Margaret Falls / Cows

on Saturday I ran in the Reinecker creek trail system near Herald Provincial park, which is on Shuswap Lake. One of the wonderful features of Reinecker creek is that it has an amazing falls in part of it. Margaret Falls.

Apparently the falls aren't always flowing this heavy. My dad told me that when he was there a few years ago it was barely a trickle, winter run off really can be beautiful.

The trail to the falls is only about 500 metres. There was a much longer trails system going around the whole river area.

I got in 35 kilometres of running. Running up the east side was really nice, wonderful single track. It was snowing that day, so it was quite pretty running with the snow falling lightly but not having snow on the ground. Well, once I went past the south crossing of the creek I hit real snow. And plenty of downed trees, but that was okay as I suppose I should still be running easy.

I didn't feel tired physically, but I guess I was mentally slow, my agility felt off. At one point I was jumping over a series of down trees that were covered in snow, planning on pushing off the first to jump over the following two. Well, the first was covered in snow, I slipped and fell forward smashing my right shin straight down onto the next tree and then slamming my right shoulder into a stump on the side of the trail. Damn that hurt. Had to walk for five minutes to shake that off, got a pretty sweet green and blue bump now.

The trail system eventually heads up to White Lake, but I couldn't go that far as there was still ankle deep snow on the forestry road, and I didn't feel like dealing that. But the trails could definitely get a 50 km run in, will probably go back there to camp and run in the summer.

I came down on the west side, it wasn't quite as nice as it's more of a atv trails than a single track, but that didn't last long as once I hit the south crossing again I could cut back to the east side. Then I started smashing my shoulder into trees. I was running down some single track, weaving through a tree lined trail, while dodging downed trees. Usually if there is a tree downed and it's at about shoulder or chest height I can just duck my head and maintain my speed. Well, I guess time I was ducking late and ran full speed into an oak tree with my right shoulder. Holy hot damn that hurts. And then just a few kilometres later I was coming to another downed tree, going faster of course, and didn't duck late, but not enough and a sharp part of the tree where a branch had broken off went into the back of my left shoulder blade. Holy crap that one hurt worse. Both have left some nice marks. Oi. Good thing it was beautiful trails to distract me with.

Tonight while running the same trails I've run all winter long, I ran into cows. I didn't really notice how many there were until I had already tried to walk past some, and walked into more and before I knew it there was a herd of cows surrounded me and then they were chasing me and it was not cool.