Earlier this week I took a trip to Halton's Kelso Conversation Area to try out something very new. I went snowshoeing. I had personally never tried this out before so I was excited but a little nervous about the experience.
Outdoor, individual exercise is one of the few reasons anyone in Halton Region is allowed to leave their home in the stay-at-home order, which is why the snowshoeing trails and rental make for a great daytime activity.
Once I arrived at the park, visitors go to the west lodge to start their journey, as did I. The lodge has many signs around the park that enforce mask-wearing and other social distancing measures. The employees all wore masks at all times, and when they give you your ski rentals the employees wore gloves to enforce more safety and a contactless exchange between you and the employees.
The hills and snowshoeing experience has been open since January 9 this year and have been planning to open with safety restrictions many weeks before they did. Even on a weekday, I saw many people with their families come and enjoy the outdoors and enjoy embrace this new experience.
I would HIGHLY recommend that you bundle up and try to bring hats, gloves and scarves to the hills. I wasn’t aware of how cold the mountains and trails would be so I decided not to bring gloves (and I would live to regret that decision.)
So once we got our snowshoes we were then shown how to put them on properly and then started our experience on the trail. The trails were split up into three different sections. ‘S’ for the small trail, ‘M’ for the medium trail, and ‘L’ for the large trail. For the best possible experience, I took the medium trail.
I started my trek on the medium trail, the trail had many twists and turns and many high mountains to climb. I found the trail to be a very good way to exercise and a very good cardio workout.
The trek lasted about an hour. The experience was very unique but also very cool. Once you got up to the top of a hill you had a pretty nice view of the trees and the 401 highway.
Once you head on your way down it is very important to go slowly because if you walk fast down the mountain you may lose balance and begin to fall down.
At the end of your walk, the lodge gives you a free hot chocolate to help warm you up from your walk and also has a campfire set up for customers to sit around and keep warm.
When I asked one of the employees why they'd recommend people coming to try snowshoeing, they said, “Everybody needs a good outlet to the outside these days. Other parks aren’t really starting to enforce these new distancing rules, but we are.”
The price for the snowshoeing experience at Kelso Conservation Area is $15 if you already own your own set of snowshoes and $18 for the entire experience and you need to rent snowshoes also.
This experience was very new to me but I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was a fantastic time and just being able to appreciate the quiet outdoors and see the scenery around me is a reason why everyone should go and try this and experience snowshoeing.