At the beginning of the month, I drove up to South Lake Tahoe for a snow skills course, offered each winter by Ned and Julie of Mountain Education. The course is structured around active learning — within minutes of meeting at the trailhead, the group straps on their snowshoes and hoists their packs, and proceeds down the trail in an awkward procession through the snow. Immediately, Ned begins to unload massive amounts of relevant, useful information — how to break a trail in the snow, how to “read” the topography to navigate toward a goal, how to bail out and find civilization, and so on. And so it goes for the next five miles, uphill downhill through the woods and over frozen lakes. Hip flexors? Got em.

Once you set up camp along a ridgeline next to Tamarack Lake, Ned brings you down to the edge of the outlet, where you learn how to safely approach the creek for water. Dinner is cooked, in your tent or vestibule if the weather is nasty, and you tuck in feeling a bit intimidated by what the next day holds: ice axe training! In the morning, the sun is shining, though the weather report promises snow. You grab your ice axe, a foreign object until now, and head over to a steep hill below the ridge. First, the fun stuff: glaze the hill with your butt! Just like children (or lemmings, depending on how you choose to look at it), you systematically take turns sliding down the hill to pack down the powder. Ned even has you go down on your back, head first; the blue sky is giving way to the precursory storm clouds, you notice, as you ski down blindly. Then comes the axe, useful for self-arrest, self-belay, cutting steps — generally things you hope to avoid along the trail, as they suck up massive amounts of time and energy. One by one you skid down the hill, clutching your axe, and with varying degrees of style and grace you come to a satisfying stop on the hillside. There, not so bad after all.

The weather holds, so the group grabs their maps for a quick jaunt before dinner. A quick hop skip and jump, and the group navigates to the neighboring lake, held in a snowy bowl under its namesake peak — the line between the lake and the mountain is erased under the snow, and coupled with the evening light, your depth perception is tickled into thinking that white spot where they meet is neither near nor far, but simply infinite.

The snow starts falling as you cook dinner. The tents are all cinched down with dead man anchors, though the silnylon still catches in the wind as the light fades. With a warm belly, you fall asleep in the weather, curled around a bottle of hot water at 8pm. The wind picks up, the snow sets down, and at some point during the night you have to pee so badly that you shove your feet into your wet boots and step out of the tent — to pee in the vestibule. No matter, the snow has completely covered it come morning, when you awake to a new blanket of whiteness pushing in the walls of the tent. A tent neighbor comes to shovel it out a bit, and then you sit and wait inside. First goal: stay warm and dry. Make tea, eat a pop tart. Eat a Clif bar. Make chai. Wait. Tidy up your personal affects. Wait. Crack jokes. Feed your tentmate a packet of emergen-C, withhold water. More laughter, more waiting.

Suddenly, a slight break in the weather. You break camp, and shove the wet gear into your packs to head home. Along the way, you find evidence of other people who had also been camping out nearby — though you would have never known it. Snowshoe tracks following the creek bed lead the same direction as the group. Camaraderie and new confidence is enough to stave off the discomfort and tiredness we feel, and we backtrack over the frozen lakes while conversing over our ambitious plans to hike for an entire summer. Each of us, so different, motivated by such unique reasons, have something solidly in common: a goal, that if completed in one summer, will put us into a group smaller than that of those who will summit Mount Everest this year.

For several weekends each winter, Ned and Julie Tibbits lead groups of interested parties into the Desolation Wilderness to equip them with skills best learned by doing. The experienced guidance and knowledge they have provided the trail community over past years, and on a donation basis, is absolutely invaluable and unparalleled; the goodness they provide within the trail community is so great, and I feel sincerely grateful to have had an opportunity to meet them and spend a weekend in their company. From start to finish, the weekend is full of helpful information that integrates seamlessly into mindful action, and I know that I will have more realistic expectations and therefore a more enjoyable experience this summer directly because of my time with Ned and Julie.