Two weeks ago, I lumbered over 30 miles and felt great. Last week, I lumbered 20 miles on slippy, lumpy snow and felt like an aching bag of shit by the end. Come the weekend, I sat my fat ass inside and did nothing. Then, I woke up Monday morning at 6 AM, rolled over, farted twice, looked at the -1˚ weather icon on my phone, and said, “fuck it.”
Tuesday was another morning of stuffing myself into cold-weather gear and begrudgingly heading out for a lumber in temps, struggling to make it into the double digits. However, I was quick to realize that, outside of a four-hour flight to Jamaica, there’s no place I’d rather be heading off to on a Tuesday morning.
We had a minor heatwave today, with temps up to 23˚ at the time of lumbering. You wouldn’t think four extra degrees could make a difference, but indeed they did.
I started off this first full week of the 2025 Ignorance is Bliss Tour with a 5.50-mile hike in crisp, to say the least, 19˚ temps.
Since I’m at the age where I see enough balls dropping just by looking in the mirror, I continued my custom of being in bed several hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve.
I took the weekend off from lumbering just ’cause I wanted to, but I wish I hadn’t.
The weather was dark, glum, and morose all weekend, the football sucked, and unsurprisingly Spurs blew another lead to draw 2-2 with Wolves. I hate them. My time would have been much better spent walking in the woods with my camera, but the ache of “new muscles” used whilst hiking three days on mushy snow and a tired mind from a week of grief, travel, and holiday “merriment” had me thinking differently.
The good part of the weekend was that 50˚ and an all-day rain melted any shred of snow, and the trails were completely bare come Monday morning.
With warmer temps, conditions in the woods have been getting progressively worse, so on Friday, I needed to adjust expectations of what I was going to get out of my morning lumber. I also needed to make further adjustments to my kit.
While we were away in Pennsylvania, the central Michigan area picked up another few inches of wet snow on top of what we already had on the ground, and that made for some tricky hiking conditions on Christmas morning.
Wifey would be joining me for the early morning lumber, and we debated whether to take the snowshoes with us or not. We settled on sharing my trekking poles and using hikers, and that proved to be just fine, with only minor slipping here and there.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a little late getting to the trails due to the late sunrise (8:07 AM Michigan Standard Time for your sunrise nerds who read this) and my want to fill a bathtub up with scolding hot coffee, climb my naked self in, and drink myself out instead of going out into the dank, wintry morning air.
Luckily, Wifey will not permit me to fill our tub up with coffee (“It’ll stain the tub!” she says), so I settled for a big-ass mug or two of the stuff and then got my shit together for another lumber in chilly woods.
I returned to the woods on Tuesday and was greeted with MUCH better conditions.
I can’t go so far as to say it was a beautiful day; that would be a lie; it was dank AF, but all the ice was gone from the trails, and it made for a much easier lumber than on Monday.
