Another weekend has come and gone, and once again, it was pretty darn not bad.

There was less slack than I wanted due to light snow coming on Saturday night, and the remaining leaves needing to be cleaned up on Saturday morning. The good news is that 95% of all the leaves are down and cleaned up, and the remainder can be taken care of another time, or just let winter take its course. Glad to have it done and out of the way. Of course, I was gifted a literal pain in the neck in the end, so that’s not great.

I woke up Sunday morning to a light dusting of snow on the ground, followed by on-and-off snow showers for the rest of the day. Not much accumulation, but it made Monday’s hike the first snow hike since April.

It was a balmy 21˚ when I took off down the trail, and there was a spring in my step for no other reason than to warm up.

The sky was clear, and the snow and leaves crunched loudly underfoot as I lumbered along, letting every critter in a 5-mile radius aware of my presence in the woods.

Not sure if it was the crunching, the bitter cold, or the early start, but there was very little critter activity for most of the lumber. There was only a nuthatch here, a chickadee there, and the occasional squirrel for the first 4 miles or so. It wasn’t until mile 5.5 that I saw a cooperative buck in the snowy woods.

I ended the hike with 6.30 miles in my feetz, a growling stomach, and cold digits. Still, it was fun to be in the snowy woods for the first time in months. Of course, in a couple of months, it will just be another cold, snowy day. And in five months, it will break my will to live. Of course, it doesn’t take much for that to happen these days.

Later.