Falling into the snow

A friend of mine and I went up to Castle Lake at 6000 feet yesterday. It's probably my favorite Alpine lake I've ever been to and I first went there in 1953 in a new Chevrolet but the road wasn't paved yet. I was 5 at the time and the dirt and very rocky road then tore out the whole muffler system from the exhaust manifold that day. So, it was pretty noisy the rest of the way up. We tied up the broken muffler system with a wire and let it hang until we could get back into town to get it fixed. People carried wire and things like that then sort of like how people carry Duct Tape and pliers now in many vehicles and sometimes screwdrivers and crescent wrenches for emergencies. We usually carried jumper cables and extra water for the radiator too because this was before anti-freeze in the radiators and before Radial Tires and disc brakes too.

Anyway, yesterday we went up To Castle Lake from the little City of mt. Shasta  and took our mountaineering skis with us but found that where we wanted to go around the right side of the lake to the UC Davis fish research place and a little further along the trail had been tracked by someone (or more likely many people) so we decided to walk around rather than ski around and so walked around in our Mountaineering ski boots which aren't stiff the way downhill ski boots are. So, they are like walking boots with devices to clamp onto the mountaineering skis. Or more precisely the skis have clamps that clamp onto the devices built into the boots.

However, at one point I lost my balance on the skinny trail when my foot sunk down in one place a couple of feet into the snow. This was bad because I couldn't get a handle on anything to get back up and was worried I was going to blow a knee trying. Finally, under the snow I found a little tree covered completely with snow and I was able to use the little tree as a ski pole like device to get up.

I can't remember finding a snow situation where I couldn't get up for a long long time because mostly when I'm out in the snow when it is deep (over 3 or 4 feet deep) I have ski poles or walking poles and snowshoes. I'm not usually walking around in deep snow without poles of some kind for balance or just getting back up out of deep snow.

So, if you are in snow deeper than 2 feet deep it's a good Idea to either have ski poles or walking poles if you fall in because it can get pretty sketchy real fast otherwise.

Anywhere off the main trail the snow was closer to powder so there was nothing at all to grab onto for balance to get up out of there. So, be careful out there when snow conditions get strange. And they almost always get strange if the snow isn't manicured like at a ski lift by snow movers.