Turned back by snow again

Yesterday I set out on a hike up to Revett Lake but found a good amount of snow within a mile above the trail head, and because I am quite familiar with that trail I knew that there would be deep snow banks on the higher part of the trail also and so I went no further. I’ll give it a couple more weeks. Here are a few photos of the lower part of the trail: it’s a very pretty trail and a beautiful lake.

The altitude is high enough that there are very few flowers blooming, but this little one is growing right in a small spring that issues from the hillside. I have probably seen the species before, but for some reason have never identified it, even though it really is a pretty little thing.

Small-leaved Montia ~ Montia parvifolia

The reason for my absence

There is a new love in my life. She arrived as a wonderful Valentine’s Day gift to our family and I was finally able to make the trip to meet her. Fortunately she inherited her good looks from her mother and father: she looks very much like her mother did when she was a baby. I won’t try to describe my feelings for her and her new family because this is a blog post and not a book.

Now I will re-enter the blog world again and slowly start trying to catch up with all I have missed in my absence. I expect that will be a little like entering a freeway into California traffic.

Away from the computer

For about the next two weeks I will be away from the computer. I will miss reading everyone’s blogs, but clearly not miss keeping up with the “news”.

Moonset

The Mission Mountains

Photo taken from the National Bison Range, western Montana

The thirteenth goose.

A part of the universe in which we find reality is not always joyful and the inevitable encounters with mortality are very real and very moving. We each deal with those encounters in our own way. I have recently experienced such an encounter and my response to it has been very personal and unique to only myself and I prefer to let it remain so.

Please consider one of my previous posts written in December of 2006:

Early this morning a flight of Canadian geese could be seen over the river in their familiar “V” pattern, but this time something was not quite right: instead of even pairs, there were only thirteen. These beautiful big birds mate for life, and if one loses its mate, it will usually take another the following year, but seeing an uneven number in a “V” during the winter has always produced a feeling of sadness for me.

So, for the thirteenth goose, this:

The beat of gray wings
on a cold gray sky,
and a space in the “V”
for a time now gone by.
Your life-mate is gone
and the winter is long:
there’s a void in your life
and a tear in your song.
I know your sorrow,
or if sorrow’s not known,
then loneliness;
feathered grief of its own.
When the grass next turns green
and the gray sky turns blue,
a new life-mate, then,
is my fain for you.

It is now time for me to resume public contact through “Montana Outdoors” and to express as best I can my encounters with the beautiful things in the natural world. Please understand my absence.