This is a lovely local trail that is part of the Hiawatha Trail System in Sault Ste. Marie.   We accessed the trail near the beginning of Backcountry Road (about half way down the east side of Fourth line) and found the trail entrance on east side of the road.  The first part of this trail is just a small snowshoe trail that hooks up with the main Coldwater Creek Trail.

       The Coldwater Creek trail is intended for use by crosscrountry skiers, but a beautiful snowshoe trail was created along side it, and loops back and forth across the main trail.  If you are just hiking the trail in the winter, you need to stay on the snowshoe trail, because the main skiing trail required a trail pass. 

       As we followed the snowshoe trail, many other trail options began to converge with ours.  We decided to take one that headed towards the stream that flows through the area.   There were a few obstacles we had to face along this trail, as it got very narrow at times. There were fallen trees to climb over and one section of stream we had to cross over on a very narrow path.  It made for some beautiful pictures of the stream flowing alongside the trail.

       Eventually we came to an larger opening of field where the trail either heading towards a small lake, or continued further east around the loop. We went to check out the lake, but it was fenced off with danger signs.  It was hard to tell with so much snow around the lake what the danger was, but my best guess was that there was a dam. 

       We decided not to trek around the lake for the sake of time, and continued down the regular trail heading east.   We found many more trails converging once again, some of them labeled as bike trails. It was here where it started to get tricky to keep track of our direction. We unfortunately did not have a compass with us or a copy of the map, so I highly recommend it to anyone else wanting to try out this trail.  We accidentally got turned around somewhere and ended up hiking so close to Fifth line that we could see the houses across the street. We had no choice but to hop on the groomed trails (even though we weren't supposed to) to get us back in the direction we were supposed to go to meet up with the regular snowshoe trails.  If you hike this in the summer or fall, of course it wont matter which trail system you use. Hikers are just supposed to stay clear of skiers, and we did run into a few along the way back.   Thankfully one of the skiers was kind enough to advise us how to find our way out.  But even with her directions, we ended up hiking into someones back yard, a full street over from where we started.

       In total the Coldwater Creek trail is supposed to be 2.5km long, or about 3 hours in length.  Even with our turnarounds, we still ended up hiking for the length of time we were hoping for. And the beautiful sights were worth it, even with getting lost.