Cabin Journal

Snow Changes Everything

The landscape becomes less harsh and more welcoming. At the same time it becomes more alien. Everything familiar is buried under snow: the cabin decks, the path to the water pump, the septic system, the yard full of pine cones, the creek, the road. It all blends into a blanket of white.

Before the snowstorm, the landscape was what I call ugly winter: the snow from two weeks ago had melted and frozen, creating dirty lumps. Where the snow was absent, the ground was brown, the grasses beaten down by wind, rain and snow.

But when I arrived at the cabin last week, snow was falling on the already 2-3 feet of snow we got the previous week. All that snow makes my daily chores more difficult and complicated. I have to create paths to the water pump and to the shed to get more firewood. Driving is tricky, because the road is a narrow ribbon through 3-foot piles of snow, so straying inches from that path could mean getting stuck. Instead of walking across the front yard to my neighbor’s, I have to walk out the driveway and onto the road.

But the rewards are worth the extra labor. I took my cross-country skis to nearby Wild Basin on the day it was snowing hard, and the new stuff made the old snow even softer, more pliable. Every push forward provided a small bounce, a small leap upward, so I felt unbounded, free from life’s mundane chores. Coming back down I felt I was floating, skimming the top of the snow. The whole landscape felt softer. Rough and sharp boulders wore soft caps of snow, and the creek was muffled.

The next morning the sun came out, and the light was almost blinding on the unbroken blanket of snow. When I went for a walk later on the plowed road, my senses felt sharp, as if I were seeing things more clearly.   

Meanwhile, after one of the driest Decembers on record, the trees are sucking up all this new moisture. For the moment, I won’t have to worry that this forest of ponderosas, spruces and aspen will start to die off. With all this snow, for the time being, I won’t worry about wildfires.  

For a short amount of time, the world is renewed again. I need to appreciate that.

Fire and Ice, Part 2

This is not the first time we’ve had wildfires followed by snow and icy temperatures. The last time was a little more than a  year ago, in October 2020, when a combination of dry and windy conditions started four fires in the mountains that raced over the mountains. At the time, everyone was shocked; we rarely had fires in October and never, in recent memory, had a fire jumped over the tundra to land on the east side of the mountains and race toward the nearest town, Estes Park.

But the fire last week was even more shocking because it started in December, usually one of our colder months of the year, and it started in grasslands, some 10 miles east of the closest forests. Pushed by 100 mph gusts that funneled through a canyon to the west, it arrived in the last place you expect a wildfire: a suburban shopping mall where Costco shoppers fled the building only to find thick smoke in the parking lot.

Then the fire did something else no one expected: it leapt over the highway and raced toward subdivisions where no one had ever expected to see flames burning except in  barbecue grills. Unable to outrace or outfight the windstorm, firefighters could only watch helplessly, while trying to evacuate as many people as possible.

What played out is well known: 1,000 homes destroyed in what everyone assumed was the safety of suburbia: winding cul-de-sacs of ranch homes and backyards, playgrounds, schools, restaurants, banks, a recreation center and police station.  

And then nature delivered another whammy: a snowstorm and frigid temperatures. People who didn’t lose their homes had to deal with power outages and cold weather. It was a double message from climate change: first the fire, then the cold.

When I came to the cabin a few days later, I found at least 2 feet of snow. For the first time this season, I was able to cross-country ski. I took a lap around the perimeter of Meeker Park, grateful for the chance to ski again, for breathing in cold, clean air, to see the world white again, any ugliness covered over.

After the horribly destructive winds of the past week, there was calm, not even a breeze to ruffle the grasses that were still standing or shake the snow off the branches of the ponderosas. Mount Meeker, for almost the first time this season, was covered in snow. I could see small physical remains of the wind that had been so destructive: pockets of snow that had been pushed and then stabilized around stalks of plants (right). Nature had arrived at some relief, some balance, for the time being.

I breathed in the calm as much as the cold.