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How do you walk through four feet of snow? You crawl.
After a few days of watching thick flakes fall I had to get out into the snow to walk. A league or so down a shoveled road, and I had to wade through the meter deep snow. A ways wading across the first expanse of open snow and I had to lay down and roll around.
Laying down in the snow
Staring up at the sky, the snow is not white, light, as it is collectively on the ground. Rather it appears as swarms of insects, tiny black dots not entirely threatening the whiteness of the sky, but still swimming about in an uncontrollable fashion.
At creek level you can see some of the depth of snow. The snow slopes down to the creek forming these scrumptuous puff shapes. It was very difficult to get across these creeks without getting wet; you can't quite run and jump, and most snow is just power masking some object three or four feet below.
I made it across the creek and ended up at the foot of this tree. I dug a hole big enough to put my body in the snow and I sat and stared up at it, as the snow had accumulated on it to give it another expression.
The wind and snow combined to make the snow deep, even growing down off of this branch.
I saw some sort of tracks in the snow, off the path I was wondering. They were human perhaps? Fresh certainly, but nowhere deep enough for a normal person. Looked like both legs moving at once; must have been bunny.
Fiddling with Photoshop, you can see the bunny clearer. He or she has hopped off into the trees.
(Colin Adams had an educated interpretation of these tracks).
Just admiring the fact that there was near perfect silence, only the occasional sound of rushing water and snow patting against plastic winter fabric, when I stumbled over this humming generator sitting in the midst of the forest. Nothing demanding electricity nearby was visible nearby.
Nature sculpts.
I came across a sliver of a buried sign.
Fun archeology to expose it.
Contemplating the land like waves.
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Snow piled deep and left to the winds becomes a rippled mindscape that invites all sorts of conduct. At once it is "virgin" in the sense that it appears not to have ever been visited. So there is an urge running into it. And it appears soft, as though it could absorb and bury comfortably a large body. So while common sense reminds you that the snow is cold and a poor substitute for clothes, there is an urge somewhere in the mind or body that wants to be with the snow, as if to sleep in snow, rub yourself in it, perhaps make love to it.
To the traveller, the snow is to be crossed. And this sort of deep snow soon makes the legs tired. Moving about over varied surfaces sorely tests the knees. I discovered the best way to cross these lands was to crawl.
Not, as it turns out, to Snow Shoe.
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