Spoiler Alert - I survived to tell the tale

I haven't had one of these crazy adventures for awhile. Some of you are going to read this and think "Adventure? This is normal for me." Well for me, this is a crazy adventure.

This past week I was in Edmonton for teacher's convention. Since I was in the Southern part of the province, I decided to invite myself to a friend's house - something that I am getting quite good at. However, that friend was going to the mountains on a romantic retreat with her husband. So I invited myself along. They promised me that they didn't mind and that they were actually looking forward to seeing me. Really they did.

On the agenda- mountain snowshoeing. So brand new snowshoes on my feet, which broke about three minutes into our hike, we proceeded to climb up a ridge to a look out point. While once we got out of the trees, the wind hit us. Wind in summer is one thing, wind in winter packs a punch with snow and ice crystals. So we wondered around on top of this ridge plateau thing, trying to avoid the wind. Eventually, we thought it was time to wander down the mountain again as the clouds obstructed the view anyways.

Well the thing about snowshoeing on wind packed snow is that your snowshoes don't always leave a mark. We couldn't find our path down the mountain. We thought that we were heading in the right direction, until we came to the edge of a cliff. At the bottom of the cliff was the parking lot with our car. Far to the right was where we had climbed up but we had no idea how to get to that part of the mountain. So we decided to try a new way. Eventually we found a creek bed and started following it. The snow was so powdery and amazing. No animal had walked in it and at times we were sinking past our knees even with our snowshoes on. The descent was enjoyable but there was always the question in the back of our mind as to whether or not this creek would take us where we wanted to go, whether or not it would end in a waterfall and another cliff (as creeks do in the mountains) and whether or not we would be able to find another way down or if rescue crews would be able to find us since no one knew where we were. The mental anquish almost did us in. Well obviously, we did survive. The creek came through for us and once again the mountains refreshed my spirit.