During Chrysalis’s fall camping trip, I offered a hike up to Deadfall Lakes. The weather that weekend turned out to be cold with scattered showers. The rain that fell that morning in camp was falling as snow up on my trail. By the time I had driven to the trailhead, however, that snow had started to melt.
The view of the trail ahead was of thousands of disorienting white polka dots, much larger than snowflakes but stationary, filling the space around and above me. The trail that ascended to the lakes bordered the stream that flowed down from the lakes; this stream was bordered by willow thickets. Once in the willow thickets, I could see that the white polka dots were little piles of snow on the top of individual, rounded willow leaves. As I walked past thousands of these “polka dots”, I began seeing the fit between each pile of snow and the shape and orientation of its leaf. The broader and flatter the leaf, the more snow could pile upon it before sloughing off. This game of awareness then expanded to the bracken ferns low to the ground. A broad raft of snow covered the broad, strong bases of the leaves but at some point out towards the thinner, more flexible tips, the snow would slump off. Each species of conifer supported a distinctively shaped snow pile that could always be understood by examining the pattern of the underlying needles. Now looking for different white shapes around me, I noticed straight lines of snow along the top sides of rotting tree trunks; the dead wood must insulate the snow from the warmer ground. But only the rounded willow leaves supported polka dots filling the space ten feet high.
The snow has fallen, is melting, will be percolating down through the soil. The water cycle is flowing but it slows and backs up when the snow piles up on leaves. These places where flows back up and accumulate, these places create structures that catch the eye. The trees around me are places where the flow of carbon is backing up and accumulating. Thousands of years ago, the colder north side of the mountain ahead of me accumulated more snow in the winter than melted in the summer and created a glacier. That glacier ground cirques into the bedrock where water has now accumulated into lakes that are the destination of this hike. The shape of this land has the same sense of fit as the shape of the snow piling up on different kinds of leaves.
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