I confess I don’t get along with snow as well as I used to.
It was always a somewhat iffy relationship from the get-go, but now I have to be honest- the romance is gone. Oh, it’s still fine to look at- through the window while I’m cozied up on the sofa near the wood stove- fine feathery crystalline flakes drifting down amongst boughs of cedar- but I don’t feel the need to get out and romp around in it like I used to. While there are undeniably many wonderful things about snow, it has two qualities about it that I just can’t get past- 1) cold, and 2) wet.
When I was a kid we thought there was nothing better than playing out in the snow as much as we could. We’d slide down it on red plastic sliders, dug tunnels, built forts and snow people and snow sculptures, fling it at each other and anyone passing by, and generally wallowed in it until our toes and fingers and hands and feet were numb, and still we didn’t want to go inside. 
Later we learned to ski, and we always eagerly awaited the opening day at the resort. We started with lace-up boots, wooden skis and cable bindings, and a family pass for the whole season that only cost a few hundred dollars. My parents knew it was a bargain- skiing kept us active, healthy, and most importantly- out of trouble. We skied a lot.
Now I live in Northern California, where the most important thing about snow is that it is our water source for almost everything we do. Last winter we had all of about two snow storms, and the winter before that wasn’t much better. But it looks like this year maybe things are changing- we’ve already had a couple of really good wet weather systems break through that persistent high pressure ridge and deliver some big loads of H20 on us. Yep, free water, from the sky. Hooray, drought’s over! Maybe.
Just in case this too turns out to be a false alarm, a little teaser from Mother Nature, I decided to go up and do some celebratory romping while the romping was good- and there was nearly 2 feet of fresh powder blanketing the high country. Hope Valley. Where the West Fork of the Carson River meanders through an alpine meadow as lovely as its name, ringed with 360 degrees of majestic, forbidding, craggy summits. Breathtakingly beautiful, yes. Windswept, yes. Cold, yes. And snowy. I brought all of the necessary gear to stay warm and comfortable, the good snowshoes, camera of course, and all 5 dogs who insisted on coming along: “whither thou goest…”
18 inches of freshly fallen powder does not support any weight. A butterfly would sink in it. Snowshoes sink in it. So do long-legged dogs and the short-legged dogs following in the tracks of the long-legged dogs. I schlepped along laboriously and they leaped and bounded along like furry snow porpoises.
We romped and schlepped over to the river, investigated a number of interesting smells along the banks, took a lot of pictures, sat on a rock and ate a peanut butter sandwich, and pretty much wore ourselves out in about two hours.
So we schlepped, romped and porpoised back to the car, spent about 20 minutes removing snow dingleberries clinging to the feathers of my feathery little ones, and then gratefully returned to lower, warmer, greener elevations.
I like snow. I like it up in the mountains and I like it outside my window when I have the day off and the woodstove fired up. But my romping days aren’t what they used to be; or perhaps it has just been so durn long that I’m out of practice! Maybe tomorrow we’ll give it another go- after all, if we’re lucky it might be a long winter and I’ll still need to stay out of trouble!
