Deep Freeze in the Mountains and thoughts about winter

Recently I've been reading a novel set in early December along northern California's Mendocino coast. The setting is a gloomy one, with trees (including giant sequoias) dripping with rain. There is looming fog, dim, diffused light, and the general depressed air of a damp winter.

Meanwhile, people in a mansion overlooking the ocean are preparing a bright holiday celebration including chamber orchestras, bright oak-log fires, mulled wine and mead, and every sort of festal food. The contrast between the outside gloom and the bright firelight is striking.

Yesterday at the High Mountain Lodge, a bitter cold spell settled in, and I awoke early this morning before dawn to go over and check the pipes and the heating situation in the guest lodge. I was thinking about that novel. It was dark as pitch. The cold was bone chilling, and the snow that had fallen overnight actually squeaked when I walked on it.

We are tumbling toward the shortest and darkest day of the year in just a few weeks but aren't even there yet. I anxiously went through all our guest rooms, running hot water down every drain to make sure that the sewer line wouldn't freeze up. I know, I know--other cold places in the country worry about their pipes freezing; up here, we get anxious when the sewer ices up. They have even invented a machine to thaw out a sewer line. It's a cross between a power washer and a roto-rooter. You hook it up to your hot water tank....

But I digress.

After checking all the rooms for warmth, and making sure the utility chase between the first and second floor of the lodge was warm, with no icy blasts chilling the pipes, I squeaked my way back to the dining lodge and our owner's quarters, took a shower, and got dressed for the day.

When I next went outside the sun was up, and it smacked me in the face and dazzled me. The sky was so dark blue it was almost purple, and the snow on the mountains and down in the pasture was so amazingly bright that I thought of a 16th century poet's made-up word, "glistering," a combination of "glistening" and "blistering."

Of course, the temperature was nine below, but the sunlight was brighter and sharper than the warmest Caribbean beach.

So much for gloomy northern California contrasts between the indoors and outside. I guess you could call Colorado winters "postmodern" when it comes to the usual traditional and literary ideas of our darker months. A hundred years ago, when Christina Rosetti wrote, "In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone," she accurately described the condition of the earth and water. But there's nothing bleak about a Colorado winter.

Yes, we will have crackling fires in the fireplaces at the High Mountain Lodge this winter. Yes, we will have bright celebrations with good food and drink. There may be some overcast days, and the wind can blow like the Big Bad Wolf.

But outside the Lodge rooms and away from the crackling fires, there is a world of exquisite winter beauty. I hope you are lucky enough to experience it; it would be really cool if you experienced it with us (that's a shameless marketing plug).

Julie and I hope to see you this not-so-bleak winter.

Let It Snow

The other day when Julie and I were buying our season ski passes at Winter Park, one of the clerks said that the early snow had been the best they'd had in years. "It's, like, February conditions out there!" she enthused. And it's true that we have enjoyed pretty steady snow since before Thanksgiving. Happily, too, the wind hasn't been bad, so it's easy to see the number of inches based on the buildup on the railings enclosing the decks.

It's incredibly peaceful at the Lodge right now. About the only sound I hear when I cross from one building to the other is the crunch of my boots in the snow and the tinnitus in my ears. We're muddling about doing a lot of catch-up right now from the full house we had at Thanksgiving.

Reservations are sparse until the week before Christmas, when we will be jumping. However, between now and then, we expect reservations to pick up, courtesy of an incredible deal being offered by Winter Park: a two-night stay will net guests two free lift tickets at the area, and steep discounts for additional lift tickets. I expect that we will be getting a lot of last-minute reservations. Just remember: mid-week is the best time to ski, if you can play hooky from work.

The snow right now will make it worthwhile. Last year at this time, we were still seeing dead grass peeping through the snow in the pasture; not this year. The snow's already deep enough to hide virtually all the vegetation--though the horses dig down to it  quite happily.

Last night when I was driving back to the Lodge from Denver at 10 p.m., the wind was whipping up snow as I drove over Berthoud Pass. But my headlights illuminated the snow-covered evergreens rising on either side of the road. Because of the darkness, they looked almost two-dimensional: a painted backdrop for a stage play about the perfect Colorado vacation.

Or the perfect place to live. It was good to get home. And I didn't even mind shoveling off the decks this morning.

Silence

Something set Murphy the Lodgedog off this evening. I'd been having fun playing variations on hymns on the piano, and at first I figured it was the missed notes she was complaining about.

She spun around a couple of times in the sitting room, barking her head off, so I finally let her out, and followed her, just in case she was going to have a set-to with the neighborhood fox that she couldn't win.

She ran up and down the road barking and carrying on, but it was clear that her heart wasn't really in it. There was nothing there to bark at, and even she realized it, but like a politician, she kept up the sturm und drang for longer than necessary.

When she finally quit barking, I found myself standing on the deck of the lodge in absolute silence. The almost-full moon was shining through high clouds, and a fine ice-mist was in the air. The thermometer showed that it was just below thirty degrees, which in January in the high country is just short of the banana belt.

It was a perfect temperature, and a perfect silence. There really wasn't anything to see. Sheep Mountain to the west was enveloped in mist, though you could see its outline because of the moon glow. There were too many clouds to see stars.

I was shocked by the silence. The silence was the loudest thing in the valley.

The thing about silence is, you can't capture it with a camera and post a video of it on YouTube or a still  picture on your Facebook page. There's no laptop in existence that has a scratch-n-sniff screen to communicate how your other senses become heightened as the silence takes over: You can't describe the smell of the cold air or communicate the feel of the frozen mist falling on your skin or even begin to communicate the scent of silence. There's no way to describe the expansion of your soul as the cold settles in around you and replaces noise with a blanket of ice crystals and muted moonlight and a crisp cold.

Make no mistake, though. The silence of the high country doesn't equate to peace. Stay too long outside, and you become uncomfortably aware that the ice crystals falling on your arms are no longer pleasant; they're just cold. You can only equate silence with peace for a short time before you begin to miss the voices of loved ones and the laughter and the joy of human companionship.

Silence is always a corrective to noise, but it can never replace voices.

New Year's Eve morning

Winter has settled down to stay for a while at the High Mountain Lodge. It reminds me of the Christina Rossetti poem, In the bleak midwinter: "Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow." Soon even the tallest of the dead grasses down in the meadow will be under the snow.

There is, however, little that is bleak about a Colorado high-country winter. Even as I write this on the last day of the year, the sun is shining through the window of the office and dazzling me to the point I can barely see the computer screen. If the clouds, which mercifully acted as a blanket and kept the temperature above zero last night, abate as I expect them to do, the dry, cold air will mean that the sky will be so dark blue this afternoon that it will almost be purple.

Of course, there is a flurry of activity, what with the holidays and the New Year's celebrations. But even that bustle can't completely erode the serenity of the outdoors:

Winter

All the Denver media have been commenting recently on how cold it is, and how early the cold came.

I suppose in an urban environment, where cold and snow can indeed make life miserable for so many people, it's not surprising that the TV and radio stations--and even the paper--will utter Cassandra-like cries when the snow begins to fly.

But up here, when the snow flies, it's good news. The skiing gets better and people start to think about winter sports.

Even the cold doesn't seem so severe up here as it does down in the Big City.

This morning, the sun rose into a partly-cloudy sky, and light gradually crawled down the side of Sheep Mountain and over the meadow down below the lodge. It's stunningly beautiful here right now, and as the winter deepens, it only promises to become more so.