Winter wonderland

It's officially winter here in Seattle! Today actually wasn't that bad in terms of temperature, but we had been getting down into the 30s at night and waking up to frost on the ground and frozen windshield wipers.

Of course, this means then that it's time to get to the snow! We are determined to get the girls to learn skiing while they are young, and we've brought them for lessons in years past. This year, we are trying out mini-mountain, an indoor ski place where the selling point is since you don't have to worry about it being cold inside, you can just concentrate on perfecting your form. The girls took their first lesson Saturday and it went pretty well. It felt very safe inside (they took our temps, the set up is basically a gigantic warehouse so lots of room for social distancing), especially because you wait outside in the col until its your lesson time, and there's only one kid per instructor per ski hill (there were only 2 in operations while we were there) and of course everyone wears a mask. Evie practiced her turns while Nora quickly graduated from needed ski ties to being able to do pizzas and hot dogs all by herself.

On Sunday, we drove way out far to this remote and new-to-us snowshoe trail. It felt a bit sketchy as we were driving there because the road was very off-the-beaten-path with lots of pot holes, but we ended up being grateful for it because the trail was pretty much deserted! We only saw two other groups of two while we were out that afternoon. The fresh snow was untouched and it was beautiful and peaceful. Well, it was nice and peaceful if you didn't count the kids complaining! So after a relatively short hike, we trudged back down so that they can get their fill of sledding in the parking lot hill. In any case, it was a nice little hike that I'd want to do again and go further!

The one lane road to the trailhead.

Beautiful little river

The girls insisted on towing their sled on the hike just in case we came upon a good sledding hill (we didn't).

Our stopping point.

View from where we turned around. Lots of mist!

The kids had a blast sledding and making the perfect snowball.

Family picture

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