Snow!

After a fall so warm and dry that we had no significant moisture between September and December, a storm late last week finally brought us rain turning to snow - lots of it. Our local ski area, Monarch, went from bare ground to skiers' nirvana with over 70 inches - almost six feet - of new snow on Thursday and Friday. Another storm blew in yesterday, dumping foot in the high country.

With that kind of snow, it was impossible to resist playing hooky today. So we didn't: this afternoon we piled our skis, boots, and poles in the car, along with our daughter Molly, home for a pre-holiday visit from Portland, and headed for the mountains. Twenty minutes later, we were parked in a white wonderland, with fresh snow covering trees, rocks, mountainsides, road, and no one else in sight. We laced up our boots, clicked into bindings, grabbed our poles and began to schuss uphill.

Flakes of snow twirled out of thinning clouds overhead; two ravens coasted by, silent but for the sound of air passing through their stiff black wings. Then it was just the creaking of fresh snow under skis and labored breathing as we climbed the old narrow gauge railroad grade. Ours were the first tracks - except for the twin-hoofed prints of a herd of mule deer that bounded uphill through the snow as we watched.

We skied uphill for almost an hour, then followed another railroad right-of-way around a forested ridge, swooping down and across a creek almost buried under mounded snow. We saw more deer tracks, met two other skiers, and two guys in a Jeep looking for a lost pair of dogs. We startled a flock of mountain bluebirds caught uphill by the sudden storms, and watched a long-tailed, rusty-capped sparrow hop about, foraging for seeds on the surface of the snow.

For the last half a mile, we raced the sunset downhill. We schussed around the last bend as the clouds overhead turned brilliant pink and then began to fade. Red-cheeked, out of breath, and almost giddy, we stowed our skis and slithered down the snowy road toward home as the early darkness of a winter night swallowed the landscape and its mantle of fresh snow.

This afternoon's outing reminded me - again - of the joy of simply getting outside and losing ourselves and our cares in the company of the living world. How easily I forget, and how generous and beautiful is the remembering!

On the road again

Tonight I'm home, with the bright crescent of a waxing moon setting in the southwestern sky. But my mind is on the road. Thanks to photographer Jim Steinberg (this is your fault, Jim), I'm starting a new book project: Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road, a two-book set that Jim calls a "love poem" to the 25 designated routes that show off the state's diverse landscapes and cultures. From the open spaces of the Eastern Plains with their ancient dinosaur trackways, grain elevators and futuristic wind generators, to the abrupt rise of the Foothills and High Peaks cris-crossed with Jeep and hiking trails, pocked with mines and dotted with ski areas and starter castles, to the wide swaths of Mountain Parks that run the gamut from shrub desert and sand dunes to lazy rivers meandering through green hayfields, and the brilliantly colored rock layers that shape the western Plateaus, Colorado is one amazing place.

One part of Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road, is a coffee table volume in the spirit of our previous collaboration Colorado Less Traveled, a finalist for the 2006 Colorado Book Award. In this new book though, we're paying homage to a uniquely American love: the open road. We'll weave the photos and words into a lyrical whole that evokes the spirit of each road, each scenic byway.

The second part of Colorado Scenic Byways is a take-along Atlas & Road Guide, a route-by-route map of each byway giving the down-and-dirty details you'd need to get the most out of the trip, including maps and altitude profiles, details of geology, geography and history, fun and fascinating facts, and traveler's tips from each of us.

The deadline for this whole glorious assignment: January 1 for the essays for the coffee table book, February 1 for the road guide narratives. Yup, it's crazy - but how could I turn something like this down?

Richard and I managed to drive three of Colorado's scenic byways on our trip to Durango last weekend for Colorado Art Ranch's second Artposium, an event which was most appropriately focused on maps and creativity. What a weekend! We filled our minds with maps as metaphoric and literal aids to imagination and life, and filled our spirits with the starkly spectacular landscapes of southwestern Colorado and the stories of their millennia of human culture.

That's me in front of a nearly eight-foot-tall sagebrush at Lowry Ruin, an Ancestral Puebloan site perched on a hilltop off the Highway of the Ancients byway with a gorgeous view of the whole Four Corners region. If you're in southwestern Colorado, it's worth the trip on the dusty gravel road to visit Lowry. If you can get there at sunrise or sunset when the light colors the ruins golden and picks out the distant Henry Mountains to the west in Utah, Sleeping Ute Mountain to the south, the great tilted wedge of Mesa Verde to the southeast, and the high peaks of the Platas to the east, you can see why people settled in this now-isolated site. It's a view swells the soul.

(As a footnote to my traveling green entries, our Subaru Forester was a delight to drive. It's comfortable - I love the sunroof for skygazing!, averages 29 miles per gallon of gas, and its exhaust just smells like air, nothing more.)

Now I'm home with the brilliant silver moon setting as Cygnus, the Swan, flies down the Milky Way directly overhead. But my mind is very definitely on the road - on 25 scenic byway routes, in fact. Join me on the trip when Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road is published next fall!

Community of the Land

Conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity that belongs to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." I've struggled for years with how to describe the kinship I feel with other species, not so much as individuals, but as a community -- the totality of relationships and interrelationships, the bonds of who eats whom, who chases whom, who cooperates and who competes and who cannot survive without whom -- that make nature what it is, and make Earth habitable for humans. Leopold's phrase captures why it's important to me to know and respect nature and the more-than-human communities that animate the landscape. Land is the community to which we belong, not a commodity that belongs to us.


Salida Almanac: Here in the Upper Arkansas Valley, we are waiting for snow. The sun set into a cloud bank that muffled the high peaks to the west, and Venus shone clear about two fists above the western horizon as Sirius, the dog star in Canis Major, sparkled into view over the hills to the east. Today was another in a week of spring-like days that have the juncos trilling and the dippers on the river warbling courting songs, and the spinach I planted last fall in raised beds poking tiny leaves up from the rosettes that have survived the frigid weeks of winter by hugging the sun-warmed soil surface. But the Weather Service says we're due for a return of winter tomorrow. It's been a long one already, but I wouldn't mind more snow. In arid country like this, we're always poised on the edge of another drought and greedy for precipitation, just in case. So I'll keep hoping for snow!