With an unusually snowy season in the Cedar City area this past winter, Dave and Jan decided to try hiking with snowshoes for the first time. So they rented snowshoes from a local sports shop and headed up to the Markagunt Plateau with their neighbor, Kathleen, to try the snowshoes out. Driving between snow banks along the highway as high, at times, as eight or ten feet, they found there weren’t too many places they could even pull off the road, but they eventually found a wide spot near the Duck Creek Forest Service campground where there was room to park their car.

Wondering whether snowshoes would allow them to hike across country over two or three feet of fresh snow they soon discovered that snow conditions were not going to make that a sensible experience – unless they wanted each step to sink knee deep into the snow. So they chose a “groomed” forest road for their adventure.

The road was a familiar one over which Dave and Jan had travelled by car and Dave had ridden his mountain bike, but the scenery was entirely different with the forest floor and many of its trees plastered with snow.

Snow shoeing on groomed snow, it turned out, was not much different than hiking on packed snow in regular hiking boots. Dave, Jan and Kathleen were agreed that, though the road they travelled was an uphill walk for the most part, it was an easy and very pleasant experience.

The top of the road provided a nice view of an expansive meadow area through which the road passes right to Navajo Lake or straight ahead (more or less) to the Cascade Falls trailhead and a crossing of the 30+ mile long Virgin River Rim trail.

The weather was crisp and beautiful, and the hike was a very pleasant experience – definitely something to be repeated. It was a good opportunity to say “YES” to the Lord’s question to Job, “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?” (Job 38:22) – though there is far more to the investigation of the wonders of the snow than snowshoeing on snowy fields reveals (see theJohn1010project.com “awesome wonders” video “The Jewels of Winter” for more amazing detail)!