Field Notes #9: How I celebrated winter solstice

Warning!   Warning!   Long post.

Dec. 21st, a.m.   As I started out, temperatures bumped around in the low 20s.   A ragged ceiling of waxy yellow clouds sometimes let through bright sunlight.   Mostly, though, the cloud cover took the polish off the snow.   An unexpectedly cold breeze chilled the denim of my jeans and cut through my gloves, making my hands ache.   I pulled the overlong sleeves of my parka’s polar fleece liner over my gloves to better protect my hands.

Usually as I keep moving I warm to the point of having to remove gloves and open my parka.   I’ve found I can hike barehanded in pretty cold temperatures as long as I’m walking.   I trusted those conditions would recur during this jaunt and continued up the road and past the cattle guard, picking my way up the icy slope to the trailhead, weighing the decision to go further with each step.   When I reached the trailhead, I stopped to study the snow-drifted trail, trying to see in its white curves and silvery dips some hint of my accustomed route.   Snowfall had blanked out everything.   The slope seemed steeper, the way deeply buried.   I found no hint of my established footholds.   Nothing to do but try.   I stepped off the rim and sank into eighteen to twenty inches of snow.   Wow, I thought €”that’s a lot.   Nonnegotiable in just hiking boots, if that was how it would be the whole way.   But probably, this was only a drift; the snow in our yard had melted from twelve inches to about an eight-inch depth.   I doubted average snow-depths in the piñon-juniper forest that lay ahead would be much different form my yard.   So I took another step into the drift, sinking again, then another, then another.   Snow powder packed into gaps between boots’ tongues and my woolen socks.   With each step, I had to pull my leg up high, extend it, balance carefully on the snowbound leg, rock forward to sink the raised foot, then settle my step into the softly yielding snow.   The sensation was that of walking through a half-frozen cloud.   Not that I’ve ever done that €”except maybe then.

Note to self: Snowshoes are no longer an option.

As I worked my way down slope, at times sinking my walking willow nearly half its height into powder to keep my balance, I had so much fun maneuvering through the drift €”step, sink; step, sink €”that I missed the trail’s turn-off and had to double back.   Another reason I missed the turn-off: re-imagined as it had been by snowfall, it hadn’t quite looked familiar.   The turn-off trail   runs across the incline rather than down it.   I found the snow depths there similar to those of my yard, about eight inches, give or take a drift.   Generally, I could move through it more quickly.   But unstable rocks lay beneath the deceptively smooth blanket.   I had to alter my course several times to avoid guessed-at obstacles beneath the snow drop cloth as well as large branches and tree-portions the storm had broken down acrpss the path.

At one point, I lost the trail.   The white blanket muted every meaningful landmark and my eye became completely confused.   Here’s where something interesting happened.   As I stood, visually canvassing the landscape for some hint of which way to go, I felt a tug inside my body.   Instinctively, I gave in to it, and my body turned slowly to face a particular direction.   It lined me up with a vaguely familiar arrangement of snow-faced trees.   Looking down, then, I could just make out the dimmest intimation of the trail showing through the snow’s rumple.

Yay for kinetic memory!   I had been down this trail so many times that, even as my eyes doubted, my body exercised faith.   It acted as a compass, lining me up spatially with an established pathway in my mind.   After this, I felt able to trust myself to know the way and encountered no further disorientation.   The trip was worth it to learn this lesson alone.

At about the halfway mark, I reached where the trail drops down and follows the canyon wall along an eroding ledge of rotting sandstone.   Here, I stopped for two reasons.   One, a mountain lion has moved into the canyon, and I won’t be walking beneath any ledges (or through trees) without looking up.   Often.   Two, the scene was utterly beautiful.     Bared knees and elbows of bleached-out Navajo sandstone cliffs poked through holes in crumpled quilted white fabric.   Because of the cloud cover’s thin yellow cast, the sandstone glowed buttery yellow through all the white.   The heavily shadowed greenery of pinion pines and junipers broke up glare off the snow and feathered in a texture of darkness where my eyes took some relief from the off-and-on light.   On any day, the faces of the cliffs are full of complexity, a moving canvas for the genius of shifting sunshine.   But here, the furrows, caves, and straight edges, frosted with snow and ice, appeared completely new.   I’d never hiked into the canyon before when there’d been this much snow.   I was discovering the place all over again.

Furthermore, clean silence, so rare anymore it’s hard to imagine, lay in the snow-lined canyon.   No breezes, no ghost drums, no sounds of distant traffic, chain saws, or airliners scraping past overhead.   I stood listening to the soundlessness, thinking how the mind craves it just as much as my eye seeks in the p-j forest’s shadows relief from snowlight’s glare.   Our minds are so accustomed to filtering and fending off noise we don’t realize the strain they support until we plunge into these pools of quiet that form in potholes of time and place.   Silence so perfect, so deep, it gathers you up.   You feel yourself at the center of the universe at such moments.   Not something I’d want to live with always, but when I stumble across it in moments like this €”and it was a product of the moment, only slightly longer-lived than my thoughts about it €”I let it swallow me whole, just for a little bit.

This part of the trail, lying as it does along the western wall’s slope, has the warmest exposure this time of year.   The snow here, compressed by deer hooves and coyote paws, had melted, exposing alternately crumbling yellow sand and, further down, chocolate brown or €”looked at from the other direction €”dark purple soil, very loose and branny, easy to slip and fall along, even when dry.   Striping through this purple/brown earth, green-grey bands of clayey bentonite soil.   The dampness of snowmelt stabilized these and I made it down this steeper section without trouble.

I found the sage flat, actually a teeming community of tall sage mixed with towering, older rabbit brush plants, much changed.   The heavy snow had glued down the plants so that they were half their established heights or lower.   I stepped as well as tripped over frozen-down branches that shortly before had stood clear of the path, then only dusting my upper arms and shoulders with pale fluffy seed, or in the case of the sage, speckling my fleece jacket with tiny, dart-like grains, to my nose, more fragrant than the plant’s turpene-laced leaves.   On this day, I supposed any remaining rabbit brush or sage seeds to be plastered to their decaying flowers stuck in clumps of half-melted snow or encased in beads of ice.

I reached the canyon-bottom trail and found it well used, its recent history a jumble of coyote, fox, cougar, and deer tracks.   Also, within the last couple of days, somebody had ridden a horse through in company with a dog.   The horse tracks had partially melted, in some places down to the frozen ground, and I made my own use of them rather than wade through the slightly crusted snow, which banged my shins.   I felt pleased I’d made it so far, though plowing through the snow for approximately two miles already had become tiring.   Snow had melted inside my shoes and my socks had become squishy wet.   This was, I knew, a circumstance to be avoided in cold weather, but experience has shown that as long as I keep moving my feet will generate enough heat to keep themselves warm, if wet-warm.

This portion of the creek that winds through the canyon contains the only water for miles, upstream or down.   A pair of springs feeds this section.   Before the beavers moved in, the creek went dry just above and just below these springs every summer, and the springs themselves and the pools they fed in the creek dwindled down to barely-there wet spots.   Under the beavers’ influence, the creek has plumped up.   The animals have stretched the water further downstream and longer into the summer.   On this day, I found it a series of grey panes of snow-rimmed ice capping the engineered ponds.   Wonderment over the thickness of the ice tempted me to slide down the bank and find out, but given how much energy I’d already spent, and knowing I had a steep climb up a snowy trail ahead, I let the question go.   Making it into the canyon under these unpredictable and somewhat stressful conditions and then making it back out in good shape was the goal for the day.   I kept to the main trail, dodging several new broken limbs and fallen tree sections, more parings of the storm.   Tracks showed that the horseback rider had been forced to go around these, so they had been down for a while.   I crossed the spring and began the steep ascent, and here walking became strenuous.   In some places, the path had thawed and re-frozen.   On steep inclines, ice slicks had formed.   At one point I slipped and pitched sideways into a snow bank.   Having worked up a sweat long before, I’d taken off my gloves, so when I fell sideways I caught myself by planting a bare right hand in the snow.   When I pulled it out it was covered in glistening ice crystals that prickled as they melted rapidly.   I shook the water off, dried my hand on my jeans, and pushed on.

The rest of the climb took a lot of strength.   Discovering I had it made me happy.   I reflected on how if I hadn’t taken this hike as many times as I already had done and if my fifty-three-year-old body did not retain knowledge gained through a busy childhood of out-of-doors adventure, I would have come out on the short end of the stick, probably suffering injuries and possibly exhaustion.   But I do have that childhood aptitude for outside movement still alive and thinking inside me, a body-wisdom that, given any chance, still rises quickly to the call for it.   Also, I have the new knowledge of this particular trail, gained since I moved to the area.   This canyon and I are becoming fast entwined.   I had my first dream about it a few weeks back.   Here’s the version I wrote to a friend:

I was walking through a section of my “circuit” where the sand is very heavy and deep.   It’s one of the most readable parts of the trail, always inscribed with the tracks of passers-by.   This is where I found €¦ bear tracks and where I’ve followed cougar tracks inset into mine.   Deer make deep impressions through here, coyotes lighter ones.   Turkey tracks, showing every crease, cross-stitch everything.

€¦ I was walking this section, eyes turned to the ground to read what had come through, when I looked up to see something strange coming down the trail from [the mesa to the east].   It was two men in their late twenties floating along in personal hovercrafts about the size of inner tubes you’d use to go tubing down a river.   I felt fascinated.   They stopped to tell me how much they liked their hovercrafts for hiking and extolled their profound virtues.   One great advantage was that the hovercrafts leave no tracks and so make no unsightly impact upon the environment.   One of the young men made it clear that this was a superior stance to take with nature and that his use of the hovercraft to “experience” nature had raised “hiking” to an art form.   Meanwhile, there I stood in the sand in my falling-apart Agitator boots, listening politely, feeling the tinge of amusement flush across my mind.   Both young men were well-dressed, wearing all the right khakis and other high-end hiking apparel as they sat in their ‘crafts.

They finished their speeches and then floated off, north, toward the … mountains, which in my dream I could see, though you can’t really see them from this part of the canyon.   I stood watching the hoverers go, still fascinated with the cleverness of the craft but also thinking, “I trust the earth, its winds and rains, to erase all sign of me.   Give me the physical involvement anytime.”

Advertisement