Letters from the Divide Ode to Winter The cold is on its way (if it hasn’t already arrived) and, as Pam Houston points out, there is a lot to look forward to. My father always said it was a bad idea to live in a place where if a man got dumped out of a car on the side of the road in his shirtsleeves at any time of year, he couldn’t survive the night without freezing to death. I live at 9,000 feet in the high San Juan Mountains of Colorado, where, on the very few nights that man in his shirtsleeves wouldn’t die, he would still be made damn uncomfortable. Last January, the coldest one in several years, the thermometer bottomed out on my back porch at 45 below zero for 10 nights running. Almost nothing survives 45 below, not the pipes, not the starter on the 4Runner, not the feral cats that manifest utter indifference right up to the 10-below mark and then make a beeline for the basement. Still, January is arguably my favorite month at the ranch (with stiff competition from both June and September). In wintertime mine is the last inhabited ranch on the county road, which means that some days I see the snowplow driver and most days I see no one at all. The days are maddeningly short, but most of them are crisp and blue, verging on painful in their visual clarity, and the others are highly dramatic, with massive walls of white vapor rolling down off the divide that might leave a few inches or feet of snow in their wake. When I moved out here nearly 20 years ago, it didn’t take me long to discover the rules for surviving western winters, the most important one being get out in them. I skied a hundred days a year those first five winters, on the mountain all day and then backcountry by moonlight. I learned fast that there was nothing more intimidating about Rocky Mountain winters than Rocky Mountain summers so long as you kept yourself in all of the right synthetic clothing. Polar fleece, Synchilla, polypropylene, Gore-Tex—there seemed to be no lower limit to the temperatures I could handle so long as I layered up and kept my body moving through the snow. ❅ ❄ ❆ It is a January bluebird morning, and everything is blanketed in snow and silence. The sun has been up for over an hour, but the thermometer is sitting tight at 10 below. I layer socks and long underwear; pack a lunch of hard cheese, cherries, and chocolate; fill a couple of water bottles; rouse the dogs from their place by the fire; and step outside into the bright, bright morning. My nostril hairs freeze so fast it feels like a special effect, and I click into my bindings, loop my pole straps around my wrists, and head across the meadow. There is the satisfying sound of the snow settling under my skis and the jangle of the dog tags and very little else. The big fir trees are shedding snow in translucent veils, and the barbed-wire fence is covered in the lightest dusting of ice crystals. I ski past the horses, stopping to knock the icicles off of their manes and tails, to brush the frost off their eyelashes. There is no bird sound, no creek sound, no contrails, no echo of cars out on the two-lane. There is the shush of the skis, the plant of the poles, and the occasional louder crack of a large shelf of snow as it settles. On the far side of the meadow, four bighorn sheep have come down to forage above the fence line. Dogs and sheep eye one another for a good five minutes before the dogs come to the sound decision that the snow is too deep for a satisfying chase. I plant my poles and eat the cheese, cherries, and chocolate. There is something in the stillness, in all of that pure crystalline beauty that recommends some form of prayer. Going out into the snow is beautiful, coming in from it equally good. There is the building of the fire against the plummeting temperatures that come with the setting sun. There is the giant pot of golden beet and oxtail soup and the big bottle of red wine that I’ve been saving. There is the pile of damp and exhausted dogs in front of the fire, smelling more and more like cinnamon toast as they dry. If I am especially lucky, there is a hot tub later, outside beneath the flurrying snow, maybe with a handsome man in it, or a big red bathtub inside with lots of bubbles, a good novel, and a warm robe for when I get out. In a little while the moon will rise and tempt me to take one more spin around the meadow. (If you have never seen the particular light of a nearly full moon on nearly new snow in a high-altitude meadow, you owe yourself that short trip into the sublime.) One restless night—the moon can be so bright here it makes it hard to sleep—I listened to the coyotes sing for more than an hour before I got out of bed and dressed to go see what they were singing about. I could get only one dog—the one called Fenton—interested in a 3 a.m. fieldtrip. When we got to the other side of the meadow, we heard a tremendous rumbling and stopped in our tracks. My first thought was avalanche, though I knew we were safe in the flats where we stood. Then I began to make out the large dark bodies hurtling toward the river. They came in waves of 30 or 40, a herd of elk 300 strong, massive bulls and sturdy cows and spindly yearlings—all down from the upper reaches of the hard, frozen Ivy Creek to take a drink from the still barely open river. Fenton and I sat, breathless, a safe distance away. When the last of them had passed, we returned to the ranch house, awed not only by our good timing but by our good fortune to live in a place where when 300 elk decide they are thirsty, they can head down to the river and drink.
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