I like snow until it’s in my way.

My tires share this frustration.

This is of course the great conundrum of winter in Northeastern Oregon.

The very substance that makes this longest of seasons so enticing also defies our efforts to get at it.

I don’t mean town snow.

The yard on the north side of my house in Baker City has been white, or mostly so, since well before Christmas.

But as a winter sports playground it’s not, say, Park City or St. Moritz.

I’d be catatonic with boredom after just a few laps in snowshoes, even if the snow was deep enough to warrant snowshoes.

Which it’s not.

The ground, as city lots tend to be, is flat, so the only way to approximate downhill skiing would be to climb up on the roof and ski off, which would likely alarm the neighbors.

I don’t own skis anyway.

I don’t think I could fit a snowmobile through either of the gates, but even if I could, the slightest application of throttle on a modern sled would result in a rapid and likely painful encounter with a fence.

Or a tree, or the side of the house.

The mountains, then, beckon.

There the snow lies deep, frequently refreshed by the storms that, like as not, glide past the valleys holding their precipitation with the stubbornness of a miser standing in front of a lottery machine.

In the mountains the expanse of snow-covered terrain is so vast as to be practically limitless.

Snowshoeing is my favored mode of getting around, and snow has the advantage, as winter progresses, of covering the logs and limbs and boulders and other obstacles that make navigation in warmer seasons more tortuous.

Trouble is, snow also covers roads.

The very roads that lead to the places I want to go.

And so there is a perverse sort of calculus at play, where the same storms that transform the mountains into ideal snowshoeing destinations simultaneously deny me reasonable access to those places.

By reasonable I mean close enough that, at the placid pace of snowshoeing, I can get there without having to build a snow cave and lay in the amounts of supplies that you read about in a Jack London story.

Lacking a snow cat, snowmobile or other suitable vehicle, my options are severely curtailed, limited to roads that are regularly plowed.

Which is exceedingly few of them, as a percentage.

Among the exceptions is the sno-park at Catherine Creek Summit, along Highway 203 between Medical Springs and Union.

I have driven past the sno-park many times, including during winter, but until Saturday, Jan. 21, I had never pulled in and parked, snowshoes stacked in the back.

Actually my daughter, Olivia, who’s 15, was driving our Toyota FJ Cruiser. She and her brother, Max, who’s 11, and my wife, Lisa, were along for our first snowshoe trip in the area.

The parking lot was considerably bigger than I expected, with ample space for the snowmobile trailers that were attached to most of the rigs on the day of our visit. As with other sno-parks, including the one at Anthony Lakes Mountain Resort, some of the money to pay the plow drivers comes from sales of sno-park permits, which are required.

Catherine Creek is a popular starting place for snowmobilers riding the extensive network of groomed trails in the Wallowa Mountains to the east. Forest Road 77, the Eagle Creek Road, starts on the east side of the highway, opposite the sno-park.

The area west of the parking area had just a few snowmobile tracks.

We headed northwest, mainly because I was hoping to get on the lee side of a ridge and out of the southeast wind which, like most winds in January, was brisk.

After meandering between patches of brush for a while we came upon an obvious road that contoured along a slope, ascending at a nearly imperceptible grade.

(Which, happily, is precisely the sort of grade Max and Olivia prefer.)

The snowshoeing conditions were to our liking as well. The recent spate of nondescript weather, with daily cycles of freezing and thawing, had formed a solid crust in the snow, but a modest storm a couple days earlier had laid down a couple inches of powder. That made for soft steps rather than the cacophonous crunching that can happen after midwinter thaws.

We turned back after a mile or so when my planned loop route — I detest backtracking — petered out at the base of a steep ridge that seemed to lack an obvious ascent route.

The swatch of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest on which the sno-park is located extends for a mile or so west, south and northwest, and what with the slow progress typical of snowshoeing there’s enough room to spend several hours tromping around.

The forest is thick but in a few places we had a decent, but not unimpeded, view of the trio of peaks that dominate the Catherine Creek country — from north to south, China Cap, Burger Butte and Mule Peak.

I appreciate mountains that come in groups, as those three do. When I see them I am reminded of other, even more eminent trios such as the Three Sisters of Central Oregon, or, even more magnificent, the great trinity of the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland — the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau.

The comparison crumbles in ways besides the scale of the peaks.

In Switzerland a network of trains and gondolas and funiculars and tramways ferries people almost anywhere they care to go. The contrast with Northeastern Oregon is dramatic.

But though the lack of winter access sometimes frustrates me, I would consider it a bad bargain to swap our solitude for its opposite. We saw a pair of snowshoers, accompanied by their energetic and friendly trio of dogs, during our walk, and I was a trifle surprised, even with the proximity to the well-maintained sno-park.

No matter how much I sometimes yearn to stand atop, say, Eagle Cap in the depths of winter, I would shudder to see a line of gleaming gondolas climbing from the valley, each disgorging a group of tourists into a climate-controlled building for whom no vista, however stirring, would be complete without an overpriced hamburger to go with it.

Catherine Creek sno-park is on the west side of Highway 203 at the summit divide between the Catherine Creek drainage to the north, and Powder River to the south. Sno-park permits, which are available in annual, three-day and one-day versions, are required to park there. There is a vault toilet. Overnight camping is not allowed. The sno-park is about 14 miles from Union, and about 30 miles from Baker City.