My snowy walk this morning

For quite a while I've been in the habit of getting up early and going for a long walk every day. Today we had some snow on the ground, which is unusual for Eugene, OR, so I decided to snap some pictures with my phone while I took my walk. For the past few days the weather has been reporting winter weather advisories, but nothing significant had been materializing so I think I mentally transitioned into “boy who cried wolf” territory, I hadn't even realized snow was a possibility until I woke up this morning and looked out the window.

It's not a lot of snow, maybe a little more than a dusting, but I decided to walk down the Fern Ridge Path to the wetlands rather than the sidewalk route I often take because I didn't want to deal with crossing as many streets or uneven sidewalk sections with snow on the ground, it's a much smoother walk on the bike path.

The Fern Ridge Path mostly parallels the Amazon Creek, and it has a number of underpasses where it crosses streets and a few bridges where it crosses the creek. While part of the point of walking on the path is to experience some of the nature that's nearby I always get a bit of a kick out of bridges and underpasses for some reason. (On a more depressing note, you sometimes pass people sleeping under the underpasses at the times I tend to go out, which was the inspiration for this poem I wrote a few months ago).

I've already hit all my stretch goals for the week in the walking app I use, so I only went far enough into the wetlands to be able to satisfy my normal step goals for the day and then turned back. For the past few weeks I've been getting into the habit of reading blog posts on my RSS reader for part of my walk when I'm in this area. I tried not to do too much of that today since I wanted to be more careful about watching my step. There are pros and cons to that, most of the blog posts I read are about news and politics and that tends to get me a bit agitated (my frustrations with the current news/politics environment inspired this poem), so I avoided that, but then that also leaves me without much to think about other than ruminating on the problems in my life, which is also depressing.

On the way back I swung by the Walmart to pick up some things. While I was inside it started snowing more heavily again, with big wet flakes.

It's a lot easier for me to visit the store on this route than it used to be because they opened up this bike/pedestrian bridge a few months ago that lets you cross the creek and easily get from the shopping area back to the path.

With the heavier snow and the sun coming up it was an even prettier walk on the way back. Since snow is rather rare here I don't often get to experience the change in scenery that it causes.

Hopefully the snow won't stick around too long, though. In the abstract I like snow, but in late 2016 I ended up slipping on some ice and breaking my elbow due to snow followed by a couple days of melt/refreeze, it was one of the things that made 2017 a pretty terrible year for me and it makes me kind of paranoid about walking when it's potentially icy now.