A JOURNEY TO SNOW COUNTRY

HOOKED ON COLD

My snowshoe trail stretches nine miles behind. Ahead is a cold February night. Time to make snow camp, and quickly, while there's light. These old snowshoes have carried me all day through an alpine forest muffled by five feet of snow. The snowshoer's rolling gait, like a sailor's sea legs, returned easily. Despite a 50-pound backpack, I glided through the new-fallen powder. A horse could not have gone where I had floated effortlessly. Each winter I take the snowshoes down from the wall and journey back to snow country. Winter empties Arizona's high places. The trails are buried, campgrounds deserted, seeps frozen, the flies gone. Hikers come by the carful in summer, but there is no one here now.

For this adventure, I have traveled to the Mount Baldy Wilderness in the White Mountains country, 40 miles southwest of Springerville in eastern Arizona. Part of the area is sacred to the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and the rest is under jurisdiction of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. Still 2,000 feet higher than my camp is the Apaches' sacred Baldy Peak, at 11,530 feet. Sunset exaggerates its shadow across the V-shaped wash where the west fork of the Little Colorado River flows clear at its headwater between hummocks of snow. Not until the north-flowing stream reaches the land of the Navajos does it take on its characteristic thick soup of red-rock silt. A stranded elk has left death traces in the creek bottom; it could not escape the deep snow. Fresh coyote tracks follow those of a cottontail from tree to tree. A mountain chickadee makes a brief call to witness the part of deep-woods snow camping I most dislike: erecting a shelter. And, with the temperature now approaching zero, there can be no delay. The aluminum tent struts make my bare hands ache, and they become stiff and clumsy. Wooden shafts driven at 45 degrees anchor the tent, but plastic bags weighted with snow would have worked just as well. At last, inside a warm sleeping bag after hot food, sleep overpowers me. Later something wakes me. Half the night is gone. The nylon tent is aglow in moonlight and sparkles with a rime of frozen breath. Outside, the freeze-dried snow squeaks underfoot, and my nostrils pinch with frost. Nothing in summer could compare to the view. Mysterious shadows extend like fingers from the dark edges of the ponderosa woods, reaching for the snowfields that shimmer like diamonds in the false twilight of moonglow. Overhead, a galaxy of stars is set in ebony space around a full moon. For the hundredth time, I ponder which in Nature is more intimidating: ice or fire. Of ice, there seems much more, but I've come prepared with layers of cold-weather clothing. I have shelter, a stove, fuel, matches, and plenty of food. And those wonderful old snowshoes. The frames are clear ash strung with rawhide. My father brushed on the first protective coat of varnish before making a gift of them on my 12th Christmas. For 42 years, I've repeated the varnishing ritual that has kept them ready for use. The only concession has been neoprene binders to replace the oiled moosehide you can't buy anymore. They have taken me on many adventures as a boy in northern Michigan and later as a man trudging through the Rockies of Montana and Utah. I've hunted and ice fished from them. Once, when I was lost in a Michigan blizzard, these snowshoes carried me to safety.

Frank Toupal, formerly the U.S. Geological Survey's man in Springerville, each winter walked to work on snowshoes, measuring snowpack in the Mount Baldy Wilderness, where snow commonly reaches a depth of 90 inches. When he carried his modern aluminum and neoprene-webbed snowshoes through airports they attracted attention. "A lot of people don't know what they are," he said with a laugh. And those who do "are amazed to see them in Arizona." The fact is Arizona receives plenty of snow in the mountains. The central and eastern mountains can get six feet or more. Edward L. Osborne, a computer programmer from Chandler, had just returned from a snowshoe climb up Humphreys Peak with six others. When high winds arose, "we dug two snow caves, and that's where we spent the night," he said.

HOOKED ON COLD

"We sat in those snow caves and talked, and it was like being in a hotel room. It was cold, but when you have the right clothes, you don't feel it." Wearing bearpaw-style snowshoes fitted on the bottom with metal cleats for easier climbing, Osborne and his party had back-packed to a point above the timberline before burrowing in. "The next day," he said, "we snowshoed to the summit."

What's the attraction? "I love looking out of a snow cave and seeing trees covered in snow, and no footprints," Osborne responded. "When you go back to an area in winter it looks very different, and beautiful."

Osborne's account brought me back. Humphreys Peak, at 12,643 feet, Arizona's highest mountain, has a companion, 12,356-foot Mount Agassiz, and one night I snow camped on its summit. Sundownbrought bitter cold, and icy gale-force winds roared about me. Piled snow and rock provided a three-foot windbreak behind which snow packed around a plastic tube tent helped conserve warmth. That night I crawled into a sleeping bag wearing all my clothes while outside the wind howled and snatched at my shelter like an angry terrier. Dawn brought calm and rimmed the horizon for an hour with flourishes of purples, blues, yellows, and greens. Headlights on Interstate 40 leading to Flagstaff appeared as a 50-mile-long string of pearls draped across the predawn darkness of the Navajo reserva-tion. Looking from Agassiz Peak, the hori-zon seemed to tilt toward light, and I was probably the first person in Arizona to see the sun that day.

Winter backpackers swear by snowshoes. "With snowshoes, you can pretty much go over any kind of terrain," Osborne has found.

He sometimes takes skis along. "We like to snowshoe up and ski down," he explained.

Through trial and error, Osborne and his companions have discovered skis do not grip snow that's iced over. "Crampons will puncture the ice and sink in the snow," he said. "But with snowshoes, you have an intermediate step; you can have a large platform for your feet, so you don't sink, and you have crampons under-neath."

Although Osborne is vice president of a large outdoor-adventure club, he could recall just eight people who snowshoe and winter camp. "Finding people to go is tough," he admitted. "Most people hear the word 'snow,' and they want to be in front of a firein a lodge, not on the side of the mountain."

Gary P. Morris, 47, a deputy chief in the Phoenix Fire Department, snowshoes occasionally with Osborne and has several times snowshoed up Humphreys Peak in winter. "This all started years ago," he said. "A guy in the club who enjoyed winter camping got a number of us folks out."Morris found he enjoyed winter camp-ing, and he also became interested in mountain climbing. He has since climbed Alaska's 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America - part of the way on snowshoes.

"I've done a number of solo trips on full-moon weekends," he said. For this he heads about 110 miles north of Phoenix to the Coconino National Forest near Mormon Lake, where elk herds winter. After snow-shoeing into the bush several miles, he makes snow camp.

"You can almost guarantee there isn't going to be anybody else out there," he said. He makes a point of getting up for a look-see in the night. "I think the cold temperatures tend to magnify the stars. You can lie flat on your back and watch the stars, and see satellites go by, and aircraft at 40,000 feet."

The basic design of snowshoes hasn't changed in centuries. The earliest known, woven sticks, in principle work the same as modern bearpaws of metal and man-made webbing. My own were made in Maine in the 1930s using a Canadian beavertail design that features a stabilizing tail for downhill and running.

Yes, running. How easily I found dog-trotting on snowshoes could be while a frozen lake groaned and cracked ominously beneath me. But you have to be in good physical condition to take on winter barefisted.

Randy L. Mueller, 39, an insurance agent from Scottsdale, bicycles regularly and runs up a mountain trail in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve each day to build stamina for climbs up some of the Western Hemisphere's highest peaks. He has climbed 23,835-foot Aconcagua in South America - the highest point outside Asia - Mount McKinley, and most of the highest peaks in the western United States.

"My favorite mountain range in all of Arizona is the Chiricahuas," he said. "I hike there winter and summer."

The Chiricahua Mountains, a "sky-island" mountain range in the Coronado National Forest, rise majestically some 10,000 feet out of the Chihuahuan desert valley of southeastern Arizona, 35 miles north of Douglas near the Mexican border. The peaks, interwoven with numerous canyons and bizarre rock formations, were once the traditional homeland of the Chiricahua Apache Indians and served as an almost impenetrable hideout for Apache guerrillas.

Mueller and seven others climbed 9,667-foot Flys Peak with cleated bearpaws, snow camping two nights. Of all the Chiricahua mountains, Flys Peak "is the one that gives the best view," he said.

"An advantage of snow camping is that everything is cleaner," he continued. "In summer, the trails are dusty and dirty. That doesn't happen in the snow. The only thing you have to watch out for is when the