Crevasse-Moraine Trail

Hi there!

With all this new snow on the ground, I was able to convince TheMother to put her casserole in the fridge instead of the oven and join Fly and me for a late morning/early afternoon hike along Crevasse-Moraine trail.  We’d received the new MSB annual day-use parking pass in the mail, so with the window sticker in place, we parked next to the only other car in the lot and chose our trail.

The trails have names as well as numbers for the loops and letters for the junctions.  We decided to take the Outer Loop to begin and ended up hiking loops 1-8 for a total of about 5 miles.

Right at the beginning of the trail system there is a big sledding hill, with a pavilion for festivities down at the bottom of the slope.  The picnic tables were upended for winter, but I’m sure they get a lot of use during the summer.

There were a lot of junctions and paths to follow, but the trail markers were plentiful and easy to follow.  Naturally, we ended up doing the challenging stuff by accident.  Ugh.

Since I’ve packed my microspikes the last few trips and didn’t need them, I foolishly left them, along with my poles, at home this trip.  However, underneath the 4 inches of fresh snow, the trail was pure ice.  Fly slipped, TheMother slipped, and I fell more than I have over the past four years combined.

This trail is filled with hills.  Icy, icy, icy hills.  One of them was so slick we decided it was better to just sit down and slide to the bottom of the hill.

I’m not kidding about the hills though - even the signpost writers were keenly aware of all the hills. 

Moose seem to enjoy the area and one of them took advantage of a newly fallen willow tree across the trail and ate the tips and stripped the bark as a snack.  Yum yum.

The scenery was lovely with all the fresh snow, but it’s probably enjoyable at anytime of year.  The trees are nice and it looks like there’s a variety of shrubbery, such as devil’s club, highbush cranberry, and ferns.   The only downside to all the tall trees is that they block the glorious mountain views.  Keep your eyes up for brief peeks of the peaks.

  

We returned by way of the trails named Subway and Expressway.  By the time we reached the sledding hill, it was filled with a couple dozen adventurers pulling assorted sleds and innertubes; a few brave souls slid down with nothing but their bodies on the icy slope, like penguins.

There are other trails that we had neither time nor energy to tackle on this hike, so Fly and I will definitely be making a return visit to Crevasse-Moraine.