Cabin Journal

Tracks in the Snow

Because we’ve gotten a lot of snow this winter in the mountains, I see animal tracks everywhere. It’s like discovering a hidden world, because I rarely see the animals, but it’s obvious from their tracks that they are everywhere, leading lives I can only guess at.

 

The most common are the rabbits, and maybe the easiest to decipher because their tracks leave a distinctive pattern of two feet in front and one in back. And there’s tiny delicate tracks that I  assume are from the chickarees (gray squirrels), because they are the smallest animal around, except for the birds. I have a mammal identification book that shows tracks in summer, but they look different in snow. So I am free to imagine a whole jungle of animals circling my cabin when I’m not around: cougars and bobcats, weasels, martens.

 

Sometimes the tracks make perfect sense. Behind the cabin I found a well-trod path of rabbit tracks in the snow going from the fence line to the porch. I assume the rabbits are making use of the dry spot under the porch, a place maybe more difficult for predators to reach them.

 

And it’s not just animal tracks that I find. On a recent walk around Meeker Park, I discovered human footprints, which are only startling because I thought I had discovered this route on the other side of the valley, that it was my trail, known only to me.  Who were these people that followed the same path? Did I know them? Would I meet them someday on this trail? I feel a kinship to these fellow travelers, who found the same route I did, even in their absence.

 

Beyond my feeble efforts to determine who or what belongs to these tracks, I find these lines in the snow compelling. They are almost never straight, but weave their own scroll across the snow, something haunting and beautiful. They never fail to stop me in my tracks (below).

 

The Dead of Winter

This is the ugly, hard part of winter, when the snows from last month have hardened, crusted over, are dirty at the edges of the roads. The days have been gray, with little sun. Even the winds have disappeared, so it seems almost lifeless. The number of stellar’s jays and rabbits, my constant companions in the winter, have dwindled. Have they fled to lower altitudes where there is less snow and more food, or have they starved to death?

 

On my walk last week, I discovered one of those cold hard truths of winter life: a dead rabbit on the trail that looked as if it had starved (or frozen) to death, its body intact, with no signs of violence or clues as to how it arrived here. Its legs were crossed, as if it were running and had been struck down mid-stride. I couldn’t pull myself away. Here was something that was once alive and was now dead. It was as if it carried some message that I couldn’t decipher. When I reached down to touch it, its fur was still soft.

 

It’s this times of the year when I’m most grateful for the few neighbors who ride out the winter at 8,500 feet. So I was sad to find out that my neighbors to the east, Claudia and Tom, have decided to spend the next few months in Georgia, in a warmer climate. That means that all of the houses to the east of me are empty now for the rest of the winter, no lights at night, no fires in the morning to show that others share this part of the valley with me now.

 

It feels like some loss: people and animals fleeing for easier climates, while those animals who stay succumb to the harsh winter conditions. Everything seems to be shutting down. Yet on my walk this week along Tahosa Creek, still muffled in snow, when I stopped hiking through the deep, crunchy snow, I could hear the creek. Even buried under a foot of snow, It seemed loud, boisterous, as if were proclaiming something: the promise of spring, of life still running.

The Cabin's Legacy

When I first moved in this cabin (a year and a half ago now), I could tell the cabin had been loved and carefully tended, even though I didn’t know who was responsible for all the thoughtful touches.

 

The couple who had sold me the cabin had only lived here for four years and only occasionally visited. Someone else had perfectly set up this cabin, someone who loved to read, had left behind books, including a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost; someone who loved nature, collected nature books and pine cones. It was someone who had taken time to improve the cabin: left a ceramic water jug on the counter, installed pegs in the  back supply room, and decorated the outside wall of the garage with old implements: a metal wheel, mining tools, an old rusting animal trap (above, taken last summer).

 

I wanted to know the cabin’s history, where everything came from, who had loved it before I did, and why there was a ramp to the front deck. Luckily, I was able to find the people who had most strongly left their stamp on the cabin, and, just as fortunately, they lived in Boulder, not far from me. 

 

Tom and La Verne Anderson’s first cabin had been in St. Elmo, near Buena Vista in central Colorado, but their son Matthew, who had muscular dystrophy, found the location too steep and difficult, so they found the cabin in Meeker Park, fell in love with it the same way I did: at first sight. They even brought a pine tree from St. Elmo and planted it to the south of the cabin, where it still grows. I like  that something from their first cabin is still here, and that it links me to them, who loved this cabin as much as I do, and to their first cabin.

 

When we got together, La Verne had carefully written out the names of all the previous

owners, starting in 1939 with the Whites, so now I know who else inhabited these knotty pine walls and stood at the kitchen sink looking out at the backyard. They told me stories about the neighbors: old Bill Waite, long gone whose cabin I face; and Madeline Graff, who started coming here in the summers since 1949 to the house next door with her husband Max. The Andersons gave me a sense of history, deepened and enriched my knowledge of the place.

 

They told me I could follow Tahosa Creek all the way toCamp Cheley, about the pond and falls along the way, and the old building at the camp, thus hugely enlarging the boundaries of my then known world. They gave me practical tips about the cabin: where they had stored extra lime in the garage and how to start the kitchen woodstove (with a hairdryer). They showed me pictures of the ponderosa that fell on the roof by the bedroom and of the cabin before the front and back decks were put in, when the entrance was where the bathroom is now (which they added).  I started to see the cabin in a different light, not just how it looks now, but how it’s  evolved over the years. I felt as if La Verne and Tom, not the people who sold me the cabin, were passing it on to me.

 

Tom, a school librarian (which partly explained all the books that came with the cabin), had started keeping a list in 1990, continued through 1999, of the birds and flowers (titled “Blooms & Bird”) they had observed and their first sightings. They gave me the list, so now I can watch for the first sighting of Orion on Aug. 11; or look for the goshawk he saw every year from 1990 to 1996; or the first shooting star, marsh marigold and wild iris, which he recorded seeing, respectively, on June 24, June 1, and June 3 in 1993.

 

And it was Tom who put in the bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, nailed the antiques to the side of the garage, put in the heater and lamp in the outhouse. It was the Andersons who bought the couches that I still use, bought the wood-burning stove, and added a bathroom and compost toilet.  They built the decks, first the one in the front with the ramp so Matthew could get his wheelchair up it,  and then one in the back so they could have privacy from the sometimes too-friendly neighbors (above, taken last summer).

 

After their son died, the Andersons sold the cabin. When I first met them, I worried that talking about the cabin might bring back painful memories. But they didn’t hesitate to tell me everything they knew, and I still feel enormously grateful to them for sharing their history and love of this place. And now I can see that I am just one in a line of people who will love this cabin and take care of it the best that I can, that someday it will pass on to someone else who will fall in love with the knotty pine walls, the ancient ponderosas, the sound of the hummingbirds and creek and the wind through the pines.

Mount Meeker Gets No Respect

 

From Boulder and points south is a view of a massive mountain to the northwest that most people refer to as Longs Peak. For the 40 years I’ve lived in Colorado, I thought this landmark to the north was the famous Longs Peak. I’ve even hiked a trail in Wild Basin, to the south of the peak, and stared admiringly at what I thought was Longs Peak.

 

It was only when I bought the cabin in Meeker Park at the base of Mount Meeker that I realized my mistake, that what most people think of as Longs Peak is actually Mount Meeker. The two are adjacent and share a flank used by mountain climbers to get to the top of Longs. But Longs Peak gets all the attention, because it’s a fourteener, clocking in at 14, 255 feet. In comparison, Mount Meeker is only 13,900 feet, 100 feet shy of ranking as one of Colorado’s 54 mountains higher than 14,000 feet. To climb all of the fourteeners is a goal of many hikers; it’s like bagging trophies or shooting the elk with the biggest antlers.

 

One hundred more feet and Mount Meeker would have been written up in all the fourteener guidebooks, its climb to the top sought after by thousands. It could have been the stuff of legends, stories passed down about heroic feats of climbing, near-death experiences, and even tragedies for those who met untimely ends. Instead, it sits there, a mighty fortress, its broad eastern face largely untouched and untrammeled. It may be three or four times as massive as Longs Peak yet is bypassed because it doesn’t hit the magic number.

 

And yet, maybe it’s better that it has stayed below the public radar. Its east face is one long and wide talus slope, with one crease down the middle. It looks as if you could roll a ball all the way down its smooth surface into the trees, some 3,500 feet below. Though local guidebooks mention some primitive trails on the mountain, its rocky face looks forbidding, as if it would be difficult to get a toehold. I like to think of it as something wild, a place untainted by humans.

 

From the valley in which my cabin sits I can look up at its wide east face. In every season, it becomes my icon, my touchstone, what I look to when I get up in the morning, see the first light, pink on its gray slopes. In all times of the year, I can see storm clouds pushing in from the west, clouds that sometimes obscure its top. In fall, the first snow sparkles on its broad flanks, and in spring, when the snow melts, the mountain reveals its iron gray rock. For me, it remains an icon of something powerful, impenetrable, almost unknowable.

 

With any luck, it will stay that way.