Cabin Journal

In Search of Winter

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.

Path of Destruction

In an effort to escape from the destruction and chaos I –and the whole country—witnessed this week in our hallowed grounds of the U.S. Capitol, I headed to one of my refuges: Rocky Mountain National Park. A few weeks ago, the Park Service had announced the reopening of several areas in the park that had been consumed by wildfires in October.

One of them was Moraine Park, one of the iconic places in RMNP, a broad open valley surrounded by high peaks, with a creek that meanders in summer through tall grasses and willow bushes. In fall, it’s the favorite place to view the huge elk herds that come down from the high country and to listen to the male elk  “bugle” their threats against other bulls.

But there were no elk in Moraine Park this week, because there’s no grass to eat. Instead, a swath of black scorched earth ran in a straight line through the valley, like a river of destruction. Many of the willow bushes were burnt or gone altogether, and aspen and ponderosa trees were toppled. Instead of grasses surrounding the creek, it was bordered by charred soil. The blackened trunks of pines lay on the ground, and whole hillsides were devoid of anything except boulders (left). A  large juniper tree had lost all its needles, while the branches stretched out, as if pleading with the heavens.

It was a scene of desecration, a ruined and mostly empty landscape, and I could only imagine the ferocity of the flames that tore through this valley, whipped up by strong winds. I can only imagine the number of small animals, such as chipmunks and ground squirrels, that couldn’t escape the inferno. The silence testified to their absence.

And yet, a surprising number of trees still stood. Although some of the giant ponderosa pines were blackened at the bottom of their trunks, with their roots sunk deep into the rocky ground, the rest of the tree still looked healthy with green needles.  Around one of the trees was a clump of pine cones— perhaps a promise of new life. Some of the aspen also were burned at their base, yet remained standing, although it will be spring before we see if the leaves emerge and how many survived.

I remembered the last time a fire raged through Moraine Park in October 2012. When I visited the park the following June, the grasses in the park were more lush and thick than I had seen in decades.

In this blackened and too quiet landscape, there’s hope. Hope that the grasses will return in summer, that the pines still standing will survive, that the aspens, with their interconnected roots, will leaf out come May, and that the elk and smaller creatures will return.

Amid the dead trees and the smell of burnt earth, I heard a bird sing. There’s always hope.