Eye on the Next Ridge: Where to Go From Here
Okay. Last lesson.
Here's the thing about teaching a class like this. My job was never to get you to some finish line where you know everything. It was to get you comfortable enough that you'll actually go, on your own, without me standing there telling you to take your jacket off.
So let's talk about what's next. Not in a big dramatic way. Just practically, what does month two and month three of this look like once you don't have a class to show up to.
Widen the trail list, slowly
You've probably got one or two foothill loops you know pretty well by now. Good. Keep those in rotation, they're your reliable ones, the place you go when you just need to get outside and don't want to think too hard.
But start adding one new trail a month. Same rules apply as always. Check conditions, check the weather more than you think you need to, note your turnaround point before you're moving. New trail plus tired legs plus not knowing where the creek runs under the snow is exactly how people get themselves in trouble. Go slow on the unfamiliar ones. There's no prize for covering ground you don't know.
Build the habit, not the streak
I'm not going to tell you to snowshoe every weekend all winter, because that's not realistic and also kind of misses the point. What I'd actually suggest is picking one low-commitment morning a week, even every other week, and treating it like a standing appointment with yourself. Doesn't need to be long. A 45 minute loop before the day gets going does more for you than one big ambitious trip a month that you talk yourself out of half the time because the forecast looks iffy.
Small and regular beats big and rare. That's true for snowshoeing and it's true for basically everything else too, honestly.
Bring people, even the reluctant ones
I told you about my brother Bryant already, hating mile one and loving mile three. I want to give you a different version of that story, because it's the one I actually think about most in January.
Last February I took Colton up in the kid backpack, on one of the groomed foothill trails, nothing fancy. He fell dead asleep about fifteen minutes in. And instead of turning around, I just kept going. Slow loop, same trail basically, for an hour, so I wouldn't wake him up. No real destination. No mileage goal. Just me and a sleeping toddler and the snow squeaking under the shoes.
That might be the most peaceful hour I had all winter. Not the hardest trip, not the most scenic, definitely not the longest. The quiet one. And I bring that up here because when you're planning your own trips going forward, don't only plan the ambitious ones. Plan some that exist just to get you outside with somebody you like, at a pace that doesn't matter.
That's an opinion I'll stand behind all day: the slow trip is the point at least as often as the hard trip is. If you only ever plan trips to prove something, you'll burn out on this by February. If you plan some just to be outside, you'll do this for years.
Know where your lane ends
Real talk before I let you go. Everything I've taught you is groomed foothill trails and low-angle stuff, on purpose. That's my lane and now it's yours too, at least for now.
If you get out there this winter and start feeling that itch, wanting steeper terrain, wanting to go further up canyon into stuff that isn't groomed or tracked, that's a real different world. Avalanche terrain isn't something you back into by accident, and it isn't something you learn from a community-ed class or from me. If that's where your interest goes, take an actual avalanche course. There are good ones around the valley every winter. I'm not being dramatic about this, I just want to be honest that "I took a snowshoeing class" and "I can assess avalanche risk" are not the same sentence, and I'd rather tell you that straight than have you find out the hard way.
For everything at or below what we've been doing, you're in good shape. You know how to dress, how to pace yourself, how to read where water hides, how to turn around before it's a bad idea instead of after.
A few practical next steps
- Pick your one reliable loop and your one "someday" loop, write both down somewhere you'll actually see them
- Set a standing morning, even loose, even just "Saturdays if the forecast looks decent by Thursday"
- Rent before you buy anything else. You don't need more gear to go further, you mostly need to just keep going
- If you want more challenge, look sideways first, longer version of a trail you know, before you look up at steeper terrain
That's really it. You don't need my permission to keep doing this, you never did. You just needed a low-stakes reason to try it once, which I guess is what this whole class was.
Before next time: there isn't a next time on my end, so this one's simple. Pick a morning in the next two weeks, check the forecast three times like I do, and go.