Pine Street Woods Jan 30 2025
Another morning out with Mollie.
A month of freezing weather and a snow drought has left the forest looking tired and dried out. The frost penetrates deeper into the soil and erupts in cracks of bright crystals of ice while the trails bulge with black shiny domes of ice covered in forest duff like some smooth dark ogre skulls pushing up from their underground slumber.
The sky radiantly blue with a washi of thin cloud attenuating the weak winter sun. Sometimes shafts of light break through and promise some warmth.
I clomp along the paths threading my way around the top of the hill through forest and streambeds turned to flowstone by the frigid air. There is precious little novel to attract attention but I make do.
Observation and attention slows and relaxes. The five hundred feet height of this hill is a rump of the granite that forms the Selkirk range which runs down from British Columbia and ends near here. The granite is glacier-carved, broad rounded slabs of rock rough in surface but smooth in form.
Scattered all around are smaller round rocks and stones redolent of river beds and alluvial plains. These are rocks rolled and worn smooth by the movement of ice. They were deposited when the ice vanished over 12,000 years ago signalling the start of the Holocene.
I wished to make the walk longer this morning but Mollie had other ideas, refusing to follow me to down Green Heart she stood her ground on Momentum; I relented and walked the switchback up to her.
She sprinted with joy down the trail, leading the way. She scented rabbit and was racing to and fro into and out of the forest and up and down the track in a frenzy, nose close to the ground.
At the top of the meadow a view, across the fog -bound lake, of the Cabinets. Sun grazing the upper most slopes. On the meadow some small vignettes in the weak sun, a lodgepole pine cone clinging stubbornly as they do. Some Oregon grape is bright red in this patch.
A naked larch standing alone in a vigilant symmetry wating for spring when soft bright green needles will emerge again.
And the alligator-hide bark of the mature western white pine.
