Hi Campers,
This week I go backpacking into the Mount Rose Wilderness of western Nevada right after a nice snow fall. The temperatures drop down to 10 degrees and I need to stay warm...ultimately building a camp fire and the telling the legendary story of Snowshoe Thompson...the Norwegian skier who delivered mail across the Sierra Nevada mountains on skis!!!
( for twenty years between 1856 - 1876! )
Also testing out my new sleeping bag...the KELTY Cosmic Down 0 !!!
Keep Hiking!
Base Camp Chris
Travel Nevada
https://travelnevada.com/
Story of Snowshoe Thompson
https://snowshoethompson.org/the-story/
Mount Rose Wilderness
shorturl.at/orHQU
Snowshoe Thompson Wiki
Between 1856 and 1876, he delivered mail between Placerville, California and Genoa, Nevada and later Virginia City, Nevada. Despite his nickname, he did not make use of the snowshoes that are native to North America, but rather would travel with what the local people applied that term to: ten-foot (over 3-meter) skis, and a single sturdy pole generally held in both hands at once. He knew this version of cross-country skiing from his native Norway, and employed it during the winter as one of the earlier pioneers of backcountry skiing in the United States. Thompson delivered the first silver ore to be mined from the Comstock Lode. Later he taught others how to make skis, as well as the basics of their use. Despite his twenty years of service, he was never paid for delivering the mail.[11]
Thompson typically made the eastward trip in three days, and the return trip in two days. Thompson carried no blanket and no gun; he claimed he was never lost even in blizzards. A rescue attributed to him was that of a man trapped in his cabin by unusually deep snow. Thompson reached him, realized the damage to the man's legs from frostbite was sufficient to kill him, skied out to get chloroform, skied back in with it, and delivered the chloroform in time to save him.[9]
Thompson usually traveled the route known as "Johnson's Cutoff", a pathway first marked by John Calhoun Johnson, an early explorer and first man to deliver mail over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Today this approximates the route of U.S. Route 50 as it winds its way from Placerville, California to South Lake Tahoe.