This morning she was there, austere and aloof, low to the west. Though an intimacy grew as I stood with my coffee in hand, sweet and creamy, sipping by the sliding glass door, staring over the backs of the horses silhouettes, the peaks of the bald mountains, and asked for nothing. There, alone, the two of us, she faced me.

Was she closer? Did she appear bigger? I can’t say I saw a difference. What I can say is that I looked a little longer than I usually do. And you know, the longer you look, the more you see. , More. Deeper. Details. Lines and curves and subtle shadows I never notice before. And something more.

The importance of that little bit of rock reflecting the sun back down at us. And to think when I was a child, man had not yet touched her. She was still only a myth.

Our moon has since become closer, more manageable, understandable, real and tangent. Funny, though, how the mystery has not disappeared. Like fire, our innate intrigue does not dissipate with a grasping of the facts. It only goes a bit deeper, more personal.

My moon.

This morning I watched my moon, diffused behind the high clouds, set behind my mountain. Did your moon do the same?

Aspen buds forced on my kitchen window

The dormant season begins her end. Mountain awakes. I am reminded how wild our world is. Yesterday, the first squirrel. Then a skunk, left dead to a .22 in the chicken coop before the dog or playful colts could find it or we would find a dead chicken. This attracted a fox who climbed into the coop and chased off the chickens only to be tempted by the foul smelling carcass. And finally a pine martin. All this just yesterday.

I imagine it was the fox who took care of the stinky thing for us last night. This morning, the odor of ranch begins to clear.

On a walk this afternoon along a packed snowmobile trail. South hillsides trickle with the first melting, hidden under snow, exposed where rocks have opened to earth. An unfolding, unfurling of the season. A small secret we can find by sound. The drip drip drip we have not heard for months.

Around every tree bare dirt is rendered, relieved of its heavy load. And at the very top of one tree, a quick shiver of brilliant blue. A pair of bluebirds has returned.

There is no wind before the sunrise. My world is completely still.

Far off on the distant shore in the obscurity of the timbered hillside across river an owl calls. In this blackness, this whiteness, this big wide open empty frozen world.

Who? Who does he call to there so lonely when it seems like so long since I have seen heard seen smelled life in the shadow of day?

I see her now, not all anew, but from a new perspective.

An intimate view. I slow down and look closer. Fine details reveal themselves only with time.

In the early morning after a clean snow the trees sparkled with a hoar frost in a way I’ve never seen. Fine silver branches of the Aspen, delicate and intricate tips with the new sun just up behind them, setting them all aglow. The mountain sprinkled with diamonds. For a moment I felt like a princess dancing through the soft snow beneath my heavy boots.

Yesterday in an Aspen Grove. Snowshoeing up a silent trail. The old ones are dying. The largest of the trees finished playing out their part let loose of their bark and reveal their orange blood below, the demise of the old growth. The Aspen are never too old. Short lived trees. I am glad in a way as I see the passing of this generation of so many scarred with names and initials and dates of tourists who felt they mattered so much to the mountain to leave such a lasting mark, who felt carving into a living tree was somehow not the same as scrawling on a subway with spray paint. I fail to see the difference. Both selfish marks some stranger passing by had the ego to leave behind.

It is hard now not to be distracted. First light from the rising sun has topped the mountain to the east and is illuminating the uppermost stark white peaks of Indian Ridge and Pole Mountain. A pinkish layer of light. Off set dramatically against the steel grey sky behind. Another storm pours in form the west. A little more snow to add to our load.

How can I overlook each detail now in this silence? I remain in tune while I can hear.

willow buds in winter

This year there is little ice.  The snow seems to spread directly on the river and creeks.  I question its ability to hold even me each time I cross but see the moose tracks before me and find comfort and wavering confidence.

This winter has an easier mood. A few days colder than any others just to keep the averages in line.  Otherwise, a little less snow, a little less wind, a little less chill.  Mild. Comfortable. Comforting.  My home feels like a content place.

Easier.  Winter is not half over here. We have much work to be done.  Our lives our bustling with the well anticipated and needed change.  Electricity in the air, charging us and our lives with excitement.  The exhilaration of change, now put into action.  We can enjoy our memories, but need not grasp for what is no longer there.  I do not cling to what I no longer am. Where and who and what am I now?

Now. A perfect moon low in the sky, its cool silver light reflecting off the white ground, reflecting off the heavy clouds, the echo of this watery light.  Each molecule of air seems to embrace the radiance. Our world glows.

Now the clouds are swathed in a silver and gold luminosity and the moon slowly settles behind the mountain.

In a matter of moments, I will notice each time I look up a little more clarity in the sky, a little less magic.  Day prepares to rise.

How many mornings have I seen the moon slip behind the mountain from the warmth of my home while in the dark crystalline world outside my window temperatures are so far below zero, far below anything elsewhere I have lived through?  So close, so thin are these walls and windows, so often I step out into it all.  My home is not a bunker in which I remain hiding, but a haven I return to, rest in, allow to be a part of the wintery world while smoke rolls from the stove pipe, down the valley, dissipating into nothingness.

How much wood have we burned to allow us the warmth to remain here?

How unnatural at times it seems when I remember the fresh green of garlic poking through rich black moist soil in perfect lines and patterns of deliberate life, and tilling beds in preparation for carefree sprinkling of carrot seeds, a simple random toss that produced sweetest rewards. These were other times, other mountains.

on the Rio Grande at Brewster Park

Down by the river I flow while the water stands solid beneath me. Here, we are supported. Still we stand on the white expanse and listen.  A murmur of life below. Is that Thalia I hear beneath the surface, tempting me to join her?

It has been years since I had a dog who can keep up with me. I am enjoying the more distant explores this year. But have I ever had one who can sit and listen, enjoy the moment and ask for nothing for now, only to soak it all in as this one does? What a wonderful companion I have.

I think of how many come here to fish in summer, standing in free flowing waters with their waiters and hip boots, tossing lines to dance on the water’s facade.  And how little “use” one has here for winter.  Peace and solitude hold only so much value.  We tend to choose more excitement, brighter lights, and louder noises.  (Perchance warmer places, too.) Stimulation provided for us, not created by mind and nature. Our senses left dormant where here they can breathe.

The banks and adjacent hillsides are littered with droppings and tracks of the moose that were scattered here yesterday, high tailing it for the trees, as a low flying helicopter broke the peace, hovering over the frozen river, scanning the hillsides, back and forth. From our kitchen window we watched a bull moose run through the deep snow on the north side and seek shelter in the trees, only to be chased back out again twenty minutes later as the helicopter changed its course.

We call it wildlife harassment.  I believe they call it “counting elk.”  Funny they wouldn’t think of the simpler method – asking those of us who live where the elk do for answers. Perhaps our answers are considered too simple.  I have found local views hold less value than facts and figures filed behind a big desk.  Living with the wild life, one sees and understands more than many a report will tell you.  But learning to look… I’ve been thinking of that often lately.  Our inability to see.  We see what we expect to be there. We find more comfort in the safety of seeing what we expect to see, not what is really there. It is a blindness we all must battle.  Seeing is not always easy.

Ah, but who am I to say?  I don’t see the elaborate reports.  I don’t look. A blindness for which I am at fault.  I only see the magnificence around me, and look at the finest of details.  I hope to miss nothing.  It all holds value.

We return home among longer shadows along the packed snowmobile track, the half moon rising in the ridiculously blue sky over the tops of the trees peppering the hillside.

Have you ever heard the shivering aspen with their intricate silver tips trembling naked in the frigid winter wind?

a storm still a canyon away

Storm.

How can we use the same word for that which happens in winter and summer when they are so very different? Hear the distinction. One soft and silent and gently falling.  The other rolls in like a mighty herd with fire in the sky, full of intensity, power and passion, electricity in the air, thunder on the horizon.

Winter.  Our storms arrive and settle.  They ease into the distance, descend down the valley and enwrap us. Consuming the mountain in a muted rage. Without a sound, without flash, without fanfare. Only extreme silence, calming, subdued, like a lullaby.

Tranquilized.

In summer she shouts her arrival.  Wild and vibrant, colorful and loud. The sky is alive and the ground becomes more so as it is saturated and swells. The cup flows over.

In summer she screams. She dances and twirls and pounds the drum to some primeval beat with torrents of rain playing on metal roofs, rubber boots and horse hooves singing in puddles and whistling down muddy slopes.

Ah, the fiery passionate song of summer in the high country!

Rather than confining, containing and covering, she exults and spills forth. 

Now a winter storm.  Its subtle and hushed arrival. We sit inside and wait it out.

We settle into a long deep sleep as the heavy blanket falls around us and tucks us in to the womb or casket.

And within, buried deep inside, a slight stirring. Passions brew soundlessly, as subtle as the sound of falling snow.

We appear dormant, don’t we?

I am a seed ready to burst free with the first rains of spring.

snow on the willows down by the river

And this morning, a closer confinement.  Our valley safe and protected as if held in a gentle mother’s arms. The defused low light of the waning moon behind the clouds is enough to see our horizon fade away sooner as the mountains to the west of us are lost in paler gray.  Another storm approaching.  A curtain falling in between acts.  A new scene will emerge when it lifts.

There is excitement, anticipation in the hollow void like a white hole when the storm finally sets in and enwraps us in a heavy veil.  No trepidation of the weather. We are ready, almost always.  This is what we expect.  This is what we live for. This is the blessing of the mountain.

grass remaining on the horizon line

Big storms continue to pass us by. We hear stories from the other side of the Divide and listen longingly. Here, we watch the radar maps and check forecasts daily, looking out for “severe weather warnings” with the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning.  And every day, it seems, they tell us the Big One is coming.  This one to be measured in feet, not inches.  Yet we see two inches one day.  One the next.  Feeble storms. 

And warm. Mild. Balmy.  Yesterday hit 40 while the snow sort of fell.  Last night I cooked dinner on the grill under the covered deck and I was comfortable.  30 degrees is unheard of for a December night.  I stood there with the lid closed, the aroma of sweet smoked chicken wafting through the damp air, and watched the flakes fall under the narrow gaze of my headlamp.  Such deep silence in the endless black, broken only by the hiss of the dripping grease on the grill.

We ease into this winter. Soft and warm and now finally wet.  We need the moisture. This morning there is new snow.  Perhaps measured in inches instead of the feet we would have hoped by this time of year.  It will come.  If not this storm, perhaps the next. 

Yesterday Forrest shared a poem he wrote about deluge and drought, full of contradiction that weather (and life) can and does bring.  One day nothing, the next too much.  Only through time do we find a balance. The balance of moisture, of temperatures, of seasons, of light and dark.

Now we find darkness and revel in the long nights that Solstice allows us. Darkness softly spreads like the shadow of wings from the giant raven flying overhead.  At once ominous and magical, somehow discomforting.  Such lightness in memories of the easy long warm days of summer when night does not settle until after nine, and the sun rises before most in the morning.

Tonight is the longest night, the pinnacle of the darkest time of year, made darker still as the full moon will be shadowed from the radiance of the sun by our beautiful blue planet.  A lunar eclipse just past midnight; funny it should occur at what we call the darkest hour. 

I see no hidden meaning only the drama and intrigue that nature plays.  That alone is plenty, more than we will ever fully understand.

like a sand dune of snow

Despite the increasing light of early dawn, the view this morning is limited.  The mountains close in further on days like this when storm clouds dance about the hillsides and hide the mountain tops, circle and tease and linger but do not come in, settle down and stay a while,  join us and grant us with the blessing of a heavy load.  Rather these clouds sever us further from what may be happening elsewhere. How little we know of what lies beyond our enclosed horizon. Here, our world is still and seemingly unchanging, drifting shades of white and grey, pencil lines and smudge marks as far as the eye can see. Is that ever far enough? 

How dry this season has been.  I dare not complain about the mild weather, for I know better than to assume this will last. We enjoy it for what it is, knowing it will change.

Yesterday I cut branches from the nearby spruce trees to decorate the house for Christmas.  We will not cut a tree and have not done so since Forrest was three.  The fake tree we had set up for the past several years was lost in the move (the move that brought us right back where we started from).  We will do without a tree this year.  There are plenty to look at and enjoy just outside our windows.

The branches I collected are fragile.  The trees are suffering from the dry spell. Blue needles appear yellow and fall off leaving a trail of tiny spikes about the kitchen counter and wood floor.  They give off little smell of fresh sap that winter cuts usually grant. As if the beetles have not taxed the trees enough.  Now they suffer from drought.  Or are the two related as many have assumed?  The dry will not remain. They say another storm is on the way.  Perhaps this one will serve us all well.

For now, the ground cover of white becomes thinner, dryer, changing its texture from plump crystals to course sand.

The wind blows.  Dry snow moves like a shifting dune, arid and desolate beneath the pale grey sky in this abandoned landscape. Patterns changing in the low light and long shadows of the December sun. Sugar snow. Crystalline surfaces, wind blow and sun glazed.

These patterns will be buried beneath the heavy load I know will come.  We count on nothing but change.

patterns in the wind blown snow

a bit of color on an otherwise bland day

Layer upon layer the mountains fold and fade

And endless undulation of white capped waves

Motionless below the somber sky

Finally merging with lines too faint to decipher

Enveloping the stratum of steel grey clouds

Becoming a part of the sky that helped formed them

Softening their hard edges with time and wind and rain

And the untamed spring run-off as the snows that in winters form

Suddenly let loose in a violent burst of brown waters

That rips and tears the face of the mountain

Not unlike a zealous artist at work on a pile of clay

But wait

I am ahead of myself

I hold myself back

From lusting for the lushness of the spring

Now it is the silent hour of the mountain

As she stills and freezes and collects the bounty of snow

That feeds her and us in times of less than plenty

We refrain

We are restrained

We quietly build the load that one day will gush forth

Uncontrolled and wild

In a plentiful powerful passionate display

simply snow on the base of a tree

An easy season so far.  Mild morning temperatures have been well above zero, some days approaching twenty degrees.  We watched the thermometer climb to 45 mid day recently.

On my morning walk with Gunnar across the open pasture the wind was blowing strong and warm.  I was dressed for something colder.  I don’t plan my attire according to the weather for our morning chores and walk, only put on the same heavy coat and boots, hat and mittens every morning and either find myself comfortable or find myself cold.  On this morning, I found myself too warm.  Unheard of! I pushed back my hood and savored the temperate wind on my face.  It somehow felt like ocean air, moist and robust, only there was no salt.  There is no odor in a snow covered land.  I remembered the brackish aroma, and for just a moment was lost in that memory and was there, hearing the waves roll over the rocks.  The sweet smell of wood smoke from our stove brought me back home.

In the evening I felt rain. The boys say it was hail.  It does not hail here in winter, I tell them.  It must be frozen rain. Or is that what hail is made of?  But I smelled rain on wet dirt freshly exposed, a powerful perfume. I long for its song on the metal roofs.  Instead, we have the silence of the snow. Or the refined drip, drip, drip of the snow off the roof when I stand out on the porch in the late afternoon sun.

Warm as it is, our world is still white. After lunch, I take the dog for a brief walk through the woods on a snow white trail.  Our footsteps are muffled in fresh powder in places untouched by the sun.  My breathing from the altitude is the only noise, rhythmic and deep like a distant chorus of drums. Snow drapes across the fallen logs, clinging, holding, soft and sensuous like hair down a woman’s back.

Snow remains when one would think it would fall, melt, fade away.  Here it stays.  It belongs. It comes and settles in for the long season. It ebbs and flows like a weekly tide, but does not leave.  Staying up here as long as I do without a trip down the mountain, I begin to assume the whole world is white.  I forget it is only a few places. Our little world.  A narrow vision.

For now the snow recedes.  The white tide pulls back. The snow softens and compresses down to dirt beneath our boots on the southern slopes and where the wind has blown it thin.  Tomorrow perhaps the ground will show through in those spots.  Or perhaps it will snow and cool off again.  We try to guess.  We watch the forecasts.  Ultimately, we get what the mountain gives and that is plenty.

the crossing at west lost trail

It is different this year.  I suppose I say that every year. 

The snow came early, following a most mild early autumn.  Thus the water’s surface did not freeze.  At the creek crossing we step on the bridge of snow and fall through.  There is no ice to support our weight.  The sunken in tracks of the moose before us set the stage.  The ice that usually carries cannot hold up this year.  It is not there. I find a crossing of snow pack over rocks and stop mid stream, bending down for a closer look.  Beneath the snow, there is little ice.  In places, none is visible, just the snow seemingly floating on the surface of the gently flowing black waters below.  How cold the waters must be to not melt the snow above, I do not attempt to find out, and do all I can to stay dry while crossing.

I wonder if the ice will form later.  According to the calendar, winter has not yet begun.  On the mountain, of course, seasons are relative.  Summer is short. Winter is longer.  Mild as this one has been so far, I worry and yet I know by now that the seasons have a way of balancing. The mountain takes care of herself.  Our trepidations are in vain.

In the meanwhile, the mountain exposes a new view for me.  I will never be able to say I have seen it all.  Each day reveals something new.  How I would miss the subtle changes, minute variations that allow me this intimate link with the mountain, my home. 

You wonder, don’t you, what I will do when I leave?  I will begin anew and start to see and feel a new mountain. How exciting that will be!

Now I am here and making the most of it.  There is plenty.  Yesterday, I enjoyed a Sunday stroll, if you will, with the puppy, now nine months old.  I can tell you this: it was no walk in the park. The conditions were just wrong. Crusted snow, often soft and sticky, and thin powder beneath unable to support the wide step of the snowshoe.  Each foot print crunched in, pushed clear to the dirt below, and pulled out of the same hole often covered with the wet top layer which had to be knocked off with my poles.  Each step.  I was tired in no time. The puppy was not.  Watching him gave me a regular dose of positive motivation, enough to keep on keeping on. 

We were not alone.  We shared the trail with the moose and coyote, neither of which left a track of any value for us to follow. For those of you who live in moose country, who live with the moose in your back yard, you may know how they mess up the trail in the snow.  Their stride is just wider than mine, each hoof print is much smaller than my snowshoes, poking clear to the dirt beneath this snow.  Once again, I found myself following in their tracks, not by choice but because they too are creatures of habit and insist upon following the trails you and I “see” in the summer.  In the winter, though, the ground is a smooth surface of white, trails indistinguishable.  The moose and I (and any other smaller wild beast that may be stuck up here with us for the season) still find comfort in following the same old route we do when we can see the beaten path.  Why do we stay the trail?  In this country, I dare say we all know that is usually the easier option in an otherwise tricky course.

At times, however, I found myself grateful for those uneven potholes of a track. The moose had remembered the trail better than I, and in places where I may have wandered off, the moose tracks kept me in line. As much as one can draw a straight line in these mountains, that is.  Funny how we both find comfort in travelling the known route in this land so filled with unknowns.

No doubt you might wonder why I do what I do some times.  Don’t worry.  My boys wonder too. But they have also learned to expect, and perhaps you do to.

And so it was another day with the dog.  Life is good.  Youth is exhilarating.  Not mine, of course, but that of my companion.  The puppy does not tire.  He waits on me.  As we rise in elevation, the snow deepens, he follows in my tracks for a bit of relief, then becomes quickly and often distracted and scampers off through the snow on either side of the trail, both sides, bounding about with what looks to me like a smile on his face.

We found ourselves at the Slide.  Stark and vast in winter with the top of the World before us and the devastation of Nature in our face.  It is a harsh place, even in summer, yet so striking and humbling.  In winter, the north aspect is shaded.  The sun never touches where the face of the mountain fell nearly twenty years ago. There is little snow up there this year so far.  It will come.  Just before this rockslide is the avalanche zone where the snow let loose in the winter of 05.  A heavy load, a good year.  Tumbled trees, now with their needles long gone, are still visible in the shallow snow as a reminder.

At the Slide it seems forever the wind blows, adding to the harshness, reminding me I do not belong, that home is still two hours below, two hours of trudging through the snow.  I do not want to be out in the dark.  I am soaked with sweat from this trek already.

Once again, we do not remain long.

Descending, Gunnar is filled with a beautiful confidence.  He knows now where we are going.  Home.  Back to the boys. He trots on ahead, then is there around every bend in the trail, looking back or sitting and scoping ahead while he allows me a chance to catch up.  I never do.  He makes it home before me and announces our survival to our awaiting family.

Gunnar at the Slide

simple patterns seen in the snow

A crescent moon rises over Finger Mesa, her light diffused behind bulky clouds shaped like dinosaurs, angels and running horses. Enough light to show off the outline of the Reservoir that reveals its upper end to us, now a flat matte surface, pale gray in the soft moonlight, a contrast against the black timber hillsides enveloping her banks.

To the west the sky seems clear, perhaps a promise of what will be today, at least for the early morning hours.  Stars out the window over my kitchen sink draw me in, pull me out, take me far away.  The depth of the night sky’s brilliance in the cold morning air is limitless.  Blackness forever framed by a rugged and narrow horizon, flanked by the pale peaks of the mountaintops above tree line faintly glowing with the little bit of moonlight. It is only then I can see far.  The mountain contains me, limits my view.  For even when we scale her arduous sides and look off into what seems like forever, I do not see beyond the sea of jagged peaks.  I know there is a world beyond. I am not certain I would rather be there or here.

And slowly arrives the first light of morning, radiance from the rising sun.  The world is still in shades of grey, slowly defining what she is made of without brilliance or fanfare.  And how she impresses me even now with her cavernous colorless meadows and black walls of timber reaching up to the peaks above tree line like surrounding sentinels then blending into the sky where a pallid light has replaced the endless stars.  And my infinite view closes politely for the day.