First Snow on Tobyhanna Lake

 On Friday, October 30, 2020, we woke up to snow.  It had started in the early hours and was due to continue until noon.  The early snowfall had already dusted everything around our mountain cottage:

We had resolved, earlier in this stay, to take a hike at Tobyhanna Lake the first time it snowed here, and we eagerly grabbed our hiking clothes, hopped in the Jeep, and made the short drive up to Tobyhanna Lake.  We decided to hike from the boat ramp, up past the beach, and on to the stream and the campground road where Ruthie and Maggie Puppy had had so much fun on our earlier hikes with Katie, Matt, Weina and William.  From our first steps on the trail, we were not disappointed.  The new snow graced the browns of bare trees and made a winter's counterpoint to the late colors of burnt umber and orange leaves:

It would have been spectacular if the sky had been porcelain blue, but the lake still gave up a new mood as we paused to look out to the opposite shore:

We thought about stopping and sitting on one of the trail benches to gaze at leisure on the lake, but the bench was too snowy, so we took in the view standing up:

It is just a quick half mile to the beach from the boat ramp.  We were not sure how many people would be there enjoying the first snow, but we were pleasantly surprised that we were the first to put our bootprints in the snow, and no one else was in sight.  Everything had the look of a sepia-toned dagguerotype:

We hiked on from the beach, and, by now, the snow had reached its peak, coating the branches of the trees:

We reached one of the two largest inlet streams, where recent rains had swollen the creek until it nearly filled a culvert under the trail.  When we had been here a few weeks ago, the stream merely trickled through the culvert:

In this photo, David stands below the culvert, enjoying the last splashes of Autumn color around the water:

We decided to hike on to the top of the lake, where Tobyhanna Creek empties into the lake.  The name, "Tobyhanna" is said to be Native American for "a stream whose banks are fringed with alder."  We weren't sure whether the trees along the banks were alder, but we could imagine the Shawnee, or the Lenape Delaware or Munsee Delaware tribes camped along the stream, fishing, smoking their catch, and gathering berries in season.  By now, especially with snow, they would probably be hunkered down, perhaps in wigwams, but, beyond this, we're not sure where or how they might have spent the winter here.  We realize there is so little we know of human history.

Full of ponderous thought, we came about and returned along the trail the way we had come.  The one splash of color we saw on the entire hike, other than the browning orange leaves, was this blue trail blaze:

We enjoy winter hikes and snowshoes, but it is difficult to do them often because we are not comfortable camping in our RV where we might encounter deep snow.  The last time we had a chance to snowshoe was near Prescott, Arizona in February 2019 where, hunkered down from a large storm that only produced rain where we camped in Salome, Arizona, we drove our Jeep two hours or so to enjoy the fresh, deep powder in the mountains near Prescott (see our blog entry, "Postholing in Snowizona").  One of the reasons we decided to shelter from Covid in the Poconos of Pennsylvania was to have a chance to enjoy the snow just outside our door.  This first snowy hike at Tobyhanna Lake offered a good omen for that!