Snowshoeing at Tabor Mountain with the Caledonia Ramblers

After having a week's rest during Christmas time, I was very eager to get out on my new snowshoes with the hiking club.  After borrowing a pair of MSR Evo Ascents off of a club member for the last year, I finally bought my own pair at a great price!  I decided that it was a good time to upgrade as I haven't been using my Costcos pair for over a year now. The MSR's are better at going up and down steep inclines as they have much better grip.


I was lucky that I got to try them out the day after I had bought them.  Though I was already used to using them with the other pair, so I knew that they wouldn't let me down.  It has been really warm where I live, in fact it's been raining lots!  It was supposed to rain the day we went to Tabor, but it didn't.  The snow was very sticky though, and it was tough breaking trail.  We all took our turns doing that.

As you can see below, there are lots of trails to snowshoe on Tabor Mountain.  The nice thing is that it is a very short drive out, which is great when the roads are in bad condition like they have been with all the freezing rain.

We parked along the highway, and put on our snowshoes.  Soon, we were on our way. We were heading to the cabin at Troll Lake.

This part of the trip was fairly easy as someone had snowmobiled a week earlier and we didn't have to do much trail breaking.  After over an hour of snowshoeing, we made it to the cabin where we rested and had our lunches.

After lunch, we headed on to a different trail.  It was going to be much more challenging as we had to break a trail in the very soft mushy snow.  Thankfully, not much snow stuck on my snowshoes as I had put Vaseline on the bottom.  It seemed to do the trick and keep the snow from sticking.  I had learned about the trick from others in the club.

It was an easy choice buying the MSRs as 90% of the club die hards use it to go in the mountains. There are a few other choices out there, but this still seemed the best choice!  I like that you can get spare parts like straps for it, just in case they fail on a big trip.  I am sure it will get used lots, and it already looks like it has taken a beating.. apparently it's bombproof.

After the trip, it has been raining a lot!  I really wanted to use them more during the Christmas holidays, but it has been too wet to use them.  Please Winter, come back for a while....