over the recent holiday weekend, i drove back to my college stomping grounds in ithaca, new york. i was there to visit old friends and eat gluttonous amounts of great food, just generally taking it upon myself to stimulate the local economy one ginger vanilla latte at a time, buying too many books at my favorite place on earth used bookstore and, a first, snow-shoeing.

though i spent four years (on the ithaca college side) of this college town, i had somehow overlooked the wonder that is the cornell outdoor education and rental center until a random bucket-list type of urge to try snow-shoeing snuck up on me in my pre-trip excitement. how could we have missed this and what the hell else had we been doing?

for $15, you get a 24-hour rental for a pair of shoes from a bare-footed bear of a man in the basement of a cornell athletics facility. sign me up. luckily for us, ithaca happened to be a winter wonderland this particular weekend, so dreams were becoming reality. the snow had graciously already fallen, leaving the ground, gorges, and trees fluffy and sparkling in the whitewashed arboretum we found right on campus. Much more idyllic than my darker winter memories of the city that had me shoveling my car out from under mountains of snow, explaining the huge fallen-icicle-induced dent on the hood of that car to my father, or sleeping in full ski-regalia in a never not ice-cold, dilapidated townhouse on the edge of town.

well anyway, i was a natural. i took to snow-shoeing like a fish to water. is it an olympic sport? because i’m looking into brooklyn meet-ups. i’m looking to make this a thing. i may or may not have already done a tentative search for snow-shoes on ebay. i mean, when you find something you’re this good at, you just cannot let that skill go to waste and you certainly can’t stop talking about it.

~ jamie