Snow isn’t really a prerequisite for winter. Or for Christmas. Or, perhaps, for life itself. But when it sparkles like diamonds under the full moon, or in the slanting rays of morning sun; when its softness invites you to lie in it, whether you make a snow angel or not; when its silence creates a dimension of reverence, it becomes easy to connect with this most magical of seasons.
I don’t think it necessary to love winter in order to appreciate its beauty. Wherever we live, many of us are probably “dreaming of a white Christmas,” or sending holiday cards featuring snow scenes, or decorating trees with tinsel connoting icicles and lights illuminating the season’s darkness. The charm of the season may have as much to do with imagination — with memory — as it does with actuality.
But connecting with winter’s beauty is natural when you love the season. Skiers, for instance, love winter. Often traveling between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in order to live in perpetual winter, skiers are not unbiased commentators on the season. They can be trusted only by other skiers.
The truth about skiing, though, is that, at its most perfect, it is an experience of the sublime, of floating on clouds in effortless connection with the mountain, Earth and sky. The skier soars, every breath a link with the Earth’s breath. “My skis are the things that give me my wings, and make me an eagle and free.” At the end of the 1950s, the late folk singer Bob Gibson lived in Aspen, Colorado, skiing daily, writing a perfect song. Sixty years later, on a day of unflawed snow, I find myself singing it, even if I’m not on skis.
Where I live, winter is a serious event, with temperatures sometimes low enough that the air itself freezes. Deadly, totally gorgeous, the frozen air glitters, becomes visible, hangs across the Earth like a veil of diamonds. In this depth of cold, it isn’t possible to remain outside for long. Even protected by layers of clothing, by a balaclava, by scarves, one’s nostrils freeze. Here is profound beauty that literally takes one’s breath away.
In a somewhat warmer cold, I walk my dog along the morning creek. From here, I can watch winter progress in the formation of ice droplets. Clinging to winter-dormant plants, to leaves of grass, to haphazard twigs, the droplets become the agents of metamorphosis. Creekside vegetation mutates into crystal; the crystal glitters, rainbowed by the early sun. Ice forms at the creek’s edges, spreads wider as water molecules attach themselves to it, becoming ice themselves. The ice grows, expands from one bank to the other. For a while, darker water flowing beneath the ice remains visible. Then, new snow falls, covering the creek. The next day’s brilliant sun melts the snow. In overnight cold, the snowmelt freezes, thickens the ice along the edges. The pattern, recurring throughout the winter, echoes the whole of nature’s processes: day and night, sun and cold, water and air, all acting upon one another.
If I sat by the creek for 365 days and nights, I would understand how the Earth works.
Snow makes it easy to follow animal tracks. The necessity is to keep in mind that melting snow and wind alter tracks. Being tricked into seeing tracks that might once have belonged to a bobcat as now indicating an obvious mountain lion is not unusual. Maybe winter simply lends itself to mistaken identities. A friend skiing in Northern Montana once told me about seeing a woman in a fur coat sitting at the edge of a ski trail. Concerned she might have been injured, he skied across the slope to offer help. As he approached, a grizzly bear, out of her den on a sunny, warm winter day, got up and moved down the far side of the slope. I, too, have a personal moment of error. I was cross-country skiing in Yellowstone National Park when it seemed time for lunch. My preferred spot is always a sunlit boulder I can lean against. Noticing a perfect boulder a little ahead — large, rounded, lightly dusted with snow, facing the sun — I skied toward it. As I neared, my boulder rose up onto four legs and walked away. A bison, resting in the midday sun.
But winter is about more than wildlife, more than tracks in snow or the intensity of cold and the brilliance of a brief northern sun. With or without snow, winter seems to me a season for introspection, for reflection. A time for turning inward, for hunkering down, it is a time to get things done. Indoor things. Maybe that’s a natural part of closing in on a new year, a time to think of new beginnings, to make changes, to let go of all those things belonging to an old year, an old life, old ways of thinking.
Hunkering down. The fact of winter offers simple creature comforts that seem to me the meaning of home. In cold climates, forced inside, building a fire, reveling in its warmth and watching the brittle brilliance of the world from the warm safety of shelter is luxury, no matter how simple the shelter. This luxury, too, is part of winter. The ability to be warm, safe, protected from all that nature conjures, all that humankind attempts to tame, is also an entrance into winter. Putting yourself at risk when you enter nature isn’t the only way to make it worthwhile. Nature — winter nature — is also a spectator sport: watching from a window as snow falls, lies heavily on the evergreens, clothes the bare limbs of deciduous trees, highlights the tops of near and distant mountains. The quiet is huge then, huger than the world you see from your window, huger than the mind can embrace. In early darkness, the universe gives us permission to rest, to dream. (Well, some of us. Others have to spend inordinate time pulling on long underwear, snow boots, down parkas, wool hats, warm mittens in order to take the dog for a walk. It takes longer to get dressed than it does to walk the dog.)
Winter snow is not a luxury belonging only to northerners. In Arizona, the Santa Catalina Mountains around Tucson, the White Mountains, the Mogollon Rim, Flagstaff and the San Francisco Peaks, Payson, Pinetop-Lakeside, Strawberry, Pine and Prescott are all native to snow. It falls on the Four Peaks, so that even Phoenix residents may be offered a fleeting vision of the winter dream. Once, on a winter trip to the White Mountains to look for wolves, I passed by the Sunrise Park Resort ski area. There was a great deal of snow that year, and the ski area, owned by the White Mountain Apache Tribe, was in full swing. Farther up the road, a herd of elk wound in and out of the forest. Although we saw no wolves, we found wolf tracks along the road. We were going their direction, which strikes me as the right direction.
It was winter when I made my first hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Snow capped some of the Canyon’s higher formations visible from the South Rim, as well as the whole of the South Rim itself. It stayed with us down a fair number of turns on the South Kaibab Trail until, suddenly, winter simply dissolved. In temperature and trail conditions, it was as if there was an edge between winter and summer, with no intervening spring — a new way for a northerner to understand seasons.
Grand Canyon National Park, along with a number of other sites in Arizona and around the world, is a member of the International Dark Sky Places Program — administered by the International Dark-Sky Association, which is headquartered in Tucson. These are places where artificial light does not interfere with the night sky, rendering star views extraordinary in all seasons. Still, the difference between summer and winter plays out in heaven as it does on Earth. In summer, the Northern Hemisphere faces the center of our galaxy, where billions upon billions of stars, galactic dust and moisture formed by the season’s heat often render the night sky hazy. But winter, when the Northern Hemisphere looks away from the center of our galaxy and toward one of its spiral arms, is a time of great clarity. With a smaller amount of interference from all the other stuff going on out there, winter “starscapes” are spectacular. Although the arm, known as the Orion Arm, is one of the Milky Way’s lesser arms, the constellation Orion is one of the sky’s most prominent, visible from everywhere. There may be fewer stars in winter, but there are, most likely, as many as anyone needs.
Because Arizona’s skies are relatively free of light pollution, it hosts a number of observatories, some not far from ski areas. They’re normally open to the public in winter, but with COVID-19 still causing changed schedules, this winter it would be wise to check. Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff; Kitt Peak National Observatory, on the Tohono O’odham Nation,
56 miles from Tucson; Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, near Tucson; and Apache-Sitgreaves Observatory, in Heber-Overgaard, are all near snow country. (Although even I have to admit that snow isn’t a necessity when looking at stars.)
Stars are guides. Early cultures identified them with gods and spirits, related them to seasons, then let the stars guide them to the necessities of those seasons. Mariners crossing oceans charted courses by them. So did explorers wandering unknown landscapes. Perhaps the most famous of star guides is the one leading the three kings to Bethlehem.
The deepest winter, the time of lengthening nights culminating in the winter solstice, is, for so many of Earth’s peoples, a sacred time. It is as if what is most sacred is born of long, dark nights — of the movement of the sun away from warmth, then back toward it, a reassurance the darkness is not permanent. Perhaps it is the long nights that bring us in relation to the spiritual, the cold that allows us to notice our survival, the density of starlight that turns our eyes toward heaven. Perhaps it is simply the miracle of light that engages us in the darkness of winter. Stars, moon, the sparkle of snow when light falls on it, the cold glitter of ice, the spray of light issuing from a winter cabin, a warming fire at a winter campsite or in our own fireplace, the dancing lights on decorated trees and houses and windows in celebration of the season — all these are beacons in the wilderness of dark.
The hours of darkness reverse. The hours of sunlight grow. In the miracle of a renewing sun, we see our own renewal.