It's the end of the season I like most.

Even though by February the groomed trails are usually worn out and jagged, if I can get to Fourth of July Pass this late in the season nobody else will be there, and you can pack a season's worth of cross-country skiing into one month.

And I can bring Eddy, my dog.

He's hard on the tracks, so we don't go up in December, but I got the green-light to bring him up at the end of the season from the groomer who stopped us one morning on his snowmobile.

"Well," he said. "Normally, he wouldn't be allowed."

But then he looked at the divotsand lumps in the snow and shrugged his shoulders and wished us well.

So we like the very last of the winter. We can cover a lot of missed time.

Every once in a while we're still frowned upon, but if we get out early enough, no one else is around and we head out along Having Fun Trail, just off the access road.

When it's that early the snow looks blue packed alongside of the trail and when the sky breaks slivers of pink light fall on top of the far-off trees and we ski past the warming hut crouched along the side of the trail then climb the road until there is a break in the trees and we can see the entire Panhandle National Forest covering the neighboring mountain sides.

Fourth of July pass makes marvelous skiing.

I like it more than most everywhere; better than Jackson Hole, Wyo., though I'm biased because Eddy and I were chased from the groomed trails there.

"No chance," the trail manager there said when I asked him, so we took our skies and ran along the trail parallel the Snake River, which was just as well.

Eddy's a horrible skier, and he often lays down on the trail to chew the stuck snow from his toes, which is harder on the trails than when he just thunders along it.

Sometimes he'll catch scent of a deer and it's fun to see him stick his nose up seriously, but if we get a late jump and are finishing our run later than usual other people will be starting out and they don't like him.

"There's a sign," one woman said. "It's clearly marked."

She's right, of course.

But I broke Eddy in on Laramie Peak, Wyo., an elevation of 8,000 feet, and we've been skiing ever since. It's hard to breathe at 8,000-feet, and the mountain trail would cross a giant plain before it buried into the forest and the wind would whip fiercely there but we would drop our heads into the snow drifts until we made it to the woods where everything went silent. Once, when we saw a buffalo brush past us, we both had to sit on the trail, mesmerized, to gather ourselves while the snow fell all around us.

Everything is quiet under the trees with the snow and we do all our best thinking on the trails.

And after a kilometer from the access point on Fourth of July Pass, Having Fun Trail diverges at a junction. We keep to the right and climb up the mountain side, past the White Knuckles loop, past the picnic shelter and restroom to the High Road where the whole forest lays out before you like a mirage.

It's remarkable to believe we're just 20 miles east of Coeur d'Alene, and very, very faintly you can hear the current of traffic on Interstate 90, but it's the best view I've found since moving here four years ago and Eddy will lay down on the trail and miss it all to chew the stuck snow from his paws but I'll stay there a while and let him.

You shouldn't break the rules because it ruins it for everyone. That's what they tell me. They're mostly right, but some things you really, really have to work at it to spoil.

Tom Hasslinger is a staff writer for the Coeur d'Alene Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2010, or at thasslinger@cdapress.com.