XC Skiing - Featherstonehaugh State Forest

We've been spending an awful lot of time at Featherstonehaugh recently, mostly because it's close, has a ski trail, and holds its snow pretty well. After yesterday's dump of about 15" in my yard (and driveway), today brought a mix of rain and snow and temps near 40F. It's turned into quite a mess down here in the valley.



But just a few short miles to the west, and 1000' higher in elevation, it's a completely different story today. Notice the locations of "Home" and "Featherstonehaugh SF" on the graphic below.



After confirming with a friend who lives near there that the hills were indeed getting snow, we set off for Featherstonehaugh, but nothing we'd heard prepared us for what we found there. As we started from the car, we soon found that the woods were covered with about 2' of new snow, and the going was extremely slow. There had been no rain here whatsoever, and it was still snowing heavily. Fortunately, the snowmobile trail had seen some use since yesterday's big dump, and the 4-5" of today's new snow covering it made for some very nice, and extremely picturesque, skiing.



After about an hour of unsuccessfully dodging snow bombs from the trees above, we were pretty wet. We'd covered the length of the snowmobile trail in both directions from the car, and skiing anywhere else would have been pretty exhausting, so we called it a day.