So I was all set to take a three-day snow-camping trip this weekend to Butte Lake at Lassen Volcanic National Park. I had experienced people to go with; I had my new snowhoes; I had my zero-degree sleeping bag. What I didn’t have was the ability to mentally process a foot of fresh snow and a seven-mile hike to camp with 35 to 40 pounds of gear plus snowshoes to heft all that way. Oh, and six-hour drive to the trailhead, during which time an active blizzard was in the forecast.
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I woke up in the middle of the night with a gnawing pain in the gut that I usually associate with too much stress at work, and realized I worrying myself sick over this camp-out. Melissa’s advice was: go with your gut. I followed it and decided to bail on snowcamping.
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I figured out why it was causing me so much stress: The forecast calls for a major snowstorm that will last through Friday. More than a foot is expected to accumulate. Back where I come from, a foot of fresh snow is a shut-down-the-city-for-two-days emergency. In the mountains of Northern California — one of the snowiest places on earth — a foot of fresh snow is as common as summer sunshine.<\/p>\n
But try to tell that to my feeble brain, which is sending out all these panic signals.
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So now I’ve got a three-day weekend free and of course it’s supposed to rain here all three days. I’ve still got an inordinate urge to go camping, just not in sub-freezing climes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I was all set to take a three-day snow-camping trip this weekend to Butte Lake at Lassen Volcanic National Park. I had experienced people to go with; I had my new snowhoes; I had my zero-degree sleeping bag. What…<\/p>\n