When I arrived at the cabin this week, I was happy to see it snowing. It wasn’t a real snowstorm, where the snow descends from clouds overhead. Instead, it was small flakes blowing off Mount Meeker to the west. Still, we’ve gotten so little snow this winter that I’ll take whatever I can get.
Instead of storms that deliver a half- to a foot of snow, we have gotten 2 or 3 inches at a time. While in the woods it slowly piles up, in the open areas either the wind blows it away or the sun melts it, especially when the temperatures reach into the unseasonably warm 30s or 40s.
My neighbor told me that she has pocket gophers eating her grasses, and it took me a minute to realize what was wrong with that picture. In most winters, the ground is too frozen for gophers (which could be the voles I saw last summer) to be crawling around in. Is it possible that the ground hasn’t frozen solid yet?
I miss winter—the whole landscape covered in snow, while I glide through it on my skis or enjoy the powder under my snowshoes. It’s what makes winter pleasurable. I even like the cold, as long as I’m bundled up enough. Breathing in the sharp air makes me feel alive, especially after a summer full of smoke.
So if winter wouldn’t come to the cabin, I would have to go looking for it. I knew just where to go. I had read that Bear Lake, at an altitude of 9500 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park, had received 16 inches of snow last week. It was sobering to drive through through most of the park and see a dry and brown landscape, as if it were November not January—before I started encountering anything white.
But at the Bear Lake parking lot, it was snowing—thick flakes, not the wimpy kind that I had seen at the cabin the day before. Once on the trail I reconnected with winter: trees and rocks covered with clumps of snow, layers upon layers of snow, deep enough that if you went off the trail by a few inches you would quite happily sink into it. The snow was whiter than the aspen trunks, which stuck out of the snow like toothpicks.
Around me, the higher peaks were obscured by blowing snow, and the humans trudging across frozen Nymph Lake were colorful dots in a sea of wind-whipped white. In the summer, Nymph Lake can be covered by lily pads, but now it’s a flat sea of white.
The higher I got, the higher were the piles of snow, so huge that boulders were unrecognizable piles of white stuff. At Dream Lake (top photo), the winds were even stronger, the pines contorted over decades into strangulated shapes by the wind. My eyes were tearing, my sunglasses were fogged up from the tears and mask, and I could barely see where I was going. The cold was starting to penetrate my three layers of clothes.
But I was in heaven—winter heaven.