We’ve had a long winter, and we have very deep snow. In addition, in working from home for many hours each week we’ve burned more wood than we normally to. So we’ve run out of the best of it. The wood shed is empty, and next year’s stash was buried under mountains of snow. Fortunately, I covered some split stuff that was piled outside the shed with a tarp, and I was able to crawl in under a snow cave and pull some of that out. Our heated garage dries this wood out in a couple weeks, so as long as I plan ahead, we’re good.

But up on the hill there are some stacks of wood that are just as dry. They are far enough up there that carrying them out on my back last fall was arduous, so I’d made a vague plan to sled them out in the winter. “Why do today what you can put off ‘til tomorrow?” is often a perfect solution. Earlier in the winter I’d done some of it, but these earlier loads were now buried under several feet of snow, quite a ways from a clear path. That sledding had been brutally hard work, too, having to hump each sled load of wood over the astonishing number of fallen trees that there suddenly seemed to be—easy to step over when hauling wood manually, but a real pain when sledding it out.

I use a heavy-duty, high-walled sled of the type pulled behind snow machines, and I can fit 200-300 lbs. of wood in it. Rather than dig more damned snow to get to next-year’s wood already down here, I decided that despite the snow depth, I might as well sled more down. So I put on my snowshoes and broke out a trail to the farthest piles. Why I cut and stacked wood that far away I’ll never know. Just dumb, I guess.

That first load, on a fresh trail, only took me 40 minutes to retrieve. But it ranked among the hardest brute force labor I’ve ever done. I no longer had to hump the sled over fallen trees—they were smooth humps if they were noticeable at all—but that kind of load was just plain hard to haul. And not all of the route was downhill or even level. There was a place where I had to go a ways uphill, and with nothing to stop the sled from sliding backwards it was amazingly hard to get it up that stretch. I used tricks like orienting my snowshoes sideways and inching up one shuffled partial step at a time, using nearby trees to grab for additional anchoring, and (the worst) leaning far forward and digging in hard, trying to retain both traction and balance with both arms effectively tied behind me by the heavy sled.

Snowshoe trail, earlier in the winter.

The next load went easier because I’d broken the trail, but it was if anything a bit too slippery, especially the uphill stretch. The downhill stretches were gravity assisted, and I couldn’t have both me and the sled in the trail because it would run over the backs of my snowshoes, pin my feet, and then slam into my calves. Ouch. So I had to move onto the side of the trail and first walk, then speed up and run to keep up with the loaded sled in what was now basically a luge trail. In that deep snow, several times the tip of a snowshoe would catch and I’d go sprawling face first in a cloud of snow. (It was amazingly hard to get back up on my feet in those situations. In such deep snow your arms become almost useless, because there’s nothing solid to push off against.)

Late-winter garage wood manufactory

Imagine if you will a crazy man running beside a big sled load of wood, holding onto the pull rope with one hand and producing a wild spray of snow while high-stepping to keep snowshoes from catching in the deep fluff. Then, when a snowshoe fails to clear, this crazy person plows face first into the mess, and the sled surges on forward—because as stupid as this all sounds, I did have the sense to let go of the rope. Ah, the good old days.

I didn’t do this every day, and we had a few nice days when it got into the 40s. Those are not good snowshoeing days because the melting snow sticks to the shoes and quickly creates a 20-30 lb. glob of snow on each snowshoe (yet I did try it). When it got cold again, the trail was really slippery. But the snow on the sides of the trail had also firmed up, so running beside the sled on the downhill parts was much easier.

There are other ways besides having a tip catch in soft snow to trip you up, though, and I soon discovered this. The sled ran really fast on the icy luge trail, so I had to go pretty fast. Then all of a sudden I was face down getting dragged by the ongoing sled. You see, before when I’d gone down in powdery snow and let go of the rope, a couple times the sled had hit a corner on the now-lugelike trail and tipped over, dumping all its contents. Now, on the icier trail and at higher speeds, I feared not only this make-work result, but also the sled jumping the tracks and careening through the woods and cracking up against a tree. All pleasant thoughts while getting unceremoniously dragged by one arm down an icy hill. Fun times. In fact, it was so fun that despite my best efforts we did it again, two more times. Whee.

As great as this sport sounds, this trip was my last. A broken spruce branch gave me a serious poke right beside my eye, and despite soreness in several places, my exuberant descent thankfully hadn’t badly twisted any joints. Snowshoes are not nimble, elegant footwear. I took this all for a two-eyed, all-limbs-functional win and sledded this final hard-won load into the garage. It is burning even now. I’ve rarely seen such cheerful flames.

There is still some wood up on the hill. But I think it might be easier to haul it out on my back in the summer…

The snow is about belly deep on a moose