Meadowlarks!

I went outside this morning to sweep snow off the front steps and heard spring arrive--meadowlarks!  We'll have more snow, but the returning meadowlarks have faith enough that spring has come.  If you'd like to hear the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's recording of the western meadowlark, click on the green link and scroll down on their page.
  
Brooks Clark and Thoreau went out to see what nature had for them--what a good thing for us all to do to remind us that we're part of it.  We in Missoula were reminded over the last weekend of February that one of the things that nature has for us is death.  An avalanche off Mt. Jumbo hit houses in the Lower Rattlesnake and buried three people, one of whom died.  We listen to the returning meadowlarks with sober ears.

Snow, Snow, Snow

The snowpack in the mountains surrounding the Bitterroot Valley just south of here is 125 to 161 percent of normal for today's date.  That snowpack, if it doesn't melt too quickly, will yield river water and mountain soil moisture into the summer.  Fingers crossed.  

Yellowstone in Winter

 














Bison, elk, coyotes, snow, ice, warm water, big skies, and not very many humans--that was Yellowstone for us last week.  Many animals travel on the roads to reduce their need to plow through snow, so there--all over the place--they are.  At the Gardner River, we yielded to the bison to cross the bridge.

 

 

 

Bison along the trail from Tower Junction to Tower Fall made us keep our distance and led us to change our route near Tower Fall.  In the photo below, three bison dig through snow to graze and Donna plans a retreat. 

 








We also saw bison at Mammoth Hot Springs

and, in the Gardner River canyon, we saw first one coyote and then another feeding on a bison carcass.

 
 








During five days in the Park we saw lots of bison, some coyotes, and also some herds of elk.  We saw one large elk many times over several days; he seemed to have found his favorite forage in one area along the road; he was easy to locate precisely from a distance because of all the cars, tripods, cameras, and giant lenses--classic elk jam elements.

Except for those bison near Tower Fall, our animal sightings happened along the roads on our way to and from the trailheads. 


We skied on beautifully groomed trails that follow unplowed roads in the northern part of the park.   




 


The trail into Tower Fall passes views of columnar basalt 







and the Yellowstone River valley.  A strong smell of sulfur rises here from hot springs along the Yellowstone River just below.

Tower Fall had a husk of ice with water visibly falling within it.  One day we were here all alone, and, on another other day, we stood watching the waterfall with only one other person--very, very different from the summer Tower Fall experience achievable with a brief walk from a packed parking lot.


The sun smiled and the winds blew on the day we skied Blacktail Plateau.  What huge views off to the north 
in the film clip above
 







and to the west!   

One morning, after a snowfall, we were the first to ski on fresh grooming at the Upper Terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs.  The southern part of the loop has a hill where we played and played, up and down, over and over.

And here, also on the Upper Terrace Loop, is Orange Spring Mound.

 















 



On the way home from Yellowstone we spent a night in Pray, MT, at Chico Hot Springs, enjoying the historical, quirky, down-to-earth atmosphere of the place and the warm (98 F) and warmer (103 F) water in the two pools.  The air was colder!  

Eric says now that he finally gets the pleasure of outdoor hot-spring soaking--feeling warm and cold at the same time, depending on what's in and what's out of the water, and taking part in the social scene.  There were young guys getting out of the pool to sit in the snow-filled poolside chairs and throw snowballs, older people in blissed-out reveries, and children toodling around on float toys.  People relaxed together.  A smiley woman said to smiley me, "If you aren't happy here, you won't be happy anywhere."  

 

      We were very happy--



comfortable room, delicious food, 
welcoming and friendly staff who made us a feel a sweet mixture of being special guests and also wonderfully at home, 
and a beautiful setting, too--
Emigrant Peak in the background!



With Chico and Yellowstone behind us, we are feeling lucky to have been out in the wild, out on the planet, out in the winter.  We have soaked it all in.

Kenneth Rexroth was writing about fall in the Sierra Nevada when he quoted scientist and mountaineer John Tyndall appreciating the planet and its seasons, but the "chain of dependence" works for winter in Yellowstone, too:

 "'Thus,' says Tyndall, 'the concerns of this little place
Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth's axis,
The chain of dependence which runs through creation,
And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests
Of marmots and men.'"

Thanks to Sally and Fred for the Rexroth book, and thanks to Eric for driving home safely in the falling snow and over the snowy, icy roads.  We're back to the home grill.

Skiing at Lolo Pass

Lolo Pass is about an hour's drive from our house and about 2,000 feet higher--a good place for our first ski of the year.  Here is Eric skiing into Packer Meadow:











and then heading down the well groomed trail west of Pack Creek on the south part of the Packer Meadows loop:

Eric brought his hot-off-the-press happy-trails photo water bottle, and we both swooned over the subalpine fir.  What beautiful trees!

Walking in the Sun

Between Gaudete Sunday and the winter solstice, out walking in the sun, I hear two wonderfully, wildly different pieces of music in my head, and, thanks to YouTube, you can hear them, too, by clicking on these links:

"Gaudete" sung by Steeleye Span

and

"Why Does the Sun Shine?" by They Might Be Giants

Greetings of the Season!

Wanderlust

Two German hikers in Mt. Robson Provincial Park, British Columbia, taught us the meaning--to Germans--of the word wanderlust /ˈvandərlʊst/.  While we've borrowed the word, in English the meaning has wandered.  For them it is the very strong desire to be out walking or hiking in the world, in nature, in the mountains.  Think of the Romantics; think of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, they said.  We ran into this particular pair of wanderlusters a number of times: we camped near them and talked with them in the front-country Robson Meadows Campground the night before we started our backpack, and we also saw them on the Berg Lake trail the day we set out--the day that they hiked 26 miles round trip into and up high to Berg Lake and out and still had plenty of time to explain wanderlust when we asked them why they thought we were seeing almost as many Germans as Edmontonians on the trail.  Edmonton, Alberta, is the closest big city; most of the people we asked said they lived there.  And then all those Germans!  "Wanderlust...it's a German thing," these incarnations of it told us.

We never achieved a 26-mile-day level of wanderlust on this trip, but we did surprise ourselves with what we can still do and how much we still like it.  In addition to backpacking to Berg Lake, we also dayhiked along the Icefields Parkway on the way north and south and also while camped at Berg Lake.  We pretty much had on bottines souriantes.  

On our way north we stopped for a quick trip along the Wilcox Pass trail with its beautiful series of vantages on the Athabasca and Dome Glaciers and the Icefields Parkway.  Beautiful views off to the south, too.   Click on any picture to see a larger version.

The next afternoon at Robson Meadows Campground (about an hour west of Jasper town), drying out from a rainy night at the Icefields Campground, we briefly saw the south face of Mt. Robson, 12,972 feet and more than 10,000 feet higher than where we stood, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies.  We spent the next six days walking up the Robson River valley (from 2,800 to 5,400 feet) around Mt. Robson (13 miles each way) to Berg Lake on the north side of the peak and also exploring the Mumm Basin and Snowbird Pass trails.

We had been expecting to shlep heavy packs, cross many bridges, and see beautiful country--
and boy howdy, we did!--but we were surprised that a wonderful part of the Berg Lake trail was meeting other hikers and some climbers.  (This summer is the 100th anniversary of the first ascent of Robson.)  


We met many friendly and very happy people but not casts of thousands--the park allows anyone to day hike and bring dogs on this trail, but it limits the number of people who camp and doesn't allow dogs overnight.  Backpackers make reservations in advance for particular campgrounds and attach laminated permits to tents when they pitch them.
 
Each of the seven defined campgrounds has a group of 5 to 26 tent pads marked off by low wooden frames, 



sometimes even a bench.



The sign behind the tent pad very politely says of the forest behind it, "Notice: this area is closed to allow for re-generation of plants and ground cover.  Thank you."





So--organization and limits.  Without them, this trail would be loved to death by too many people and tents everywhere and anywhere.  In addition to the permit and campground system and  structure, this trail has the infrastructure of a good community.  Of course we were grateful for the trail itself (originally built in 1913 by outfitter and guide Curly Phillips) and for the uncountable bridges, but the surprise for us was the camaraderie of the little towns in the cooking shelters.  



Mind if we share your table?  Where are you from?



Here are Eric, Barbara, and Heinz cooking at the Whitehorn shelter.  Barbara and Heinz are the kind and friendly people we talked with the most over the six days we were all on the Berg Lake trail.

 
Here, near the middle of this photo we took looking back from the switchbacks up through the Valley of a Thousand Falls, you can see the glinty braids of the Robson River, the roof of the Whitehorn cooking shelter, and--maybe, since it's tiny, tiny from this point--the Whitehorn suspension bridge. 














Rain, rain, hail, hail.  What a thrill, though, between hail storms to get our first glimpses of, first, Mist Glacier

and then Berg Glacier!








Home on the trail has a kitchen, bathroom, and living room, but these work differently from the more permanent ones that we think of as home.  The kitchen routine requires water filtering and even finding the right place to filter and cook.  That's the Berg Glacier in the background of the photos of Eric cooking at Berg Lake and filtering from Toboggan Creek. 

 
Some of the bathrooms along this trail are composting toilets, 

and the living rooms have good places to read and bliss out.



We didn't sit around much while we camped at Berg Lake, though; we wanted glacial prospects.

We saw Berg and Mist Glaciers from the Mumm Basin trail:


 

and the Robson Glacier from the Snowbird Pass trail.

 

 








And but so, as David Foster Wallace would say.  Glacier gazing leads to discouraging climate-change contemplation.  Off in the distance in the photo to the left is the toe of the Robson Glacier in 2013.  We're standing where it was in 1911.  

And here is the Robson Glacier's lateral scour line from near Berg Lake:




This is both a beautiful place and a picture of Earth on the move-- 

  

very beautiful and very much on the move with Toboggan Creek rolling through, icefall, rockfall, and the glacier's calving.



We enjoyed beautiful weather for our two days at Berg Lake and then for the hike out, too:
 

 
Eric and Whitehorn Mountain

Barbara and Heinz near Marmot Campground 
 
 

 Emperor Falls




 


And the ups and downs--
arg, both--
on the way down, too.
















Man, this trail was plenty challenging, but many times we imagined it years ago without its wonderful, helpful bridges.  Here's the suspension bridge near the Whitehorn campground.  We crossed it traveling through with our backpacks and also while camping there to filter water from a side stream that is clearer of glacial flour than the Robson River that the bridge crosses.

 

Here's Eric taking a break and reading the sign on another bridge, the one below Kinney Lake,

 





and here is the map posted near the parking lot.

On the drive back home, we stopped for food, fuel, and an architecture-based historical walking tour in Jasper. 

Jasper has lovely gardens, planters, and a community vegetable garden along the railroad tracks.  Here are some of the flower beds outside Robinson's Grocery. 

 


Seeming to float with fanny packs in place of the heavy backpacks, we hiked up the Cavell Meadows trail near Jasper and saw marmots, pikas, and the Angel Glacier. 

We worked hard but had a lot of fun on this trip.  We didn't push to our limits and took the time we needed, including about 3 hours each morning to filter water, breakfast, wash dishes, and pack up.  We sure did not pass anyone on the trail who didn't pass us sooner or later.  Still.  We're thinking of backpacking into the Titcomb Basin in the Wind Rivers next summer.  Less rain.  And wanderlust!

 









Wanderlust feels distinctly Thoreauvian to me, and wanting to go to the Titcomb Basin--and maybe back to Berg Lake--brings thoughts of some things Thoreau said in the Ktaadn section of The Maine Woods.  He sees the mountain as representing "the unhandselled globe, ... not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land, ... the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth."  The mountain for Thoreau and the glacial topography around Mt. Robson for us are "unhandselled"--unused.  We look in such places at raw matter, "vast, terrific," and feel a jolt of recognition but maybe not full understanding: "Talk of mysteries!--Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"  Wanderlust seems a great word for a yearning for that recognition, mystery, and contact.