Snow

My last blog post was on the first of December, and it was about snow.

Surprise, here it is the middle of April, and this blog post is about.... snow.

There are two additional blog posts in draft that I never finished or published: a December post entitled, "Skiing in the Silence of Powder" and a January post, "The January Blizzard of 2011."

Lest you suspect that by now I'm in the terminal stages of Cabin Fever and about about to turn into an ax murderer, I'll let you in on a little secret: I love snow.

Even this late in the season, there's nothing about snow up here that will cause me to run screaming from the building screaming, "No! No! Dammit!" the way I did one time after coming out of a late-afternoon graduate seminar at CU-Boulder when it started to snow in May. Up here, we know what to do with snow: we play in it.

We are not officially in mud season up here at the High Mountain Lodge. That doesn't happen until Easter Monday, the day after Winter Park closes. But that doesn't mean we haven't had a lot of mud already. And the lovely snow we're having right now just means that it will cover the mud with an even layer of white. For a day or two. Of course, this snow means that the mud will just be that much deeper when all that melting moisture mixes with the dirt, but up here, we're into immediate gratification, so like Scarlett O'Hara, we'll "think about that tomorrah."

This has been a spectacular winter for snow up here. While Denver was basking in a drought-stricken perpetual autumn, we have been blessed with wave after wave of moisture from the west that has smacked into the continental divide and given up the ghost in the form of snow in our valleys.

The other day, we went over to check on the horses. It was a bright, sunny day, and it didn't even occur to us to wear snowshoes until I sank into the snow to above my knees. And for me, that's saying something.

I'm Facebooking, e-mailing, and texting all my friends: come on up! Winter ain't over yet.