January in the Snow

January was a busy month. Chrissy and I took Janel on her first snow shoeing trip up to Mirror Lake near Mt. Hood. This is a relatively easy trail -- only ~3 miles long. We were thinking about trying to continue on up the trail to the top of Tom Dick and Harry Peak (which is at the top of the Ski Bowl skiing area), but the weather was kinda crappy and Janel was not in the mood to suffer for no good reason :P. Below is a picture of Janel and Chrissy on our way down.





On the weekend before the super bowl we went up and stayed near Mt. Hood with Allen, Michelle, and a bunch of friends/family of Jason and Lynn. Most of the people went skiing, but Allen, Janel, and I stuck to snow shoeing. Allen was planning on doing a little of both ... but was injured and did not want to tempt fate. Despite his attempts to be careful ... he still managed to hurt himself. You can ask him about the details :P. You can see all the pictures from our trip here.


On Saturday we went on a hike on the south side of the mountain. The hike starts at the White River snow park. It was a decent hike -- nothing amazing but not bad either. After parking at the snow park, we had a bit of a difficult time figuring out where the trail went. From the parking lot, we followed a well beaten trail to the left which lead to a boy scout cabin where a bunch of tubing was going on. This was the wrong direction :). From there we wandered through the woods (this did not make Janel very happy) until we eventually ran into a trail (which made her happy). Instead of turning left from the snow park, we later found out that we were supposed to turn right (for future reference). The trail follows a ridge along the side of the white river up to the PCT (and eventually to Timberline). Here is a picture from the hike:





On Sunday morning, Allen hurt himself and therefore could not join us for our Sunday hike. Before the hike, Janel and I drove up to Timberline to wander around and take some pictures. Here is a nice one:





After Timberline, we headed over to the Trillium Lake snow park where we joined Chrissy and Lauren who drove up from Portland. This is an easy and very popular 5 mile hike with some excellent views of the east side of the mountain. Janel really liked this hike.