Mountain Hiking

Ouzel Falls 

I’ve traveled this trail at least twice before in the summer.  At first, it’s a woodsy trail that  follows St. Vrain Creek and passes several cooling waterfalls, but then it rises out of the valley and enters a hot, dry, dusty expanse that hasn’t recovered from a sweeping forest fire of some years ago.  Scattered saplings are slowly pushing up, but new seeds are coming in slowly.  The ground is unshaded, baked, and dry.  The sun beats down.

But in February, the hike is wholly different.  Cold winds blow.  The trail is obscured under its blanket of snow, and the texture and contours of the ground are softened.  Rough and jagged rocks, sticks, and logs are a couple of feet down.  A few boulders reach up, but all is covered in the same soft, undulating surface, like a gently rumpled comforter on an unmade bed.  The creek is mostly ice-covered, snow-covered, and silent.  I stand on snowshoes, leaning just a bit on my poles for a comfortable outrigger kind of balance, and listen.  There are no voices, no people passing, no sounds.  Wait, the wind is rushing through the topmost branches, then subsiding—a pulsing blanket of its own covering everything below. 

Alone again.  I do like the solitude, the connection to the natural world unbroken by any jarring distractions.  I insert myself between the two layers of blanket, the thick moving air above and the soft snow below.  It’s like climbing into bed, burrowing under the covers, and so shutting out the rest of the room, the house, the town.  You won’t find me hiking with an iPod or a cell phone, bringing the outside world into bed with me.  I’m here to listen to the stream, the woods, the mountains.  Sometimes it’s quiet.  That’s okay.

When I do encounter fellow hikers, they almost always come in pairs.  They are talking animatedly back and forth.

“Good morning,” I say.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it,” one replies.

 And off they go in excited conversation—“and she said…”  “I can’t really agree with that sort of point of view.” “Well, I’m really looking forward…”

 I stand and let the buzz fade to silence, and the rushing wind returns.  The soft quiet of the woods envelopes me again.  Let’s see, they turned left up there to walk over to the creek.  I’ll take the right fork and climb up the valley.  The trail takes a long diagonal across the slope to the northwest, turns in a switchback, and follows another sweeping diagonal up to the northeast.  I walk into the mountains, back out a bit, then deeper in—with each switchback, I find myself farther west and higher toward the Continental Divide. 

 I certainly won’t make the Divide at this time of year.  It is heroic enough in the summer, with solid footing.  Now, the trail is hidden and the surface is soft.  So far, the trail has been traveled and so I am following a compressed trough.  Higher up, fewer will have passed and new snow will have filled that groove. Sometimes, the trail is only marked by an open way through the trees.  At some points, there are two or more possibilities.  If I choose the wrong way, I am soon sinking to my knees in loose, uncompacted snow.  I retrace my steps to try the other way.  Here I am supported by a compressed layer lying just under the most recent snowfall.

 I come to a bridge over St. Vrain Creek.  The cold hasn’t got a firm grip here.  There is ice and snow, but water still surges in a bubbly sheet from under one expanse of ice.  Below the bridge, the layer of water slides over a boulder surface and slips rushingly under the curlicue leading edge of another expanse of ice.

 About three miles in, I come to Calypso Cascades.  Here, a bridge passes below a broad slope covered with trees and boulders.  In the summer, the water tumbles among and over those boulders, forming a dozen different cascades, all churning and dancing.  In the summer, the music is big.  But this stream is quiet.  There is ice and snow.  Each log has its long ridge of white.  Each rock is topped with a thick mushroom cap of white.  It isn’t an unbroken cover.  There are dark openings—here beneath a rock overhang, there along a fallen log—and gradually I begin to hear a throaty rumble of flowing water, slurping and gurgling emerging from those dark openings.  The sounds are faint, as from way down.  The sky is gray.  The sunlight shows through thinly over in the south.  Tiny flakes sift down through the dark green branches and show speckled against the trunks.

The wind is pushing the treetops back and forth.  Here and there, fallen trees have been caught in the branches of their neighbors, and they squeal and groan as they move and rub together.  Along one stretch of trail, there is a cawing, roaring sort of sound.  I hear the trees call, “Ho…  Go…  Aw…”  It is like a far-away baseball game, the crowd urging the teams on.

As I climb, the snow becomes deeper and deeper—one foot, two, three.  The trail becomes more and more obscure.  Fewer hikers, snowshoers, skiers have come this far.  No one else has been here since the last snowfall.  The forested slopes have been carved into mounds and hollows by the wind, like wind-tossed waves on the sea.  Troughs have been dug at the bases of tree trunks.  Little tree tops poke just a bit above the snowy blanket. 

Now the sun is out, and the snow sparkles as if mica chips were embedded in the surface.  The trees throw dark and sharp-edged shadows against the so-white ground. 

I cross a tiny stream.  To my left and right, it is covered in snow and hidden.  Only where the stream crosses the trail has the snow melted to show the flowing water.  The water is dark, flowing deep in a dark cleft.  The pebbly bed is dark and cold.  Up the slope, where I know the stream to be, trees are waving and rubbing.  This time, the sounds are like a frog chorus, dismal and wistful in the cold wind.

 Finally, I reach Ouzel Falls.  In the summer, the stream pours over the lip of a vertical, rock cliff, like water out of a garden hose.  It falls 20 or 30 feet and splashes into a small pool.  I remember sitting on a nearby log and letting the sound and the moist air wash over me.  Today, nothing is falling.  The stream is frozen.  Icicles hang from little lips of rock.  Snow is piled from the pool to the top of the cliff in a big, white skirt.  Nothing is moving except great swirls of snow lifted from the ridgeline and blown glistening against a deep blue sky.

Originally published in the
Daily Camera, p 10B, 4/7/2006.