Cabin Journal

Signs of Spring

It’s different up here than down on the plains. Instead of the almost gaudy colors of the pink crabapple blossoms, red and purple tulips and yellow forsythia, in Meeker Park, we get the translucent seed heads of the aspen (below). In the sunlight, they have a pinkish tinge, and on first glance can fool you into thinking that cherry blossoms are suddenly blooming at 8500 feet.

Mount Meeker is still white but some of the hillsides are turning green. And every week there’s a new first of the season. Last week, I spotted a ground squirrel on the woodpile across the road, yesterday a robin on the ground and a swallow camped out on the power line. I wake up every morning to bird cries I haven’t heard since last summer.

For the first time since January, I can see all three of my solar driveway lights, buried for most of the winter in a snowdrift.  Around the yard, a few shoots of green grass are mixed in with the still brown blades.

There’s the new sound of rushing water, as the snow cover over Tahosa Creek pulls back to reveal brown churning, hurried by snow melting on top of the high peaks. Meanwhile, the South St. Vrain is reclaiming itself as a river, slowly building to its June roar. Since last September’s floods drained most of the water out of the river, what remained was a small brook, or maybe it just seemed that way because the canyon had gotten so much bigger after being scoured by water and rocks.

In Rocky Mountain National Park, above 9500 feet, the snow is still deep. This week, on a foot bridge across the creek, my hiking boots were level with the handrails, and trail signs were below the trail, still buried in four feet of snow (right). But down below in the valleys, new grasses are pulling up from the earth, and the deer and elk have emerged from wherever they’ve been hiding all winter, most likely in the trees, to dine on these fresh greens after a straight diet all winter of yesterday’s dried grasses.

In my front yard last week, the pasqueflowers were just emerging, barely an inch or two above the dirt. But this week a good four or five inches of new snow covered the ground where I had last seen them. That’s it, I thought, these small fragile beings are crushed under the snow. But they have a resiliency, some urge to survive, that is both a mystery and inspiration to me. How can something so small and fragile be so tough?

When the sun came out the next day, melting the sun, the flowers sprang back from their comatose state, taller than before. And my heart breaks with tenderness.

Just Another Day

How often have I have started off on a gray, unpromising day, thinking I would not hike far, only to find myself enraptured by the day itself, by encountering and seeing things in nature I hadn’t expected. On an early spring day I started out under partly sunny skies, while thin clouds started moving in, the light filtered through a milky haze.  Most of the snow had melted, and everything was a raw brown. In the bottom of the valley a few fields were brushed with a pale green, almost a hallucination, so you had to look twice to see if it was really green or you were deluding yourself into thinking spring had actually arrived at this high altitude.

On the Lily Mountain trail, the ground is mostly rock, a fine gravel that sustains only the pine trees (and what strong roots they must have to tunnel into it and grasp for protection against the strong winds), some hardy bushes and a few aspen that thrive where the small streams collect enough water. Kinninnick is the only ground vegetation, another hardy plant that has to pull water out of the rock. I tip my hat to  all these plants/trees able to survive in this sparse landscape.

Hiking up this relatively barren mountain, I was surprised to hear the sound of water and came across a small rivulet, from snow melting on high, cutting a path down the steep hillside. On this too quiet day, the sound was like music to my ears.

Farther up the hill, I was startled to see six pasqueflowers bunched up next to a rock, a darker purple than the ones I find around my cabin, proclaiming their  proud existence on this otherwise almost colorless hillside. How glad I was to see these harbingers of spring.

As I got higher, I started getting views to the east and north. To the east,  clouds had started to wrap themselves around the top of the fortress-like Twin Sisters, and to the north and west, the tops of the snow-covered mountains protruded through the cloud layer.

Suddenly, I could feel this day, unlike any other: moody, starting to close in on itself, introverted, serious and full of portent, as if something big was about to happen. Indeed, on the way back down, the wind came up, whipping up the whole hillside,  and soon the rain started pelting me.

I was lucky to be there.