Mount Spokane State Park - Nordic Trails — Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024

I absolutely love how promising this winter appears to be! I had the morning off and I could see on the mountain webcams that it was still snowing despite slightly above freezing temperatures, so I decided to try a little early season skijoring. Once SnoPark season officially starts on December 1st, the majority of the Nordic trails are off-limits to skijoring. I didn't used to think that it's possible for a dog to get bored, but I've discovered that Jasper definitely does. The usual skijor trails are limited to Linder/Mica/Tripps (please see the Spokane Nordic website for the full run-down on skijor rules if interested in trying it!), and I've noticed that Jasper is pretty tired of all of those. But today we were able to ski within the main trail system, normally off-limits to skijor, and Jasper was very excited to see both the fresh snow and some new trails. It didn't hurt that deer and moose had been out, too; there were a lot of interesting smells for him to enjoy. Plus volunteers with Spokane Nordic have been taking out the small snowmobile groomer to begin packing the trails in preparation for the main ski season, and we even got to enjoy some freshly groomed trails! We went out as far as Nova Hut on a mix of groomed and ungroomed trails, and had so much fun skiing back on freshly-groomed Alpine that I decided to circle around via Sam's Swoop and ski it a second time. That's when we ran into volunteer groomer Duane hiking out...unfortunately he had gotten bogged down in the wet/heavy snow and was stuck! I tried to help but it took the arrival of another volunteer groomer to enable us to break the machine out of the wet snow. But I had a little fun afterwards by hitching Jasper to the snowmobile...we'll just pretend that it was the dog in harness that came to the rescue and pulled that snowmobile free!