The week of snow that precedes the week of snow

It doesn’t snow here.  This is not to say that there are not cold nights and freezing condensation.  That happens.  But it doesn’t snow.  It rains, and it rains a cold 35 degrees to soak right through if you’re not careful.  The condensation hangs in the air for most of the day, possibly being blown free at some point in the afternoon, but often enough the mist sticks around all day.  
     But not all night.  


There is this phenomenon that happens between midnight and two in the morning where the temperatures actually drop below freezing, stranding all that mist and fog and NorthWesty breath.  It falls as it freezes.  It attaches to the first surface that grabs it.  And this is how the ice palace is made.  
     Everything is covered.  Every branch, every blade of grass, every shingle, every needle, every cone, and if you are there for it, every human, too.  The clouds clear, the moon shines down in a glory of white that Glows through millimeters of iced glass wrapped round the entirety of the everything.  Feet crunch on the shimmering ground cover and the still air fails to whisper a chill word.  It is so dry.  It is so still.  It is so sparkly.  
     That’s our ice.  That’s our cold condensation, normally.  It is gone by noon or so the next day with the mild mists settled back in their normal place - everywhere.  This is the norm.  
     Which is why the week before last was such a blast.  

A night without ice, without snow, with a long exposure on the PentaxK2 

There was a warning, come Tuesday or so, from Jake, the skier, the snowboarder, the active active active lover of sport and fun:  “Snow is coming on Sunday!”  Really, Jake?  I don’t think so.  I probably told him something like, “They don’t know what’s going to happen five days from now, Jake.  If anything happens, it’ll probably be a flurry on Friday or a sleet shower next Wednesday.”  I didn’t have much faith in the prediction, though I felt like I was bringing my heel down on a beetle, squishing the primitive, pure joy in the coming of snow.  
     His shell was hardy, however, and every day that week I heard the growing weather report.  “They’re saying it will last a couple days!”…. “They’re saying we could get eight inches!”…. “They’re saying it could last three days and we could get two feet!”  And my ears started prickling.  I began to believe.  It was coming.  
And then it came.
     In the morning there was rain.  Cold rain, but rain.  The house was in its normal state, with morning weekend routines going about their business, carrying the bodies along with them, some thinking, some unthinking.  I looked up from a book and saw the wet sheep in the field.  I wondered if they missed their recently departed ram (he had a run-in with a rifle and found his way to the Alderleaf meat freezer the week before).  They looked wet and not at all bothered.  I read some more.  I looked up again and the snow was beginning to cover the sheep's head.
     It snowed for four days.  

photo by Jess

The first day was wet, thick flakes that by the next morning left nearly eight inches on the ground.  That morning the news spread through the farm like a something that spreads fast - cougar tracks, right through the main trail.  A trailing expedition set out immediately to see if they could catch up with the animal.  This might sound ludicrous, but it is more or less what we do here whenever we can.  The idea is that we will learn more from the experience than there is uncontrollable danger.  A cougar is much more likely to move away from humans than attack them, especially if the humans have the wherewithal to keep from doing something exceptionally stupid.  Jason, Michelle, and Vita were off in a flash after the trail.  Some of us were less than enthused to shoot right out of the house into the wet snow after a top-shelf predator.  It seemed.  As soon as they were out the door, I looked at the others left in the house and asked, “So you guys want to scout them?”  We were ready in two minutes.  
     As far as scouting stories go, it is much less exciting to retell than to have experienced.  We followed them down to a stream crossing and lost their trail.  The snow was coming down thick and the rotted out log bridge was slick under our boots.  After crossing, we saw the trackers up on the hill side, heads down or looking ahead (not to us on their side), following the footfalls closely.  One of our number was looking for a different way across and found instead an unsteady limb.  We all heard the gigantic CRACK as he almost fell into the rushing creek when the wood gave way.  At that point we gave up the chase because our surprise was lost.  I also felt that the trailing crew may be upset that we’d caused such a ruckus when the cougar could be so close.  So we retreated to the meadow and made a snowman.  Then we made other little snowmen.  We made an epic battle scene where the native tribe of spear hunters misunderstands the abominable monster who just wants a hug.  It was poignant and tragic.  We had a snowball fight.  I convinced Shaun to do a naked snow angel.  It left a funny impression.

The Battle Scene

And now, as with most things here, the other half of the story.  The half we were blind to:


     Shaun had been at his Sit Spot in the woods, enjoying the snow, the quiet, the newness of the day.  He watched a black-tail deer over the course of ten minutes as it walked carefully through his area, passing within twenty feet of him.  After letting the deer saunter off at its own pace, he thought he should go get ready for work.  He drives a WRX, so he was probably excited to play in the snow on four wheels.  Having returned to his cabin and changed clothes, he left to go to his car.  As he left his cabin, I walked by, briskly, putting on my gloves.  “Shaun!  Cougar tracks!  Jason, Michelle, and Vita are trailing them, we’re scouting them!  You can catch up!”  I ran on.  And Shaun, bless him, darted back inside and changed clothes.  
     Two minutes later, jogging down the trail following the human tracks following the cougar tracks, Shaun caught up to me.  “This is going really near my sit spot..”
     And then he broke the branch and we were found out and we went back to the meadow and played in the snow.  You know all this.  
     When Jason, Michelle, and Vita got back from trailing we were all still in the field, marveling at our creations, happy and warm as the snow continued down and down and down.  They had trailed the cougar to the end of the tracks.  They led into a dense thicket, one that could not really be seen into safely.  This is a rule of tracking carnivores or dangerous animals:  don’t go somewhere dangerous.  Circle it on foot to see if the animal leaves from the other side rather than going through a possible ambush.  The cougar tracks did not come out.  They found it.  The place they found was Shaun’s sit spot, twenty minutes after he'd left.

This is the kind of ridiculous stuff that arthropods do around here.  They persist.  This is, in fact, a spider, and it is actively building its web in the middle of a five-day snow storm.  Really.  Photo by Jess.

     We learned trapping.  There are a few different types of trap that we became familiar with over the next two days.  The figure four deadfall, the spring deadfall, the ground snare, and the spring snare.  Basically the deadfalls involve setting up a rock or heavy piece of wood with two or more sticks with carved notches.  These notches allow for great tension in the support of the heavy object.  That tension gets popped or sprung when an animal comes up and feeds on the bait on one of the sticks.  The stick pushes out of its notch and the weight falls.  Plop.  Snares are cordage in a loop that is generally triggered to quickly shoot up after the animal has reached its head through the loop to get at some bait.  Strangulation, suffocation, neck-breaking, or simple incapacitation until the return of the hunter.  These are the goals.  I don't think they are my goals yet, but they are that of the trapper.  
     We set these traps up in the snow, looking for Aplodontia rufa, the Mountain Beaver.  You can remember the Aplodontia well because it neither lives in the mountains nor is a beaver.  Common names.  So we set these up at entrances to their burrows.  We pacified the traps by putting sticks in the ground that would divert the weight from falling on whatever tripped the trigger.  The point was to find out if they worked, not kill poor little misnomers.  (Poor Little Misnomers would be a great band name)
    After setting our traps there were many minor skirmishes with snowballs along the return trip.  When we got to the hill down to the creek, hell broke loose for about fifteen minutes.  Everyone was involved, some better than others.  Diving behind trees, sneaking around corners, and trying to ambush as many as possible, I crashed and dashed and snuck and struck.  And was struck.  It was amazing.  
     The next day we continued our trapping practice, this time with snares.  We checked on our traps from the day before and found them, for the most part, untriggered.  When I removed my support sticks, the weight stayed exactly in place, held up by the night’s snow.  Lesson learned.  

Trails in the snow.  Photo by Jess.

     Class was flat out cancelled Thursday as the snow turned light and the ground cover became more and more icy.  
     

The battle continues...a slight impaling! (and Vita ate his nose at some point)

In the next days, the occupants of the West House became stir-crazy.  We staged a dramatic walk into town, the first leg through the woods and forestry land, post-holing most of the way.  If only we’d had our snow-shoes at this point.  Our main destination was the Grocery, but activity and adventure were serious considerations.  The snow was still light at this point, falling from trees in cascading layers of cotton white like the floating mists of a waterfall in the distance.  The entire expedition was a joy.  Strenuous and rewarding, it showed us red-tailed hawks, eagles, tracks of weasel, cottontail, and squirrel.  

Intrepid Travelers in search of Civilization (sans Jess, photographer) 

     By the last downhill trek in the return trip five hours later, my knee began to hurt.  The snow had turned to a wet sleet, beginning to cover snow with ice.  We returned to the house to find a Locust tree in our Edible Forest Garden.  This might not sound like a bad thing, except for the fact that we did not previously have a Locust tree in our EFG and this one was decidedly horizontal and crushing two Apple trees, along with a whole lot of ground cover.  This was about the time that trees began to come down.  This Locust obliterated two Apple trees and brought down our power line.  In the night the Locust right next to it fell into our sheep pen, crushing the fence.  Opposite it, a Big Leaf Maple snag (in which woodpeckers galore gorged daily and in which we had a bat box) fell across a different section of sheep/llama fencing.  Along Ben Howard Road, the bluff-hugging twist of a strip that connects us with the towns of Sultan and Monroe, we found at least five instances of downed power lines and innumerable trees on the ground.  
     So the power was out.  And it stayed out.  Candles were lit and the woodstove stayed cranked, radiating an orange glow through the front glass.  The first night without power, having just gone to the store, I had the fixings for quesadillas.  It took about two hours to make them on the wood stove, cooking the veggies together and then each tortilla separately.  We listened to poetry of the divine feminine and ate in the flickering light, finding the wonderful silence that comes in a house that suddenly has the power cut.   During the days that followed we spent a lot of time outside or if inside, reading, always close to the stove surrounded by hanging wet clothes drying in the warmth.  We worked on our Tree Journals and readied ourselves for the upcoming trip to the North.  Whenever a car was taken out, to get to the store, to get someone to work, it could make it back about as far as the driveway.  Then the shoveling inevitably began.  We dug out our drive about five times due to stuck vehicles over the week.  It was just another part of our routine.  

Tree Journal:  Quercus alba, White Oak

Tree Journal:  Quercus alba, White Oak

Tree Journal:  Juglans nigra, Black Walnut

     Jess and I went sledding at the neighbor's hill and brought back a bale of hay on a tarp for our sheep and llama, slip-sliding down the hill.  Jake built a giant snow pile for his snowboard to have a jump from.  And limbs kept falling, snow kept falling.  And then finally, the rain.  
     Sunday morning at 5am the power came back on. In time for Gordon to come back from his exile in Redmond (where he could actually get to work), in time for us to clean our long-wet and well-used clothes, in time for us to pack, in time for us to make the sojourn to REI to get the last minute supplies for our regularly scheduled week of snow.  Skalitude.  North Cascades.  Mountains you can see Canada from.  Five feet of snow to walk through.  For miles.  We departed at 8 on Monday morning.  And it was so much wilder than the week you just read about.


Love, 
Ted