Living in Seattle the question was always ‘will we get any snow this year?’ Snow was a rare and special thing. With the exception of the Chanukah eve storm and a few others we got very little snow. But that slight dusting of white stuff was still special and exciting. In Utah the question is a bit different.
It isn’t ‘will we get snow’, but ‘when will we get the first snow’. The answer to that question this winter was December 2nd. We woke up that morning to several inches of snow on the ground and a steady flow of snowflakes coming down.
Seeing it all we knew what we wanted to do; go to the canyon. More specifically Dimple Dell park. This is a small ravine that has been left fairly natural. It is about a 30 minute walk from our house. With that goal in mind we started getting ready. Who has snow pants? Who has snow boots? Who has gloves? The questions and the hunting kept on going. About an hour, or so, later we were finally ready for our adventure.
The goal was to go for a walk in the canyon. But first we had to get there. The path to the canyon goes along the light rail tracks. Opposite the the tracks are houses. Most of the houses are your standard track house, but a few of them are reminders of the past. We have been told that the whole area where we are living used to be a bunch of horse ranches. Like so many growing cities the remnants of the rural world that used to be slowly fades away. But for now there are still some small parcels of land with horses. I don’t know that they would qualify as a ‘horse ranch’, but they have a few acres with a barn and corral. Most of them appeared to be empty. I am sure many of them had horses, but on this cold winter day the horses were in the barns. To our delight one had the horses outside.
As we walked along we saw the horses slowly trotting in a kind of circle. It looked like they were all playing tag. As we walked up to the fence, they noticed us and stopped their game. At first they seemed to be a bit leary of us and just stood there at the other end of the corral. We called to them and they cautiously walked over to us. Once they got to our side of the corral they accepted that we were friendly and seemed to enjoy our visit.
After our visit with the horses we headed on to the canyon. When we got there, very few other people were there. We almost had the whole place to ourselves. One thing we didn’t have was a sled. We don’t even own a sled. I know what you are thinking, you live in snow country and you don’t own a sled. How can you enjoy all of that wonderful snow without a sled? Well you are right. We should have a sled and I am sure we will be purchasing one soon. But for now we had to improvise.