First Ride of the 06 Season.
After a morning spent Christmas shopping, I rummaged through the crate of snow clothes and got myself bundled up for my first ride of the season. Mike is already one up on me. I'm sure by the end of the season... he'll have many more rides more than me. I'll just have to live with it.
We got excited as we were driving to and from town because we could see that the trails had been groomed. That was a nice surprise. We got a few more inches of light snow overnight.
We headed out of Rays Retreat, south on trail 7. When we reached Frederick we cut over a road to pick up trail 679. These trails (679 and 79) had not been groomed. There's a spot along here where they're putting in an oil rig, so it was a mess with work equipment and trucks coming/going... and big ruts caused by all that work. Hopefully they'll have that wrapped up before Jan!
79 had a few mud holes we had to skirt around, but nothing that we couldn't avoid. And then we got back on 7 to head home.
We were out for a little over 3 hours. We had a good time. The trails were all snow covered, we saw very little dirt. Despite riding mostly trails that had not been groomed... it was a good ride. We've ridden much rougher trails in mid season.
This is the best early December ride we've enjoyed since being up here. It was especially pretty driving down through the pine trees as they are still all laden with the frosty white snow.
As I came home later tonight from a meeting it was snowing again and tricky driving on the highway. Needed my snowmobile. We're supposed to get heavy lake effect tonight and tomorrow so that will only help build a solid base for the trail and add to our riding pleasure.