O'Brien with a twist: No Place for Old Men

The trail opens into parks with great views of the high Little Belts peaks

Perfect conditions on the bottom 

Across a snow bridge

Outcroppings

What started out as a simple trip down O'Brien Creek in the Little Belts morphed into a trail-finding adventure that added some distance while we almost circled back on ourselves.
I've been doing this 8-mile run for nearly 40 years and this was the first time we lost our trail.
We never really felt lost ---- there were all the familiar sites in the right places:  Poprhyry Lookout, the powerline, Neihart Baldy and Big Baldy.
Our Wednesday Wayne's Walk group decided to begin the backcountry ski with a little twist; we wouldn't join the O'Brien trail in the normal spot, instead opting to continue up the Porphyry Lookout Road to nearly the top of the Showdown Ski Area Golden Goose run. 
There's a pretty good old road/trail from there to a snowmobile trail just above where O'Brien trail comes in.  We planned to tele the first road/trail and then tele another good slope above the O'Brien trail.
Things went pretty smoothly, and we got in some nice turns in great snow until we finished the final run.  Instead of finding the blue diamond trail marker we headed down a road to the east and sort of decided to do some exploring, thinking we'd hit the trail at some point, or at least Divide Road, which would certainly lead us back to the trail.
The skiing was pretty interesting and fun in the trees that occasionally opened onto parks with great views of the Belts.
When we got to what we thought was Divide Road we saw a snow covered hill we thought was just above the trail.
We had some discussion whether we were where we thought we were and ended up skiing back in the direction from which we came.
We stopped and found the blue trail marker.  We had found it, but wandered about in the process, crossing Divide Road in two places without knowing it because it was covered in wind-blown snow.
From there it was a piece of cake down the trail.
There is a remarkable amount of snow in the O'Brien Creek bottom and the snow bridges were in terrific shape.
We were able to do some turns in one additional spot and the rest of the trip was uneventful.
I enjoyed our period of being "lost."
But, I realized that this was something that our age group should be wary of.
The six of us were 80, 78, two at 71, 68 and 66.
This was no place for old men.

You can see how close we came to making full circle as we wandered