The Bishop's outdoor club, or those of us man enough to go, Mr. Milling, Gene, and me, all decided that we were going to go snowshoeing at San Gorgonio. Keep in mind that I have never, ever gone snowshoeing but went only with Gene's reasural that "If you can walk, you can snowshoe". So I went. I went up the night before, and spent the night with Gene orginising our gear, and then finally retiring to bed. We got up the next morning at 5 o'clock and me Mr. Milling outside in his car. We got up there and put on our tire chains, and then got to the parking lot near the trailhead, and changed into our snowstuff. We got to the trail head, strapped on our snowshoes and this happened:
I fell, and i couldn't get up. Mr. Milling was just so kind to take a picture of me falling. Now all of the internet gets to see it. After way to many falls I finally get the hang of it. So we went along for a while, and met a Buddhist man, named Bodhi, and his dog "The Dude". He was nice enough to break trail for us, as long as we let the dude, who was an awesome dog, go behind us so he wasn't sinking in to his stomach, which he was. In fact, at first I thought he was crawling, then looked at his tracks and realized he was sinking all the way down.We stopped for about a 10 minutes rest stop, at the first civilization we had seen in about 2 miles.
as you can see, the dude is there, I am the guy sitting down on the far left.We then left from here, and followed some snowboarders looking for a ridge to go down, and so the trail was pretty compact. after that we just snowshoed thorugh some very very beautiful areas. Once we got to the 6 mile area, adn about 1500 feet in elevation gain (we were at about 8200 feet) Mr. Milling made a tough, but very responsible decision. We decided to turn around because his knee was bothering him, and he didn't want to wake up, about 8 miles from the trailhead, unable to walk. So we walked the 6ish miles back all downhill of course, to the trailhead, and headed home. It was a fun trip, and definatly good training for the next time i actually go. The trip was pretty much, as I reflact back now, cursed from the begining, as we had planned for an earlier date, but gene got sick, so we were unable to go. But it ended up bieng a good thing that we left early, as I think i pulled my groin and couldn't get up in the morning.
-Jace
