Cabin Journal

A Light Goes Out

I found out last week that one of my neighbors had died the week before after a long fight with cancer. I didn’t know Bonnie well, but she was an integral part of this mountain community, someone people speak of with reverence and affection: a caring, warm person, a dogged fighter who gracefully and with courage accepted her fate.

And last week one of my other neighbors left, packed up a van and moved to Oklahoma to be with family. I didn’t know David and his wife that well either; we were mostly on waving terms. But I had gotten used to getting up in the morning and seeing smoke coming from his chimney. It felt like another presence in this neighborhood where most cabins are empty, especially in the colder months.

Both Bonnie and David were part of the Meeker Park community, and with both gone now, I realized how we create mental maps of our neighborhood and community, much as someone would sew a quilt from disparate pieces, creating a record of our known world. Meeker Park is a tight-knit community, in the best sense, so when certain strands fall out, the whole piece can feel like it’s unraveling.

What I call a neighborhood (above) is a collection of cabins scattered among the woods and around the valley bottom in the shadow of Mount Meeker.  Slowly, over the year and a half I’ve lived here (part-time), I’ve filled in my  map, although for many cabins the details are still sketchy. There’s a few solid pieces, consisting mostly of the people I run into the most, the ones who live here all year long, like Claudia and Tom who live next door. In my mental map, those cabins are illuminated, like light bulbs on a schematic board. The other cabins are a bit fuzzier, those houses where I’ve yet to meet the inhabitants or learn their stories.

The person who delivered the news about Bonnie was a neighbor of hers, someone who recently built a house over the course of the past year on the main “intersection” of Meeker Park. I met Sam while we were out enjoying the snow on one of the unplowed roads in the valley; he was on skis, and I was in my hiking boots. I was glad to meet Sam and find out a little bit about him (he loves to ski). Another piece of my map got filled in, just as another piece fell out.

At night, I like to go out on my front deck, check to see how many stars are out. I always find it comforting to see the light on next door at Claudia and Tom’s. As much as I come up here for some alone time, I’m always grateful for the presence of other people, as if among the darkness there are others like me who love these wild mountains. In the other direction, it’s usually dark, but last week I could see warm yellow light spilling out into the blackness from a cabin at the other end of the road, belonging to a summer resident who has decided to spend the winter here.

 I was glad to see it. As some lights wink out, another comes on.

More Worlds to Explore

 

A friend of mine hangs up her hiking boots when fall comes. A landscape without flowers doesn’t interest her. Yet this is one of my favorite times for hiking because the weather is cool, the crowds are thinned (sometimes I have whole trails to myself), and I start exploring new trails and places. In summer, I always return to my favorite high mountain trails where I love the landscape, the alpine lakes, and yes, the flowers, for the short duration before the snow and cold shuts everything down.

But once that happens, I feel free to explore other places. At the cabin, last fall I discovered I could hike along Tahosa Creek (above), the small creek not far from cabin—theoretically, all the way to Estes Park, some 10 miles away, although I haven’t gotten that far yet. I don’t hike it in summer, not just because I’m up on the high peaks, but because the creek passes through private property. Once the summer visitors are gone, I feel free to ignore all the “no trespassing” signs, scooting under barbed wire fences and through wooden fences.

It’s beautiful along the creek, its own ecosystem among the otherwise dry hills, with aspen groves bordered by  rock walls, small ponds, and grasses. There’s even a waterfall that spills over a large boulder, and, because it’s in shade for most of the day now, it’s in the process of becoming a frozen waterfall.

I don’t usually like to bushwhack (a wonderful word for making your own trail). It’s harder to beat back the bushes (and aspen branches and grasses) than stick to a trail with a known destination (a waterfall or lake or the top of the mountain). Yet there is a sense of exploration when following your own nose and you’re not sure where you’ll end up, not knowing what’s around the next corner. It requires more awareness, like noticing the barbed wire fence laying on the ground, which I got caught in on my way back because my thoughts had taken a different turn. You’re even closer to nature, brushing up against the smooth bark of aspen trees, clambering over boulders, grasses clinging to your pant legs.

There are cabins around here, but you don’t see them; most are on top of the hill, but down here by the creek I get intimations of human existence: a bridge made of logs across the creek; a carved wooden bench (below) set among a grove of trees next to the creek. When I hiked the creek last week, on an unseasonably warm day, I found a large treehouse, enough to hold six or seven children, apparently part of a nearby summer camp. Amazingly, the creek was free of ice, running as if it were still October, as if it never heard of winter. 

 

And, in search of new territory, on Thursday, I went back to a trailhead I discovered last summer, just a few miles west of my cabin. On a map I had found what looked like a trail that went partly up the east face of Mount Meeker. After admiring this mountain from the valley floor all this time, I wanted to be on it, see what it felt like, what I could see from there. But after a mile of hiking upward through the trees, with few views, I encountered snow and ice, for which I wasn’t prepared and headed back.

And yet I’m glad I found the trail, which has enlarged my mental map of this area, and I’ll go back when I’m better prepared, see where the trail leads and what I can find. These are all small explorations, I know, not like discovering a passage through the Northwest Territories. Yet, in my own world, I’m happy to know there are still are still places to explore. Who knows what else awaits me out there?

 

Thinking about Hibernating

I was at my cabin last week, taking advantage of the warm weather to get the front deck stained before winter. With temperatures in the unseasonably warm 60s (especially after the previous week’s snowstorm), it felt balmy, and I was enjoying just being outside, feeling the sun on my body and the wind through the trees, and hearing the stellar’s jays call to each other.

I could have almost forgotten that winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, is only a  month and a half away. But at 3:30,  the sun dropped behind Mount Meeker, and I wistfully watched the last of the sunlight hit the south side of the valley, lighting up the hillside and the orange and brown willow bushes by the creek. And then that was gone, the whole valley in shadow by 4 p.m.

When I drove into Estes Park around 5, to have dinner with a friend, it was already dark. Like most people, it’s hard to get used to the transition from daylight savings time. It feels like we’re abruptly being pushed into darkness, and I feel some ancient primitive fear. When I’m out at night in winter, I feel the need to seek shelter, to find someplace warm and safe. What did our primitive ancestors do in winter? I imagine people huddling in caves, bodies stacked together to keep warm, long hours spent around campfires telling stories and singing.

In Joyce Gellhorn’s Song of the Alpine, about life on the Rocky Mountain tundra, the botanist/writer says that marmots (abaove) hibernate from late September until early May. That means these large rodents sleep for almost three-quarters of their lives. There’s a good reason for that,  because their food supply of plants is gone by late September, and new vegetation doesn’t start growing until May in the high mountains.  Before these animals take shelter for the winter, they fatten up and then enter what I imagine is a blissful state of sleep with fellow marmots all piled up in one big ball of fur. Amazingly, their heartbeats slow to once per minute, according to Gellhorn, and they breathe only once every three to six minutes.

All that sleep must do them well, because when I watch them in summer, running on the rocky slopes or taking a snooze on a warm rock, they seem happy and relaxed. I’m not ready to sleep through the whole winter, but on those long winter nights, when it’s cold and the winds are howling, I do feel that urge to burrow into the bed and not come out until it’s light again.

First Snow, Best Snow

I drove up to the cabin after last week's snowfall and found a whole new landscape. In South St. Vrain Canyon, the pine trees were covered with snow, like someone smacked a dollop of whip cream on each one. On the hillside of sand-colored cliffs, where a few ponderosas had found their niche among the rocks, the white snow subtly changed the color of the cliffs to a pale golden, made it somehow more dreamlike. It was a whole different palette than what I usually see driving through this canyon.

And where the road starts climbing out of the canyon, all the hillsides with unbroken forest were now an unbroken expanse of white, and for a moment I felt like I had lost my bearings, didn’t know where I was, because the landscape looked so different. When I got up to the Allenspark valley, Mount Meeker was surrounded by hillsides of frosted pine trees, and I felt as if I had entered a calendar scene, some perfect image of a winter landscape, where everything is pure and white, glistening, alive.

All afternoon I sat at the cabin working on my laptop, hearing the thuds of snow falling from the ponderosas onto the roof and deck, as the sun started warming up the landscape. And when I drove home that evening, all the snow had melted from the trees, and the canyon was already in shadow, returning it to something gray and washed out, something more ordinary.

And, just like that, the magic was gone.