Cabin Journal

Silence and Light

Unable to get to the cabin for almost two weeks because of the big snowstorm, I was anxious to get up there and see the reported accumulations of 2 feet of snow. But the warming days and high winds in the meantime had reduced the snowpile considerably, especially in the fields exposed to the sun and wind.

The two Highland cattle (below), which have been pastured in Meeker Park for at least two years, must have been happy to have the grasses become accessible, even though they are tough animals, bred to withstand the cold and winds of Scotland.

On my walk around Meeker Park, I nodded to them as they stood side by side in the late afternoon sun. In the places shaded by trees and north-facing slopes, the snow was still high. Yet what struck me more than anything—the wind patterns on the snow and the ice on the river and ponds—was the quiet.  We are so accustomed to a backdrop of noise in our culture—constant traffic outside and constant electronic sounds inside (computer, phones, etc.), that when we encounter the absence of noise, it’s startling.

Suddenly, I can hear the jay call from across the valley or the muffled sound of the creek under the ice. It’s the kind of silence that settles on you, wraps you in a comforting blanket, as if you’ve been longing for this without knowing it.

Walking back, late in the day in a valley where the sun drops behind Mount Meeker at 3:30, I was touched by the lingering sunlight. It was the last light of the day, precious because I wouldn’t see the sun’s rays for another 16 hours, when they would creep over the foothills from the east and into the valley bottom.

I wanted to reach out and hold onto this tender light as long as possible as it brushed the pine trees on the hill and the grove of aspens in the valley bottom; as it caressed the brown grasses that weren’t felled by the snow. Even the cattle seemed aware of the preciousness of this last light; the two stood facing west, as if paying homage to the last bit of warmth before their long night began.

 

A Singular Snow Day

Last week (before this week's big snowstorm) we had one of those rare days when the atmospheric conditions were just right for the snow to cling to everything it touched: pine boughs, aspen branches, bronze grasses, cabin roofs, fence posts and telephone lines. Instead of obscuring the landscape in a covering of white, it outlined every twig and branch. The icy conditions had the strange effect of making everything clearly delineated while, with moisture condensing in the air, softening the landscape at the same time.

I love these vivid snow days even more because they are transient. As soon as the sun comes out, the snow will melt, and the landscape will return to what’s normal for winter.

I’m not the only one who wished such perfectly formed landscapes would last forever. I just saw an exhibit of Claude Monet’s paintings (at the Denver Art Museum). The French painter preferred working in the open air, even in winter when he had to bundle up to stay warm.

His subjects were bridges, buildings, fishing boats, haystacks and water lilies, but mostly he loved water and sky. Especially he strove to capture the different stages of light on the haystacks or sea, but he was continually frustrated because the atmospheric conditions kept changing. As fast as he painted, he couldn’t keep up. Like the rest of us, one of the world’s favorite Impressionist painters had to deal with impermanence.

Indeed, the next morning after it snowed at the cabin, the sun came out, and there was a small window of time before the crystal landscape lost its glimmer. I stood on the road (below) by the field facing Mount Meeker, which was engulfed in swiftly changing clouds, and admired the pine trees still outlined in white, the dazzling grasses and that deep blue sky, while listening to the steady drip of melting snow.

 

The Real Thing

In Rocky Mountain National Park, two different landscapes inhabit the same valley. One is natural, the other a product of human interference. In some ways, the artificial landscape is more beautiful.

Moraine Park (right, in summer) is one of the more popular places for park visitors to congregate. It’s a broad valley with stunning views to the west of a dark and dramatic cirque of mountains. It’s also where large herds of elk hang out, especially in autumn, and attract hordes of people who want to see the male elks clash and hear their mating and territory calls.

But this breathtaking landscape is not natural. Before this land was protected, the early (non-native) inhabitants cut down most of the trees and willow bushes to put in a golf course. After it became a national park and the golf course was removed, elk moved in and started chowing down the young and tasty shoots of aspens and willows that began to regrow. Because humans exterminated wolves, the elk’s main predator, there was no check to their hungry and destructive ways. The elk’s dominance also chased away beaver, which needed the willows and other trees to create their watery habitats.

At some point, the Park Service realized that something needed to be done to correct this imbalance. As an experiment, it fenced off  small areas in Moraine Park, especially along the river. The results are dramatic. Inside the fence (right), which keeps out the elk (above), aspens and willow bushes thrive. Outside the fence (below) are only grasses, chewed down to their base by the time winter comes around, so there’s a barren look to the park this time of the year.

 

To see what a natural park (the traditional word for an open setting or valley bottom in the mountains) looks like without elk interference, you need to go to Wild Basin (below, as seen from the Sandbeach Lake trail), in the southern part of the park and near my cabin. Bisected by the St. Vrain creek, the valley bottom is thick with willow bushes, almost impenetrable to humans (but not to the moose who wander through). Without the open grassland, it’s not as spectacular as Moraine Park; the mountains are hidden by the bushes and trees that have thrived in the valley. But it’s more real, more natural and more conducive to other types of wildlife than elk. I often see moose there and plenty of beaver dams; once I saw a river otter emerge from the creek.

Humans have been creating artificial landscapes for centuries—look at our cities or the whole state of Florida where humans replaced messy swamps with golf courses and palm trees. It may be “prettier” to the human eye, but a human landscape is very different than a natural one. Where nature has been left alone, over centuries or even decades, it has created a complex environment. Trees and bushes spread where they want, fall to the ground and decay, enriching the soil with micro-organisms that help flowers and other plants thrive and attract insects, birds and other animals. There’s an interlocking web of life and natural regeneration that doesn’t exist in the human-created world.   

Nature has its own wisdom, which is different from human ingenuity. A human environment, even something that involves nature, such as a park, has been simplified and manipulated by humans for human preferences. In this world of increasing human habitation, we need nature to rebalance us. I’ll take natural over pretty any day.

 

Early Snow, Fresh Air

I was hoping for a longer autumn before I had to start shoveling the front and back decks, before I needed to strap on my ice cleats and gaiters to take a walk. But nature, it seems, has its own schedule, especially with climate change throwing a wrench in otherwise (somewhat) predictable seasons. Now, instead of a gradual shift from summer to winter, we get 70 degrees one day and a high of 25 the next. We’re lacking some transitions, some days of 50s to ease us from warm to cold.

One week I’m basking in the sunlight, along with the ducks on the pond, and the  next week the pond is frozen solid, with the mallards having fled. At the cabin I’ve got the baseboard heat on high, while trying to thaw out all the frozen water containers. On the creek where I saw fish swimming last week, ice has now obscured their existence, except for the few open places where the water surges through the ice.

 

It always comes as a surprise to see the landscape change so drastically—from a rock hard landscape with stiff brown grasses to a sea of supple snow that curves and bends to fit around the trees and hills. In the past two weeks, three or four snowstorms have come through, delivering an early snowfall of at least a foot and a half, although the sun has melted some of it in areas exposed to sun and wind.

Everything feels different. For months, Mount Meeker (top) has been all sharp angles and hard granite surfaces. Now, with the snow wrapped around it, the mountain has a dreamy kind of look to it, clouds swirling around its summit, while tendrils of moisture rise up to the sky as the sun hits its flanks.

With the new snow, the air feels different: fresher and more moist. On my usual walk around Meeker Park, the exhilarating combination of the cold snow and warm  sun gives me enough energy to stomp through the deep snow, the powder forming small clouds around my feet.

It feels so good to breathe that I  ignore the cold wind that makes my eyes tear. I know this air is precious, that the majority of people in this world live in cities where the air is dirty if not unhealthy. When I breathe in this clean air, I can’t help but think of the thick smoke and orange skies that have been ravaging California.

I’ll just keep taking deep breaths of this sweet air, grateful for each one and wishing I could pass it on.

 

Autumn Light

There’s a small period of time now, between summer and winter, when the light is as clear as it will ever be. It’s the interlude between when all the trees and bushes have shed their leaves but before the snow starts to cover everything.

Without the sunlight being filtered by the leaves from the aspens or willows, or refracted by snow, the light is so dazzling it makes me stop in my tracks. Could the bark of the aspen really be that purely white? Could the sky really be that deep blue? Maybe it’s my sunglasses intensifying the color. But no, it’s the lack of humidity, no moisture in the air to make the landscape fuzzy. The winds help, too, scouring the air of any possible dust or pollution.

 

In the fields, every blade and seed head of the crisp brown plants seems illuminated. Even the cabins in Meeker Park seem to glow from within as the sunlight hits them directly.

It’s the kind of light that makes me feel I could stride up the gray granite face of Mount Meeker, still snowless. The kind of light that makes me want to walk across the umber fields, all the way down to the plains, the grass crunching under my feet. The kind of light that buoys me, keeps me supported no matter what’s going on in the rest of the world.

On the pond (above), a group of mallards relax in this light, taking refuge in this safe spot—a small island that shelters them from coyotes or other predators. I envy their comfort, their total absorption in this sunlit moment. Any day now, the pond will start to freeze, and the ducks will have to find refuge elsewhere, at a lower elevation or farther south.

But for now, we’ll all revel in this light, so honest and stripped of any pretense that it crumples your heart a bit.  

Letting Go

After a summer of chaos, life moving too swiftly for me to absorb everything, I’m happy to  settle down now as the seasons change. Although I love summer, a part of me is happy to see it leave. All summer long, I’ve been traveling, including to Illinois to see my mother, who was struggling with dementia and other disabilities that were making her life almost unendurable.

In between trips (including a fun, if hectic, one to Scotland), as much as I could I sought to enjoy summer in the mountains—the three brief months here when life flourishes and the landscape erupts with color: the lime green of the aspens that saturate the valley bottoms and the wildflowers that cover the rocky ground with every possible hue—this year in numbers I’ve rarely seen because of the wet spring. The rivers and creeks are replenished with snowmelt, and the summer birds —house wrens, swallows, hummingbirds—fill the air with their trills and swoops.

I want to absorb it all, because it goes by so quickly. There’s only a short amount of time to get my kayak out on Lily Lake before the water and air gets too cold; a few months to hike to my favorite alpine lakes—Mills, Isabelle—before they start to freeze. There’s hardly enough time to get my fill of the frenetic chipmunks and curious ground squirrels that pose on the front porch.

 

 

But now, as the aspens put on their final show before last week’s snowstorm, and after my mother’s death and funeral, I appreciate more strongly than usual how life is slowly being released: the green chlorophyll receding from the aspen, willows and grasses, as the days get shorter and the sunlight decreases, leaving behind golden leaves and  yellowing grasses. All the summer birds have left for warmer climates, and the ground squirrels have retreated into their winter dens, soon to be followed by the chipmunks and bears (but hopefully not in the same dens).

The rivers have shrunk back, leaving exposed sandy and rocky shorelines. Only the tall brown skeletons of the angelica—what’s left of summer's thick reddish stalks and white flowers—are proof that wildflowers once covered the valley. Here at the cabin, everything starts to fade away, life turning inward in preparation for winter, as the landscape returns to its brown and beige complexion.

When the cold front moved in last week, winds tore not just leaves but whole branches off trees. As snow and cold descended, the snow dampens all sounds, and silences the churning of the summer chaos. Life retreats, as it does every year, and I work to accept that. There’s peace to be found at the end of summer, as at the end of a life—a release from suffering.

The last of the aspen leaves that have been clinging to the trees let go, slowly descend to the cold, hard ground, where they will crumble into dirt and become part of the earth. Let the snow cover and put an end to all the turmoil. I can hear it in the wind: Let go, let go, let go. Let the stillness descend.

 

Shaped by the Land

Having returned from 11 days in Scotland, I can see how landscapes form people. On the Outer Hebrides, the farthest western islands in Great Britain, the weather is cool even in summer. While the rest of Europe baked in the 90s and above this summer, the Outer Hebrides  stayed in the 50s and 60s. With almost no landmass between the Hebrides and Canada, the winds attack the islands with a vengeance.

While Colorado boasts that it has 360 days of sunshine a year, the Hebrides probably gets 360 days of rain. A good weather day on the Hebrides is when it’s either raining or windy but not both. It feels like you are constantly fighting the weather, even when you’re dressed from head to toe in rain gear.

To survive there requires a certain amount of resilience. When I asked our B&B host what winters are like, considering that it rains consistently in the summer, she said the rain in winter is horizontal, and there are no sunny “spells”—small interludes of sunshine.

It’s not just the weather that is harsh, but the land itself is dark: peat bogs cover much of the islands, and the rocks that emerge from the hillsides are black. Even the rivers (left) that spill through the valleys are dark brown, probably from the peat. While some of the valley bottoms were still green going into fall, much of the land was brown. Even with the constant rain, there’s not enough sunlight to encourage life.

Only the beaches are light, almost dazzling in this dark landscape, created from finely ground seashells, churned up and polished. Even, or especially, on a rainy day, they beckon. In the fall, the purple heather also brightens the landscape, along with the white fur of the hardy sheep. And it is any surprise that all the houses are white or beige?

I think of the Colorado  mountains as a harsh landscape: all this granite softened by only a few species of trees. But compared to the Hebrides, Colorado is mild and welcoming, especially with our sun-filled ponderosa and aspen forests. The Hebrides is a treeless landscape, partly a result of human destruction, sheep grazing and a northerly climate that discourages most plant growth.

When I came back to Colorado and the cabin, I was astonished by the ease of the landscape. There’s a softness here, among the aspen leaves, just starting to turn golden; the deep blue of the sky; and the tall grasses stirring on the east side of the cabin, still green. Unlike the Hebrides, where I was constantly taking refuge in the car to get out of the wind and rain, at my Colorado cabin, I can bask for hours outside.

 

Perhaps in response to their harsh climate, the Scottish are practical, down-to-earth and soft-spoken people, almost as if they are beaten down by the weather. On trains and buses, even in restaurants, conversations are subdued, if they take place at all. There is no place for frivolity. Even on a lonely trail, people don’t look at each other, keep their heads down.

Back in the U.S, I was surprised when people smiled at me, greeted me on a trail with a smile or hello. At the cabin, it felt good to have my neighbors stop by to inquire about my trip or just wave as they drive by.

I loved the wildness of the Hebrides—the rugged coastlines, the purity of the beaches, the emptiness of the land. But Colorado has a clear light that seems depthless, especially in these early fall days.  For these next few weeks, before the snows come, I’m going to let myself sink into this warmth and light.

The Best View

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. . . . There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
~ René Daumal

Is the view better from the bottom or the from the top? Is the best vantage the one from the mountain summit? Or is it more uplifting from the valley floor to gaze up at the high peaks?

The prevailing view is to climb higher. When you’re on top, you’re lord of the world. It’s become part of our cultural language: to be at the top of your game, always wanting to reach higher, to be above it all. There’s a whole cult in Colorado among people who try to climb every fourteener in the state—those mountains above 14,000 feet. Books are written about ascents—both successful and tragic.

It's true that we see things from above that we can’t see when we’re below, that we didn’t know existed. From the mountain top, you see the whole lay of the land and how it was formed: how rivers carved their way between mountains and hills; how lakes formed in the flat areas; how human settlements took root in the valley bottoms. You can see treeline clearly—the border where trees can’t go any higher and where the tundra begins. It becomes apparent that the mountains and valleys are like yin and yang; you can’t have one without the other;

From a plane, the view is even more revealing: the empty basin and ranges of the West, the neat agricultural grids of the Midwest, the rivers that knit together the country, the furrowed hills formed by water and ice (below).

Because my cabin is on the valley floor beneath Mount Meeker, I spend a lot of time looking up on this 13,900-foot mountain, with its symmetrical shape and sharp edges. No matter how low I feel, my heart soars when I turn my gaze upward.

Near my cabin is a rough trail that goes up Deer Mountain and is directly across from Mount Meeker (top). About halfway up the mountain is a perfect vantage point: I can look upward to the top of Mount Meeker but also down into the valley. I see the green pasture that leads to the cabins along Hwy. 7. Back behind me is the meadow encircled by the road and the randomly placed cabins, including mine. On a ridge across the valley is an A-frame  house not visible from below. In fact, from here, I see more ridges, many with stone outcroppings, than I imagined from my cabin.

Looking up toward the dark gray mountain, I can see its granite flanks, the deep indentation in the middle of the mountain where a trace of snow lingers into August, the rocky knob that sticks out above the forest of trees,  and the dense, mostly pine forest that descends down into the valley, where the aspens then take over.

 

 

 

I love the grand view. And yet from on top, you can’t see the small, intimate spaces: can’t see or hear the sound of the streams, can’t know what it feels like to be in the middle of an aspen grove, can’t see the flash of the hummingbirds or the dragonfly in the pond reeds, can’t feel the wind through the pine trees. From above, the world has been foreshortened and flattened; you become a little arrogant because you think you’ve seen it all and know all there is to know. And yet you don’t know the world intimately: the curl of the aspen leaf, the smell of the pines, the squeak of the chipmunk.

It’s important to get the larger view and expand your vision of the world. That way, when you go back down to the valley, you know how the world works. There’s a new map in your head that you can combine with all the other views and produce a vision of a world that is complex, one deserving of our awe. You know there’s more than one way to see the world, to view the same landscape. Gradually, we learn that there’s no fixed view. It all depends on where you’re standing.

Mobbing Wildlife

Recently, a horrific scene played out on social media: a video of a young girl being tossed into the air by a charging bison in Yellowstone National Park. It turned out that the girl and her family, plus other tourists, had gotten too close to these wild animals (one report said the bison was being petted!), and the bison had become agitated.

This seems the tragic culmination of a trend in which people try to get as close to wildlife as possible, often so they can get the best snapshot—preferably a selfie with you and the moose, although a ground squirrel will do, if the moose doesn’t cooperate. Some  people don’t understand the concept of wildness—that these animals are not pets but live in a world where survival is the most important priority. If a possible predator—including humans—approach, they will do whatever is necessary to protect themselves and their young.

Beyond respecting wildness, I’ve come to distrust what I call mob photography. It happens all over Rocky Mountain National Park: someone spots a moose along the creek or a bear up in a tree, and before you know it, dozens of cars have pulled over, and people, ready with their phones and cameras, run over to the herd of deer or elk.

At least in the park, volunteers are there to caution visitors about getting too close. In other places, photographers, sometimes professional, stalk animals that have been sighted in convenient places, such as along city trails or close to the roads. Someone finds a nest of great horned owl fledglings along a popular trail, and soon hordes of photographers, with their tripods and long-lensed camera, are competing to get the  clearest shot. Or a nest of baby foxes has been spotted near the road, and cars are lined up to take photos of these cute and rambunctious animals.  

Not only do the animals lose their privacy but they also can be hampered in their abilities to survive—whether it’s foraging, raising young or hunting prey.

I’m not immune to this apparently human desire to be as close to wildlife as possible. There’s something innate in us that’s thrilled by wildlife: animals that live by a different set of rules than humans, that look so different, that impress us with their size and ferociousness. Maybe we want to imbibe some of that ferociousness for ourselves.

I’ve taken hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures over the years of wildlife, many from my car: bighorn sheep on the side of the road in South St. Vrain Canyon, and a bear sleeping in a ponderosa tree outside of Estes Park.

But more and more I’ve come to appreciate the serendipitous joy of accidentally coming across wildlife, often while I’m hiking (or sometimes in my kayak), instead of deliberately seeking them out. Whether it’s watching two moose swim across Lily Lake while I’m on an evening walk around the pond or fragile blue dragonflies swarming my kayak, my most notable wildlife encounters have come when I’m just enjoying being in nature. In fact, when I deliberately try to find a big herd of elk in the park, to impress my out-of-state visitors, the animals are nowhere to be found.

What I’ve learned is that the wildlife we view does not exist independently of its surroundings. Everything is connected. The elk eats the grass that is nurtured by the water flowing down from the mountains or rain from the clouds. Stopping to photograph an elk by the side of a road or an owl in a tree separates these celebrity animals from their context. And, while we’re focusing on the megafauna, we’re missing  the butterflies hovering over the mariposa lilies or the storm clouds swiftly moving over the top of Hallett Peak or the grouse (above, left) almost camouflaged among the trees.

Two summers ago, I was on top of Trail Ridge Road,  hiking a path above 11,000 feet and admiring the alpine flowers, when a herd of about 20 elk suddenly appeared (top photo). There were about four or five young ones, which were being rambunctious, chasing each other across the tundra and kicking up their heels. For the 20 or so hikers on the trail, it was a magical moment, wilderness descending on us when we weren’t expecting it.

We were part of nature—not just the elk or the flowers but the marmots running across the tundra, the deep blue sky, the ring of mountains around us, the whistle of the mouse-like pikas. We weren’t looking at nature from our cars on the road, as if nature was one thing and we were another.  We were part of something much larger. It’s at times like that I feel such gratitude toward the world.

Gone Wild with Flowers

After a cold spring and delayed summer, the hills—not to mention the mountaintops, streamsides and rock clefts—are alive, if not awash, with colors. White bistort wave in a field of tall green grasses; yellow stonecrop emerge from a crack in the rocks; and hundreds of columbines spread across the hillside on the other side of the valley from my cabin.

Every inch around the cabin has been filled in with flowers and grasses, predominantly pale purple lupine and yellow cinquefoil, a fancy French name for a five (cinque)-leafed (foil) flower that grows in profusion.

In the past week on my mountain hikes, I’ve seen at least dozens of species of flowers—from the parasitic red coral root orchid growing in the deep forests, to the orange paintbrush on dry hillsides, to the intense blue (and wonderfully  named) sky pilot on the tundra. In the meadows, golden banner and purple penstemon (left) grow side by side, while the tall, stately angelica (below), with its radiating umbel of white flowers, floats up along the ponds and streams. Scattered among the grasses are tall green gentians with white starbursts running up and down the plant’s spine.

 

 

 

 

 

Most remarkable is that the modest, usually unnoticed sulphur flower (top) has spread itself across every field, which goes to show that there’s great beauty in numbers.

 

 

If you can behold the world in a grain of sand, you can see in a flower the interdependence, complexity and impermanence of life. On the hillside, the delicate looking columbines take shelter from the hot sun by growing in the shade of the aspens and willows. When I take a close look at a single flower, it is a symphony of elements that combine to form a perfect whole: the flower itself is composed of five white petals perfectly framed by five purple sepals, and the long purple spurs protruding from the back of the flower seem to balance the whole thing. And yet, the manifestation of this flower in the world is fleeting, only here for a few weeks at most before it pulls itself back into the dark of the earth.

How to handle this profusion of ephemeral beauty? With joy, only joy.