Snow on the Mountain

Slept to clouds low on the mountain and woke to snow peaks, aspens near summits still blazing gold.

A friend and I energize out of routine for a do-it-now jaunt to the high country, up a river canyon through bright yellow cottonwoods toward Rocky Mountain conifers--Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine, Colorado blue spruce. Resinous-fragrant and wild.

Where the great trees have fallen to landslide or avalanche or lightning or bark beetles of drought years, aspen groves rise first to the opening in the forest.

Quaking aspens, they're called, for the tremulous shimmering of their leaves. Populus tremuloides. Ecstasy on the wind.

Leaves now backlit by autumnal light, green-gold, red-gold, doubloon-gold, some soaring free in gusts of wind shimmering all around us, as clouds scud overhead, harbinger of more snow.

My friend has capacity for stillness, as well as sudden-path adventure, and first sees the mule deer just above us, browsing russet leaves of scrub oak. We go quiet.

Mama watches us, ears erect. Her twitch-tail youngling bounds through the grove. Un-threatened, the deer return to foraging nearby.

I wonder about the coming winter. Wild rose hips and kinnikinick berries have already been browsed by deer and probably elk and black bear. This seems early. Perhaps they know, as we may not, to prepare.

We walk the forest path, swirl along switchback roads, and come down off the mountain in advance of storm.

Next morning, the mountain sacred to the Pueblo and all who love this land, looms snow-covered, peak to plateau, and the range northward, wintry, cloud-crowned.

Watching full moon-set this morning--starlit cold--I marvel at the last summer flowers.