In the northern Rockies, winter snows bring a flurry of hope

My father and I wade through knee-deep snow in December. Evening rushes into the ravine we climb, half the canyon cloaked in shade. The snow that softened in the sun is already freezing in the forest’s shadow. 

Here, 500 feet above the Blackfoot River in western Montana, winter has arrived with long, dark nights, single-digit temperatures, and three feet of snow. The elk and deer have moved to south-facing slopes at lower elevations, and the only tracks we see in the silent woods were left by ruffed grouse, pine squirrels, and a lone bull moose heading for a heavily timbered ridge. The raspy croak of a raven splits the gray sky.

“This snow is so good,” Dad says as he catches his breath and looks up at the towering ponderosa pines. “And there’s so much winter ahead. It looks like next year will be a good one.”

Here in the Intermountain West, life revolves around snowpack. A reservoir of high peaks catches the majority of the region’s precipitation in the form of snow, while months’ worth of freezing temperatures and darkness dam the moisture until the spring thaw releases water into creeks and rivers that swell with seasonal floods, leaving behind a green spring and early summer landscape. 

However, as Western winters truncate with climate change and snowpack across the Rocky Mountains shrinks, watersheds that rely on snowmelt have been reduced to a trickle. Dry drainages are littered with fire-susceptible timber. Nonnative invasive species like cheatgrass quickly spread across hillsides no longer blanketed for months in snow. European brown trout swim up creeks too warm for native cutthroat.

Even with this aggressive warming trend, one that many of us can recognize in our short lifetimes, the cold, dark nights arrive in the North with hope. Not hope for the reversal of such warming weather patterns, but a hope of the present moment – that the immediate winter will spare us some respite from the summer to follow. Maybe this winter will bring good storms that dump many feet of snow on the mountains. Maybe with the days growing shorter, the freeze will happen sooner. How much more time will that buy the arctic grayling? The ruffed grouse? The glacier lilies? The Alpine fescue? The Clark Fork River? 

It’s understandable to bemoan the gloom of night that arrives at 4:30 in the afternoon, the ice on the road, yet these irritations are human concerns. When we expand the concept of our community to include the more-than-human world, we realize the need for darkness and the cold that accompanies it in places like northern Montana.

The hope for a cold winter often begins during fire season in the heat of summer – when the smoke from burning pines and firs chokes the air, and the sun is a red eye in the sky. If the smoke lingers into September and October, the first snowfall can feel like a gift. 

What’s more, the hope of an early snow and growing dark means that a long winter might result in a good water year and fewer fires.

As the late-fall nights begin to stretch, I wake in the mornings to find the snow line on the mountain peaks has crept closer to the valley floor. The darkness seemingly gifting us water. And it’s here, during those hours we humans huddle in our lighted rooms, that I imagine every hour of darkness, every hour of cold, every inch of snow buys more time. That those minute measurements will mean the bull trout won’t feel baked in their own river, that the sandhill cranes won’t return to find their nesting grounds dry, that the fires won’t start in May. It gives me hope that maybe next year will be better than the last. Maybe not for the next decade, but maybe just next year. Irrational, yes, but what form of hope doesn’t step across the line realists draw? 

And when I write the words us or we, I mean the community of the Northern Rockies, which touches another community, that touches yet another community, building outward, and, finally, touching yours. Hasn’t the smoke from the West reached the East Coast? Isn’t it all our air?

As we enter the heart of another winter, anticipation builds. Again, it’s somewhat strange to hope for something so immediate – just this winter – when one can hope far more extravagantly. Maybe this is because those who live here with acute awareness, who know what it means to have ash falling on them as they walk from their car to the grocery store, understand how precious a winter can be. How every hour of darkness might give us an hour more to enjoy the light.

Back on the mountain, the color of the forest has shifted to a gray-tinted blue. The last moment of day before darkness begins its long march toward morning. A storm has come down from the peak, and it’s as if night has become a cloud to chase Dad and me back to our vehicle. The fringes of a snow shower overtake us, and, with the flakes, a cold that causes me to shiver, even under the heft of my Woolrich coat. 

“How many inches do you think will fall tonight?” I ask Dad.

“3 or 4,” he says as he unlocks the car.

“Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll get 5.”