A few hearty friends and I continued our annual tradition of snowshoeing from the Belmont Rd. Trailhead east to the Liberty Lake Regional Park Trailhead. We got an early morning start and immediately needed snowshoes to prevent postholing. This added significantly to the physical excursion required for this 12+ mile snowshoe.
The trails were easy to follow with only a single set of ski tracks in the snow ahead of us to follow. We went up the Moonshine and Saltese Ridge Trails where we tried to follow the newly improved path of the Saltese Ridge Trail in the snow with limited success. We began encountering trees down over the trail that we had to climb up and over or under when we reached the California Creek Trail. There were less than a dozen trees across the trail on our entire hike.
The descent down through the Liberty Lake Regional Park trails were pretty uneventful. We did come across five or six melted out “Moose Beds” where moose (or other large ungulates) had been sleeping right in the trail. Wildlife sightings were minimal on this outing due to our chatty conversation and the deep snow. They heavy snow up high made this snowshoe trip one of the more difficult we have encountered. Hip flexors and calf muscles really started feeling the effects around the sixth mile or so. Trading off who was breaking trail every 100 paces really helped each of us have some recovery time in the back of the line, but with only three hikers it did not offer too much of a respite. 6hours and 44 minutes after we started we arrived at the Liberty Lake Trailhead. Our GPS watches tracked our journey at 12.71 miles this time.
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