Snowshoeing In Farragut State Park

One glorious thing about North Idaho is that we have four very distinct seasons. Sure, sometimes they forget that it would be nice if we got an equal time amount of them, you know, like three months of spring, summer, winter, and fall, but for the most part we get a nice sampling of each season.

That said, winter is often the winner when it comes to time elapsed on the calendar. And this year winter came to North Idaho over a month earlier than it does on the calendar.

Not that I mind, because I absolutely adore snowshoeing!

And luckily, I have a couple of pals who do too!

Already this year I have gone on a solo snowshoeing trek, but this past Friday I met up with my hiking friends and we went on our first snowshoe of the season together.

Our destination for our first foray was Farragut State Park.

Ahh, Farragut. A former WWII training base that is now an Idaho state park is one of my favorite rambling haunts.

It's 4000 acres of picturesque North Idaho beauty perched on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille. I love the mixture of history and nature at the place, you can be walking through the woods on the edge of a cliff over looking our gigantic inland sea of a lake and stop for an inspection of an old gun turret foundation. That's my kind of place!

And so, it was with a spirit of glee and my Sig Sauer strapped to me, that I hopped into my friends bright orange Subaru Crosstrek and we headed down the road to the park.

For you see, Farragut is quite literally in my backyard.

As Idaho has become a popular escape to destination for those seeking respite from authoritarian states, Farragut has been a bit more crowded over the past couple of years. It sure wasn't on Friday though!

In fact, the only sign of human life that I spied, as we barreled down the unplowed East road on tracks made by locals in 4X4's, were some deer and an osprey.

This did not make me sad.

The road pioneering locals had blasted through the two feet of snow all the way to the south road, and I was tickled to find that we were able to make it and park at the hill above the road down to the boat launch.

For you see, we wanted to snowshoe along the banks of Pend Oreille Lake.

And anyone who has been to Farragut State Park knows that the shoreline hike along the banks of Lake Pend Oreille is a most scenic stroll indeed.

We all had a desire to see it in the snow.

So, after strapping on our snowshoes and telescoping out our poles, we hiked down the hill to the boat launch on the shore of the lake.

There's never a lack of good conversation with my pals when we go on one of our hikes, and we all had a good mirth chuckle when we saw that a local had dragged a boat through the unplowed snow and launched it to go fishing. I led the way because I always like to see the signs of the park's inhabitants, there were turkey and deer tracks galore.

There wasn't a human track in sight.

Once we got down to the boat launch all signs of human activity ended and we started out along the shores. We all took turns leading because we had to break trail.

Snowshoeing a bit of a workout even in groomed trail conditions, but on ungroomed snow it is an awesome bit of exertion, and even though it was in the single digits outside, before long we had all worked up a bit of a sweat.

Like we even noticed though, it was just so dang beautiful all around us. As we neared the point which was our destination, we paused as a bald eagle dove out of one of the massive fir trees lining the shore and glided over the deep blue waters in front of us. The raptor wasn't in a hurry and lingered on the updrafts over the water in front of us for a bit.

My face was beaming and bright (mostly from the sweat).

After trudging to the point we realized we had been tromping around for almost two hours and decided it was time for the other favorite part of mine about our hikes, lunch.

On the way back our trek was much easier, even though we had to go uphill to the car, because we followed the trail we had pioneered. I even had a brief conversation with a gigantic raven who showed off its breakfast to me. I told it mine was going to look a heck of a lot more appetizing, but was glad his had a fair bit of fat in it, as it was definitely a bit on the cold side.

My friends, they just chuckled at me in the way that you do when you are humoring an insane creature.

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Have I said that I absolutely adore snowshoeing yet?

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Later, as I was scarfing down a pretzel bun burger that was adorned with BBQ pulled pork and crispy onions, my less sweaty face got all warm with the knowledge that thanks to winter arriving early this year that I have more snowshoeing than normal in my future. Talk about a glorious season's greetings!

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And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's thankfully not frost-bitten iPhone.

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