Snow Shoe hike on a ski trail

Randy and I got a chance to go snow shoeing yesterday. It was a perfect day for it, temps going up into the 30's and a clear blue sky. I wanted to go to a nearby tail called Stewart and Indian Lakes. It's a 4 mile round trip with the trail head at the north end of green Lake (near Canada Lake). Anyway, we couldn't find the trail head so we decided to follow a cross country ski trail made by the locals.

While we were getting our gear on, a local dog, mostly black lab mix, showed up. We tried to say hi but she just skittered away. So to our surprise, as we started up the trail, the dog followed. We didn't think she'd stay with us long so we didn't make much of an effort to make her go home. Turns out tho, she stayed with us the whole trip. I guess she wanted to go for a walk and any people would do for hiking companions.

Anyway, a short way up the trail the local path joined an offical, marked ski trail. Fine by us. We trudged on, up hill but not too bad for a little over an hour. We hadn't really reached anything and so se found a downed tree, brushed off the now and had some lunch. The lab bounced around, sticking her head into the snow to sniff out buried treasure or small rodents or something, and trotted back occasionally to check out what we were eating. I did share some of my chicken sandwich. She declined Randy's offer of blueberry cereal bar.

After lunch we went back the way we came and missed our turn off onto the local path. We ended up at the fish hatchery pond I had been meaning to get to originally as it is the starting point for the Stewart and Indian Lake trail. Oh well. Anyway, we turned around and went back about 1/4 - 1/3 mile till we found the side trail we made coming in and got back to the car about 1:30pm. The dog was staying around but we told her it was time to go home and she wandered up the road, I guess toward her house. It was fun having a dog with us again on a hike. I hope her owners weren't worried.