From the old English, hoar frost evokes the hairy, beard-like frost that grows upon trees and other outdoor objects when the combination of temperature and humidity crystalize ice in a white, icy fuzz on all the surfaces of the world.
It is a kind of magical scene, assuming it is not too cold to be outside.
The dog and I felt compelled to walk for over an hour through this wintery wonderland.
If you thought it was magic walking through a gentle snowfall in the evening, with the flakes drifting through the air all around you and in every direction like stars descending slowly through the spaces and places, try instead walking through a winter forest the morning after a fog when the hoar frost covers literally every branch with a frozen crystalline twinkle.
To reach out an touch the delicate ice is to destroy it, either shattering or melting it into nothingness, back to dusty snow or a drop of cold dew on your fingertip.
And as the sun reaches into the sky, the apricity sublimates it back into the atmosphere, like fairy dust returning to the magical source, suddenly and subtly gone without explanation. The fungal-like growth slinks back into whence it came.
To walk between and under trees covered in hoar frost is to feel the deep cold of mid-winter with your eyes and to understand the power of nature to decorate itself in such a visualization of the weather.
For the last couple of days, following a week of bitterly cold temperatures, I took advantage of the milder winter weather and went skiing in the park.
Nordic skiing or cross country skiing, or whatever you happen to call the skiing that doesn’t involve hills is a perfect sport for our local park. In the summer it’s a suburban field with a perimeter ring of asphalt roughly one kilometer in length. In the winter it’s a snowy wasteland waiting to be trampled and played in by local kids.
I like to help cut ski trails for neighbourhood skiing enthusiasts.
Some rough math will tell you that a one kilometer oblong ring makes the diameter of the whole field about 320m. More likely it’s about 400m on the long side and 250 at the lateral cut. No matter how you slice it, this is long enough for some good straightaways, even cutting across the various paths people have already tramped through the otherwise pristine snowfall.
In the last couple days I’ve spent a good couple hours doing laps through that fresh snow, following a meandering track that I cut and smoothing it out so that other locals (and also future me) could enjoy them.
It’s been a refreshing change.
I haven’t spent as much time as I would have liked outside in 2022.
One word that sums up your theme for 2022.
Knee-hab.
Ok. So, it’s not a real word. I made it up.
But it is what I’ve been calling my now-six-month effort to restore mobility and health in my right knee after a mysterious injury left me with a micro-tear in my MCL, medial collateral ligament, an important bit of tender tissue that helps you balance and move and otherwise enjoy things like walking.
I haven’t run, not outside of physiotherapy at least, since July.
This is not a good thing.
I’ve been in knee-hab: stretching, strengthening, hurting, moving, healing, limping, and hopefully recovering. It’s been a very long six months.
For anyone who runs you know the frustration of not running. It’s physical. It’s outdoors. It’s a stress valve. It’s a social event. It’s a lifestyle. It balances your mind, body, soul, and beyond. It works your lungs, beats your heart and jiggles your bowels and generally makes you feel better after it’s over. It becomes who you are, even if you’re not fast.
I miss it.
Not running has descended a cloud over everything else and I would venture to suggest it has left me with a touch of depression that has been a one-hundred-percent effort to attempt to overcome this past six months.
Knee-hab seems like a silly theme, but it was my life for the latter half of the year. And as I sit here in the scraps of the year-that-was, flexing my leg at my desk knee still stiff after sleeping, it’s hard not to assume that it will define the first bit of 2023, too.
The last couple days I spent skiing in the park were brilliant for my therapy, physical and mental. My knee felt fabulous after nearly an hour of work cutting and riding the trails I’d cut. My brain felt lighter. My heart, even in the cold winter air, felt warmer.
I’ll be back out there again today, when the sun climbs up a bit higher.
And hopefully the theme of my crumby knee will start to wrap up with some grace and promise for the New Year, even as some new opportunities to be outside (and write about it more in 2023) emerge!
I’m no stranger to crazy sleeping conditions when away from home. I’ve travelled far and wide and slept in a thousand different beds, from plush king-size mattresses to wooden bunks in unheated cabins to sleeping bags on the ground with a snow-covered tent just inches from my face.
But somehow 2022 was something of a hotel year.
What do you wish you’d done less of this past year?
Multiple trips to the mountains and at least a few weeks abroad in 2022 and, if I’m being completely honest, I only spent a single night in a tent.
I mean, sure, they frown on you pitching your own accommodations on the lawns around Disney World, and while I probably could have gotten away with it in New York’s Central Park, I was travelling light and a sleeping bag would have cluttered my carry on.
I joke, but seriously though, I get to the end of 2022 looking back on my travels and outdoor adventures and by random happenstance they all kind of started and ended in reasonably nice hotels.
We stayed in a pirate themed room in Florida.
My various trips to the mountains included a ski lodge condo, an Airbnb basement suite, renting an entire house with my running friends, and an apartment suite near to the highland games grounds where my daughter was competing that particular weekend.
We booked an anniversary getaway to a nordic spa and I wasn’t going to convince my wife that tenting was a great accompaniment to that adventure.
And in New York last month we were on the 33rd floor of a mid-town hotel overlooking the Hudson river with glimpses of Times Square.
Hotels abounded.
And while we were spoiled for every last one of those trips, I’ve been looking back over two-aught-twenty-two and kinda wish I’d had a few less of those kinds of adventures, and few more in one of our tents.
We have three tents.
Our oldest by far is an early-2000s model backpacking tent. It’s reasonably light, sleeps two, and served us well on numerous hiking trips.
The big tent is our car camping tent, a hefty six person beast that has a full vestibule (into which I could fit either of my other two tents assembled) and it’s what we bought so we could camp as a family with a dog in her kennel everyone on an inflatable bed and yet still keep all the luggage organised.
The newest tent is the three person ultra-compact tent that we bought as a replacement for our first ageing backpacking tent. It’s so lightweight it practically carries itself up the mountain, and we’ve set it up only four times in as many years, mostly thanks to those particular hiking trails being closed due to the pandemic.
It’s a good thing I cleaned and packed them all so well in 2021 because they didn’t really see much action this year.
Now, I don’t purport this blog to be a camping blog, per se, but there is a certain expectation from even just me that the term “outdoor adventure” comes with a certain frequency of sleeping outdoors. I subscribe to enough other content creators to know that some of those folks are sleeping outdoors on the weekly, and even the local guys I watch truck it out to the coast for the harshest part of winter to keep up their stats.
I checked into hotels a lot this year. And I kinda dropped the ball on the tenting. And I’m actually a little bit sad about that.
It’s been nearly a year and a whole long winter of impassable trails through the river valley since I posted an update about the work being done to turn a small bit of land with a big local history into a small provincial park.
The last time we thought about that effort on this site, a small group of us had gone off on a short adventure run to test our prospects of finding a runnable trail between my house and the bit of natural space clinging to the edge of the river.
What we found instead was a dead end. And a furthering of the mystery behind this bit of future park where it seemed our odds of future adventure were good, if not simple to find.
You can read about the first two parts of that adventure here on this blog in The Mystery of Big Island Part One and Part Two.
The mystery seemed as if it would continue to allude us with no more media coverage and limited ability to drop into a snow-filled river valley for our own fact-finding-fun prior to May. My aim was to start up my investigations once again this summer with some alternative entry options and perhaps drag along a friend or five to continue our search for elusive access to Big Island.
And then I was meandering through Twitter this morning only to discover this (politically charged) tweet of how one of our local, bumbling politicians had accidently (really?) posted a confidential planning map with some clear intentions for the ongoing work around Big Island.
The little grey blot in the middle of the sea of appropriately-coloured blue land marks the Big Island proper with some surrounding farmlands clearly marked for possible buyout or annexation or something relating to creating a protected public zone around this little natural treasure.
I’ve been studying maps of this exact area, trying to understand if there is a good place to park and find access into the valley .
Clearly if I have a government sticker on my truck (which I do not) parking near to and descending upon this bit of land wouldn’t be a problem. Looking at the tweeted photos it’s clear that if a politician can clamber down into the area in his work clothes, a handful of runners with trail gear must be able to find a way too.
Of course, this accidental leak implies that multiple people are thinking much bigger than I am about this little future park. I’m working on a video about a different river valley park and some time I spent there recently, but seeing this information has made me even more determined to bring some friends and a camera back on another summer adventure, an adventure to uncover the mystery of Big Island… preferably before they plow a road there and everyone figures it out.
