I began to encounter deep, loose snow. Ski across, right? Wrong. The snow was so loose, the skis sank and tripled my workload, trying to pull them up out of the 'snow swamp' again. Thus I had to take them off and 'post-hole', as here, knee-deep each step, sometimes waist-deep, and completely ridiculous and inefficient...but equally necessary...I was not going to turn around this time. Postholing all day left me panting all day as if I were jogging for hour after hour, and sometimes I made only a few KM in a day. Image copyright Cameron M. Smith, 2004.