Intangible (Fall 2022)

INTANGIBLE

A VOICE FOR WILDNESS AND WONDER FALL 2022 SIGURD OLSON ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTE

OUR MISSION

The Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute prepares people to meet the challenges of the future with intellectual and artistic creativity by promoting and protecting experiences of wildness and wonder.

To realize its mission, the Institute hosts LoonWatch, the Timber Wolf Alliance, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards, and numerous events for young people and adults.

LOONWATCH

LoonWatch protects common loons and their aquatic habitats through education, monitoring, and research.

TIMBER WOLF ALLIANCE

With a particular focus on Wisconsin and Michigan, the Timber Wolf Alliance uses science-based information to promote human coexistence with wolves and an ecologically-functional wolf popu lation in areas of suitable habitat.

SIGURD OLSON NATURE WRITING AWARDS

Established in 1991, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards honor the literary legacy of Sigurd Olson by recognizing and encouraging contemporary writers who capture the spirit of the human rela tionship with the natural world and who promote awareness, preservation, appreciation, or resto ration of the natural world for future generations.

YOUTH AND ADULT PROGRAMS

To promote experiences of wildness and wonder for young people and adults, the Institute offers annual internships, camps, clinics, lectures, conferences, retreats, and outings.

THE COVER

Zaria Forman, Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina No. 3, December 13th 2018, soft pastel on paper, 2018.

© 2022 Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute 715-682-1223 soei@northland.edu • northland.edu/soei

For a number of years, a small group of friends and I have been, to borrow a phrase, paddling into winter. We are fortunate to live on the south shore of Lake Superior, and weekly we set out for excursions with kayaks and paddle boards along the shores of the Bayfield Peninsula.

In October, we paddle mostly in Chequamegon Bay, enjoying the fall colors, but when ice begins to form, we move north to launch at the mouth of the Onion River where greater depth and fetch typically ensure open water through late December.

By this time, ice forms quickly on the decks of our kayaks and boards, and we bundle ourselves in dorky-looking, though carefully refined, cold-weather paddling outfits—layers of wool and fleece, dry suits, neoprene gloves and mukluks, pogies and balaclavas. Our time on the water is awe inspiring. Shorelines dusted with fresh snow; bald eagles perched silently, eyes alert; dangling webs of fine tree roots with bulbs of clear ice on their tips; delicate icicles suspended from the undersides of overhanging rocks, the tinkle of fresh ice rising and falling with the swells of gentle waves.

And, then, late one night or early one morning, the water freezes solid, and we trade boards, kayaks, and paddles for skis, poles, snowshoes, and fat bikes.

Winter. It is a season loved and embraced by those who have come to know its magic. For this issue of Intangible, we reached out to authors and artists whose love of winter runs especially deep and asked them to share their stories. Their responses, in both words and images, are stunning and inspiring, joyful and sober.

They share memories of snow days and dreams for snow at Christmas. They share with children the joys of snowballs, snowmen, careening sleds, days on skis, and winter camping. They share their own discoveries of winter and the salve it provides in difficult times. They share their angst for winters gone awry in the midst of climate change. And, together, through their words and images, they invite us to embrace the beauty and wonder and magic of snowy winter days.

Erratum: In my introduction to the spring 2022 issue of Intangible, I mistakenly, and embarrassingly, misspelled Loren Eiseley’s first name. Thank you to the careful readers who gently set me straight.

ALAN BREW | EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR | PHOTO BY NICK ROBERTSON

SMITTEN BY WINTER

Maybe it was the elaborate “winter carnivals” that childhood friends and I hosted in our south Minneapolis backyard. We spent days shoveling a massive snow pile. Then we hollowed it out as our “Big Top” and spiraled a track around the outside to the “lookout tower.” Perhaps that’s what triggered my winter intrigue. Then came speed skating in grade school, ski-jumping in junior high, cross-country skiing in high school, and winter camping in college.

Along the way, a summer trip with my Lutheran Pioneer Boy buddies to a mythical place called the “Boundary Waters” sealed my destiny. I was so smitten by the adventure and the stunning beauty that I knew—then and there at age eleven—somehow, someway the Border Country would be my home.

A number of years later, as a recent college graduate, I co-founded Wilderness Inquiry with Greg Lais and was subsequently introduced to Will Steger, who facilitated winter dogsledding trips for Wilderness Inquiry and who turned me on to the Artic. What an epiphany!

In 1986, Will and I with our team traveled 1,000-miles by dogsled and ski across the Arctic Ocean to the

North Pole. National Geographic hailed our trek as “an historic milestone in polar exploration.” But for us, it was a peak life experience. Temps dipping to minus-70 degrees, blinding windstorms, treacherous shifting pack ice, and the gnawing fear of polar bears. Extreme and life-threatening, but I was absolutely enthralled. It was life in fast-forward for me, slammed into hyperdrive, and operating at peak capacity for two months straight—physically, emotionally, spiritually.

That powerful experience continues to resonate through my home and family. My wife, Susan, who crafted our North Pole clothing and gear, parlayed the success of her gear into Wintergreen Northern Wear, a mainstay Ely business. A beautiful pine-studded peninsula on White Iron Lake became our home and Wintergreen Dogsled Lodge. Our three children— Bria, Peter, and Berit—are all adventure aficionados and passionate wilderness advocates.

Winter is a way of life for us. But we fret deeply about its future. We watch the creeping impacts of climate change in the boreal forest—the rapid advance of invasive species, the demise of deep cold, mounting catastrophic weather events. On our

BY PAUL SHURKE | PHOTO BY LAYNE KENNEDY

annual Arctic adventures, we witness dramatic changes— global warming is far more advanced in the high arctic than anywhere else. The polar pack ice has thinned and diminished forty percent in the forty years we’ve traveled there.

What would Sigurd Olson think of our existential climate dilemma? Greg Lais and I connected with him when we launched Wilderness Inquiry. Then he was concerned about the demise of timber wolves. They’ve since become a national conservation success story in our region. They are survivors. Will we be as well?

When I ski the Kawishiwi River, I often think of Sig’s winter treks up the same gorgeous watershed and how he marveled at weasels and otters playing in the rapids and ice slides. In The Singing Wilderness, he shares his spell-binding encounter with wolves on a frozen river in the Quetico-Superior County. They’d just pulled down a buck. “Nearer and nearer they came. . . . about fifty feet away they stopped and looked me over. In the moonlight their gray hides glistened and I could see the greenish glint of their eyes.” Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they departed and once “more came the long howl, this time far back from the river.”

I channeled Sig’s experience with a similar encounter on our beloved Kawishiwi River many winters back. As we skied around a rapid, we noticed in the pool at its base a large circle of thin ice. It had a well-worn track around it and an odd protrusion in the center. In waning daylight, we read the story. A moose, chased by wolves, had made an ill-fated decision to cross the river in a sketchy spot. Falling through, he floundered in the deep water and thrashed out a large circle as the wolves circled round and round the perimeter, waiting to grab hold of their prey. But

he succumbed in the middle beyond their reach.

Destiny had laid claim to the moose. No amount of empathy would change that. But we felt a tinge of guilt for disrupting the wolves’ prospects for a meal. Ice was now reforming over the pool and the cold night ahead would render their meal inaccessible. But a solution presented itself. We lassoed the antlers, chiseled the body free, and hoisted him up onto the firm ice by sled dog power.

With twilight upon us, we set camp a quarter mile downstream. An hour later as the moon rose, we enjoyed our evening meal and gazed upstream towards the pool, watching the silhouettes of seven wolves feasting on theirs. They lit into a howl, just as the pack did the night Sig caught them on their prey. “That was wilderness music,” he wrote, “something as free and untamed as there is on this earth.” At Wintergreen, we call it the “national anthem of the north,” a wonderful trademark that our Canadian Inuit sled dogs share with wolves and often in concert with them.

At mystical moments like this, I think of the quote from the Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen, “Give me winter, give me dogs and you can keep the rest.” That’s become my mantra. But with looming climate change, I pray it doesn’t become my lament.

Paul Shurke is co-author with Will Steger of North to the Pole, author of Bering Bridge: The Soviet-American Expedition from Siberia to Alaska, and co-owner with his wife Susan of Wintergreen Northern Wear and the Wintergreen Dogsled Lodge. Paul has been traveling by dogsled in remote northern regions since 1979. He is an accomplished outdoor educator and artic explorer, as well as a lifelong advocate for disability rights and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

GIVE ME WINTER, GIVE ME DOGS AND YOU CAN KEEP THE REST.

—KNUD RASMUSSEN, DANISH-INUIT EXPLORER

TOP PHOTO COURTESY OF WINTERGREEN DOGSLED LODGE | OPPOSITE PHOTO BY LAYNE KENNEDY

FEATHERS IN THE TENT AND FISH IN THE PAN

The yellow Arctic Oven

tent is nestled in the snow in front of a grove of spruce trees. Stoic, strong spires telling us they remain even in winter. A winter that has brought rain in December, covering everything in an inch of ice, and week-long January windstorms that blew siding and roof metal off houses. With a calm weekend in the forecast, we decide to winter camp, making access to our fishing hole quick and easy.

After pitching the tent, Timm chops down three-inch dead standing spruce trees and builds a fire for the hot portion of our dinner—Hebrew National hot dogs with no bun to accompany smoked king salmon strips and dried Ugruk meat. Even with the fire, Henning, our three-year-old, prefers his hot dog cold.

The sinking sun casts an orange glow on Timm’s and Henning’s faces, so we unzip the tent fly and make it our job to get cozy. Timm lights a fire in the small sheet metal woodstove. I air up mattresses. As the sun hovers just above the trees to the west, Henning and I, in Timm’s 30-below sleeping bag, open the tent fly to watch the sunset.

“It’s beautiful,” he says. I smile, happy that a three-year-old can appreciate and express delight in the marvels of a winter day.

I turn, my belly falling, realizing I burnt it. A small golf-ball sized portion of Timm’s bag that touched the hot woodstove has melted. Lofty, white feathers fly throughout the 9 x 9-foot tent. Some land on the stove. We brush them off. The tent smells like burnt hair. I take off my purple wool hoody and tie a knot at the hood. With my feet still in the bottom of the sleeping bag, I shove them into my hoody, a makeshift temporary patch for the problem I created. It works.

Feathers still flying, we laugh, air out the tent, and climb in our bags to read with Henning. Our minds are roused at 3 a.m., the cold hitting our bones. The fire out. Somehow being lazy and cold in a bag is easier than getting up and lighting a fire to warm us enough to get back to sleep. It doesn’t make any sense. Nothing about winter camping makes sense, but two hours later, after overcoming our laziness, the tent is warm again and a bit more sleep is found.

In the morning while packing the tent, Henning says, “This was the best campout ever.”

Timm and I smile and agree. We drive upriver to fish for trout, our only fresh meat source in winter. And as we pull pan-sized fish from the cold water for dinner that night, we talk about doing it again.

Laureli Ivanoff is a freelance writer who credits her grandmother for a love of storytelling. She has worked as a radio journalist and as a monthly columnist for We Alaskans. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Laureli lives in Unalakleet, Alaska, where she was raised, and where she cuts fish and makes seal oil. Native food is her love language.

TEXT

PHOTOS BY LAURELI IVANOFF

Zaria Forman working on Disco Bay, Greenland, April 22nd, 2017

ETHEREAL MAJESTY

The

drawings featured on these pages were inspired by visits I made to Antarctica, Greenland, and the Perito Moreno glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina. Glaciers may seem far away and removed from our everyday lives, but they impact all living beings on Earth in numerous ways. They are Earth’s cooling system, helping to regulate global temperatures. They cover about 10% of the planet’s surface, and contain roughly 75% of the world’s freshwater supply. And an estimated 90% of them worldwide are melting.

Standing in front of Perito Moreno glacier was humbling. Remote landscapes never cease to amaze me, but what made my experience with Perito Moreno unique was the infrastructure and topography at its face that made it the most accessible glacier I’ve seen. Directly across from the front of the glacier, where cracks and groans sound every few seconds and massive ice chunks calve into the lake almost constantly, is a peninsula I traversed for hours. Normally the dangers of being that close to a glacier face are too great a risk since calving events are unpredictable and potentially deadly. But the peninsula provides protection and up-close access, granting a dynamic

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, ZARIA FORMAN

Danco Island, Antarctica, November 24 2015, 60 x 96 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2019

view of the glacier’s seracs—towering, glowing blue ice chunks reflecting and refracting light in infinite ways as I shifted my angle between the sun and the ice.

Perito Moreno was actually one of the few glaciers in the world that was still growing, until recently. The melting glacier ice worldwide has frightening potential consequences for the global climate system. James Hansen, the legendary NASA scientist who warned Congress about climate change back in 1988, predicts that if we don’t cut carbon dioxide emissions, melting ice will raise sea levels by six to fifteen feet this century.

Many of us are intellectually aware that climate change is our greatest global challenge, and yet the problem may feel abstract, the imperiled landscapes remote. I hope that the scale of my drawings and their degree of realism will transport

you to these distant, fragile landscapes, emulating the overpowering experience of being beside a glacier. If you can experience the majesty of these places, you will fall in love with them as I have. When you love something, you want to protect it.

We need to see ourselves as part of a movement in which every moment counts. To do so, I think we need to visualize not just what we will lose, but what we can still save.

Zaria Forman documents climate change with pastel drawings and travels to remote regions of the world to collect images and inspiration for her work. As an undergraduate, she studied studio art at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy. Her art is now exhibited worldwide, and you may follow her at Zariaforman.com.

Zaria Forman working on Lincoln Sea, Greenland, 82° 32' 30.3036"N 59° 54' 50.3814"W, July 24th, 2017

Whale Bay, Antarctica No.2, 50 x 75 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2016

Zaria Forman working on Whale Bay Antarctica No. 4

Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina No. 6, December 13th 2018, 25 x 16.5 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2018

Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina No. 10, December 13th 2018, 82.75 x 50 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2018

COLD HANDS, WARM HEART AN

ODE TO WINTER EXPLORATION

I can still feel the burn in my lungs atop Ch-paa-qn Peak, my first winter summit. Against the glow of sunset, my cheeks stung pink and my eyes watered, but my heart sang. The mountain’s own shadow stretched out, dark blue across the valley, leading my gaze to the Mission and Swan ranges, blazing pink with the setting sun. The trees were otherworldly—a maze of tall and tangled sugar-coated rock candy covering the mountainside, eventually giving way to a windswept summit block.

On that mountain I fell in love with winter and all of her harsh, cold, pastel glory. Many miles of headlamplit trail lay ahead, but I was bundled and undeterred— it was nothing but an opportunity to travel through silence and take in the stars.

Almost a decade later, I still relish the cold, the snow, the dark. I live for peachy pink mornings and deep blue evenings: bookends to short, crisp, sparkling days. The season feels right to me—it’s restful, safe. At home in Alaska, I may go months without direct sunlight on my skin, but I am grounded in winter’s rhythm, its colors, its beauty.

I have my skis to thank—landscapes I once deemed impenetrable now sing siren songs, and a season I once associated with depression now brings me childish joy. But it’s more than the act of skiing—it’s the yawning stillness, the fleeting and magical light, the profound connection to the elements.

Traveling wisely through winter mountains means communing with the land through deep observation. It means asking permission and understanding the factors at play. It means tracking weather, recording data, and listening to warning signs. This constant state of curiosity and reflection is meditative, introspective—an opportunity for growth.

In summer, there’s intimacy in identifying wildflowers, mushrooms, birds. In winter, the same can be said for studying snow layers and crystals, or determining where sagging snow signifies that a crevasse lies below. It’s a real-world scavenger hunt, but the stakes are enormously high. Therein lies the adventure.

Yet even on the mellowest of slopes or in the gentlest of valleys, snow and ice landscapes pique a natural curiosity, appealing to my inner child. As a winter traveler, I get to teeter often on the edge of the untold. There’s something to be said for falling in love later in life—maybe I have a deeper appreciation for winter landscapes because I discovered them as a young adult. Maybe they hold more luster, more mystery, simply because I didn’t grow up in them. But this reality is bittersweet as winter grows more fleeting— each season shorter and warmer, year by year and decade by decade.

Winter gave me the freedom to carry childlike curiosity well into adulthood. I cherish that freedom as I walk long and far on glaciers, or camp in forty-below-zero beneath the northern lights, or watch glittering hoar frost turn to gold as it shimmies, weightless in front of a setting sun. These opportunities to marvel, to sink into quietude, to be at ease in the cold and dark are invaluable. They deserve protection and preservation. Though winter threatens to fade, we must fight for it: the cold and the wonder belong to us all.

Emily Sullivan is a writer, photographer, and skier living in Anchorage, Alaska on Dena’ina lands. Their work lives at the intersection of the outdoors and the human experience and is focused on recreation, community, and environmental wellness.

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY E.J. SULLIVAN

Top: Ski touring in the Kenai Mountains, Alaska. Bottom left: Traversing on skis through the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska. Bottom right: Pink hour in the Lolo National Forest, Montana.

WINTER WILDLANDS ALLIANCE

It’s that time of year when a fleeting chance of snow appears in the forecast and people start saying, “I’m not ready for winter.” The patio furniture needs to be brought in. The roof needs patching. There’s still a pile of wood to be split and stacked. Then pretty soon the world is once again covered in snow and there’s nothing left to do but shovel the driveway and go skiing.

I traveled a lot of miles this summer, through some of the old mountain ranges, burning dozens of gallons of fossil fuel like it was just money, five or six dollars up in smoke for every thirty miles down the road. Everywhere I went I heard about how winters are getting shorter, the snowpack thinner, the snowline higher. The reservoirs are empty. The ancient trees are dying. Winter-dependent wildlife species are struggling to hang on.

Meanwhile, we humans, more of us every season, push farther and farther into the last redoubts of winter, on skis and fat bikes and snow machines, seeking refuge and recreation. We build cabins in the wildland-urban interface zones, drill gas wells into the high plateaus, and sink high-speed chairlifts right to the Wilderness boundary.

BY DAVID PAGE | PHOTOS COURTESY OF WINTER WILDLANDS ALLIANCE

Winter Wildlands Alliance is a national coalition of 34 grassroots groups and 70 SnowSchool sites working to protect America’s wild snowscapes and to inspire the next generation of stewards of winter. We were pleased this summer to see Congress finally take some meaningful steps toward reducing carbon emissions on a systemic level. We were in the trenches with a lot of partners throughout that long and tortured process. But even if tomorrow morning every American woke up to an electric car in the driveway, winter would still be in headlong retreat.

We have a vision of a future where healthy, interconnected public lands are the primary solution to a changing climate, where wildlife and people thrive thanks to vast protected snowscapes, and the kids and grandkids of today’s SnowSchool participants are still tromping around on snowshoes learning about watersheds and winter ecology.

Join us to help make this vision a reality.

David Page is the Executive Director of Winter Wildlands Alliance and Senior Policy Advisor for Outdoor Alliance California. He lives at 8400 feet above the rising sea level in California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada, surrounded by the Inyo National Forest.

SnowSchool sites in Wisconsin include the Cable Natural History Museum, Hunt Hill Audubon Sanctuary, Justin Trails, Navarino Nature Center, and Treehaven Center. A full listing of sites can be found at wildwinters.org.

AN ODE TO SNOW DAYS

My favorite day is a snow day. An unexpected gift from the universe. An unplanned rest day in the middle of the week that says—at least before remote work—you can’t do anything today. Stay at home, your plans are cancelled.

Sick days require, if not actual illness, a limiting, and perhaps morally ambiguous, set of actions that have their own risk. Holidays require a certain uniform and expectations for behavior. Even if one can sleep in, or as was the case on Christmas at our house, wake up ridiculously early and tear open presents, there is a strain from carrying

the spoken and unspoken expectations of family that sometimes bursts through the surface and threatens to burn down the merriment.

Snow days have none of that. Growing up in the 80s and 90s with no home computer, a snow day meant a day truly off. My mom was a teacher, so she also got the day off. Startlingly free of her work, home, parental, and community obligations, my mom blossomed into the best version of herself.

Our snow day mornings were generally for pure leisure, with my brother and me finding things to do while my mom often went back to bed after setting

BY STACY BARE | PHOTOS BY LOUIS AREVALO

out cold cereal or finishing up whatever breakfast she was making before we heard the news on the AM radio read by Dallas Cole.

Sometimes we did a little shoveling or played outside, but usually we preferred to wait until mom was ready to join us before heading out into the snow. The main motivation for shoveling early was to prepare for the fun. By clearing off the drive and walk we created bigger piles of snow for forts, snow men, and snowball arsenals placed strategically throughout the yard.

With the snow ready for maximum pleasure, the three of us, regardless of temperature, and well into my brother and my high school years, would pile into our snow gear and head outside for some serious play.

Few people I knew at the time could match my mom’s capacity for boundless joy on a snow day. I don’t think I saw anyone come close until years later, when living in Salt Lake City, I heard the whoops of joy on my first day of powder skiing in the Wasatch.

Our afternoons ended with a final session shoveling out the driveway. This last activity was timed carefully so that when my dad, who almost never got a snow day from his work, returned home, he would not get the impression that our day had been filled with all fun and no work. Perhaps we hoped he’d think that, instead of missing out, he had avoided a day of drudgery as he turned into the drive.

I remember a particular day when I was six or seven. I had finished shoveling and went into the back yard to make some final adjustments to a snowman before heading into the house. Work complete, I plopped myself into a snow drift and watched the light disappear from the sky. The cold seeped through my layers of snow pants and corduroys. I did not want to go in. These were rare and perfect days. I sat until the street lights began to shine and my name was called from the kitchen.

I came inside to warmth, laughter, hot cocoa, and the steam of melting snow on wool sweaters. Our family was at its unhindered best. But looking back, I realize it was also about this time that our family began to fracture. Initially, there was anxiety and fear that anyone would find out that a middle-class life on the

western edge of the Midwest could be so hard. Shame and pain followed.

More than once during that time, when my parents could do nothing but shout their anger at the world directly at me, I would wish for endless snow days. And today, when I’m holding back tears, fearful of the present, let alone the future, I still wish for snow days.

A couple of years after coming back from war in Iraq, I organized my life to maximize the number of days I spent in the snow. Specifically snow in the mountains—hiking or riding a chair lift up and swooshing down. I realize now that much of what I have said about why I spent time in those high and cold places was true, but also incomplete.

Snow, snow days, allowed my family to give me all the love they wished they could give me every day—and coming back with the traumas of war still raging in my heart, it was time in snow that allowed my demons to rest most deeply. In howling winter storms, in their cold and bitter embrace, is the warmth, acceptance, and boundless joy of my mother.

Now, as the snows come later and melt earlier each year, I wonder what days my daughter will look back on with the same sort of joy. I hope she never has to wait for a snow day.

Stacy Bare is a veteran of the Iraq war who found postservice salvation in the outdoors. He has dedicated his life to helping others discover the health benefits of outdoor recreation and is currently serving as the executive director for Friends of Grand Rapids Parks, an organization that empowers people to cultivate vibrant parks, trees, and green spaces.

Photo by SSG (Ret) Kenny Church

MAY IT SNOW AND NEVER STOP

It’s Christmas Eve. I’m four-years-old. Tomorrow I will turn five. For both Christmas and my birthday, I have asked for snow. Enough to make a snowman, have a snowball fight, race a sled down the logging road behind our house where last week a line of logging trucks moved like a train. My brother, who is eight, sat next to our mailbox marking the dirt, counting each one.

At dinner he reported the seventy-sixth truck had careened past with a spotted owl wired to its grill. Dad got up from the table and walked out the door where I now have my face pressed, hot breath fogging the glass. I could see him standing on the bank of the creek—its water muddied by landslides. The Southern Oregon drizzle wetted his slumped shoulders.

Tonight, though, on Christmas eve, the rain has stopped. The air outside bites. Dad glances up from where he is muttering over the mail and asks if I’m looking for Santa. I tell him no. “Snow,” I say, pointing out. Sure enough the ground is white. Flakes stick to the Douglas Fir, and the sound of the creek is muffled, gone quiet in the storm. It’s the first and last snow I see from the house on Jackson Creek, and it’s gone in an afternoon. That spring we move east to a real mountain town where snow sometimes falls by Halloween, and always by Thanksgiving. I sit in front of a camera and smile crookedly for my first season pass. The keys to the kingdom.

For the next twenty years I relentlessly chase winter. It becomes my year-round passion as I spend months skiing on Mt. Hood—home to the Palmer Glacier where lift-accessed turns can be made well into the summer. I never keep a strict count, but I estimate my days on snow at well over 300 a year for several years running. Then, slowly there’s a shift.

My winters grow quieter. My awareness greater. I ride the chairlift less. Nordic skis show up in the back of my car. I take an avalanche awareness course, then another. I put on crampons and learn how to move through the mountains, how to push through and how to turn back. As a graduate student, I study snow packs and how changing climate will impact future winters. I create maps that show predicted snowfall in ten, twenty, fifty years. I realize the preciousness of a blizzard, a 400-inch year.

B B B B B

I get older, but winter’s magic doesn’t fade. I still feel like a superhero every time I pull on insulated clothing, tug down my goggles, and head into a storm. I meet someone whose passion for winter equals my own. A few seasons pass, and we skin to the top of a peak where we decide to build a life together. The whole world sparkles white.

Our first child is born the next spring, and one last storm welcomes him. Leaving the hospital, we point out the thawing world to eyes that don’t yet focus. As soon as he walks, I put him on skis and tow him through our town’s snow-covered streets. A few years later we have another boy, but before we can share winter’s joys, we move from our high-elevation mountain town. We move to be closer to family, to buy a house, to stop ski bumming and start adulting.

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY AIMEE EATON

At the new house it snows too. But then it rains. A vicious cycle. The old-timers tell me, it didn’t used to be this way, and the climate data from the last century agrees. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we’ve seen a radical increase in the number of days per winter spent at or above freezing temperatures. More rain, less snow is the result, and the problem doesn’t stop there. When winter moisture falls as rain, the natural water storage that normally occurs in the snowpack fails to happen. Enough winter rain, and we’re looking at a disaster for river systems and aquifers.

I don’t tell my, now, three children this. Instead, I dress them in waterproof jackets, pants, and boots, and take them outside. We scoop sloppy handfuls of slush into misshapen snowmen and jump into icy puddles. If this is the only winter they get, I still want them to love it.

When a real storm finally comes, we head to the sledding hill with our skis. I carry our middle child up the slope, set him on his feet, and watch as he flies down. We go again and again. By the time we’re both too tired for another lap, he’s hooked and the weather has warmed, flakes turning to drops. Later, after toes have been thawed and hot chocolate drunk, I ask my husband about moving again, returning to the high mountains and raising skiers. Two months later, we sell our house. As it turns out, we’d rather be financially poor and experience rich than the other way around.

This year our whole family is on skis. Three kids making french fries, slicing pizzas, my husband and I right with them, still feeling invincible as we step into storms. The joy of winter permeates our family. It’s a gift, but not a given. I tell the kids about Jackson Creek, and clear-cuts, about how there are places where snow no longer falls, and how we are tied to the land. Up here at 9,000 feet, I share with my children the idea that winter is tenuous. As the snow banks reach our second story porch, creating the opportunity to leap like swans from the railings and roof, it’s a hard concept to grasp, but the joy of the jump teaches them more than I can.

As skiers, we are eternal optimists, any storm could bring the best day ever, any glade could hold the turn of a lifetime. Reading the forecast is an exercise in hope, as is having children. We cross our fingers the snow will come, we pray the world will be kind, then together we take steps to mitigate a changing climate, believing that winter has a chance, hoping that we can ski forever.

Aimee Eaton is a freelance writer who focuses on intersections between human activity and the environment. Her book Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country was published in 2013 and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, National Parks Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, and The Dirtbag Diaries. The mother of three young children, Aimee is currently working on projects that help adults talk with kids about climate change.

AT NE YEAR

Afternoon Walk. Temperature twelve degrees Wind twelve miles per hour. Sky crystal clear, and blue as only winter sky can be. Marveling at the light, I am grateful for sight.

Reaching a half-way point I turn around to return home. Then, hooting of the barred owl who lives in the nearby woods brings a flutter in my heart.

For this unexpected offering, I call back, “Thank You!” I am grateful for sound, and that owl’s life.

Walking home, I wonder how I can reconcile the persistence of beauty in this winter of absence.

M. C. Bumann has worked as a registered nurse in psychiatry, as an art historian, and as a curriculum designer. Following the death of her Soulmate, she sought solace walking in nature—her morning mourning practice. Interacting with the beauty and poignancy of nature in this way inspired her to learn about and begin writing, which she has embraced as the fourth major stage of her working life.