Man, we couldn’t have hoped for better (read: crazier) conditions. Woke up Sunday morning to find at least a foot of snow had dumped on us (and was still coming). Which was a catalyst for a number of firsts.

First time I had to dig a car out of the snow.

Props to Stephanie for the shoveling action-shot!

First time I had to put chains on a tire

Thankfully our Zipcar came complete with tire chains and some cold weather gear (scraper, shovel, etc). This was a total surprise to us—we’d heard that the all-wheel-drive Honda Elements had been outfitted with chains last year, but when I emailed Zipcar to confirm whether this was still the case, they responded with typical customer-service-ese: “I’m sorry we do not supply tire chains in our cars.” I guess that’s just a case of national reps being out of touch with local reality.

We stopped at the grocery store to pick up some things for breakfast and lunch, and then headed out of Weed back toward Mount Shasta City.

On I-5 the conditions were nearly whiteout. Apparently the interstate had been closed that morning, and anyone still on the road was going 25mph—which felt fast. We were very very happy we “splurged” and stuck with the slightly more expensive Honda Element, rather than a front-wheel drive sedan. It always felt solid and attached to the road.

On the way to the Nordic Center, it was hard to tell where the road ended and the snow began.

The air was so saturated with snowflakes, it was difficult to take pictures (for fear of getting water in the camera). But when we stopped for lunch after about an hour of snowshoeing, I managed to get a few snaps of us on the trail.

This is the main “groomed” trail of the Nordic Center (which is normally reserved for cross-country skiers). They’d gotten so much snow over the night (over 2 feet), we would have been waist deep on the ungroomed snowshoe trails. So they let us tromp around on the edge of this trail instead.