The Frozen Merced River

Posted By John Chabalko on March 12th, 2008

About a month ago I managed to escape to Montana for a long ski weekend (i haven’t gone skiing in a while. it wasn’t nearly as much as disaster as i thought it was going to be). I took one day to drive around the Bozeman/Big Sky area and shoot pictures. There was a lot of snow and it was cold. I hiked down to this creek from the road in snow-shoes. I’ve gone snow shoeing now a handful of times, all in Yosemite where the show is much wetter. The snow in Montana is quite a bit drier.

The snow shoes i have are rated at 300 pounds – that is, if you weigh 300 pounds you should be able to walk around in the snow with little to no problem wearing these things. In Yosemite about a month before i wore them while hiking around with my heavy backpack on and basically walked around right at the surface of the snow. In Montana i was slogging through a blizzard in snow up to my waist in these same show-shoes. Density does in-fact matter.

I’ll have a bunch of more stuff from Montana in a little while – i just wanted to put this one out there to show that a frozen stream in Montana doesn’t look a whole lot different than this frozen stream in Yosemite (you know, in case you were wondering).