the buffalo plateau

///

no place to be backpacking/ make it up as you go/ summit plateau of Abiathar Peak, Pilot Peak in distance/ make it up as you go, pt. 2/ valley of Soda Butte Creek/ forks of Cache Creek from the Thunderer/ Abiathar Peak, southwest ridge/ ridge of volcanic tuff/ Phellodon niger/ weasel– coat just beginning to transition to winter white, starting with his nose/ petrified wood in Amphitheater Creek

Crandall loop, pt. 3

///

Closed Mountain cirque/ alpine dusty maiden/ looking south from Closed Mountain/ petrified cone and needles from a once-tropical Wyoming forest/ gabbro core of the Hurricane Plateau/ avalanche path bowling alley/ going home

Crandall loop, pt. 2

///

Crandall loop, pt. 1

///

///

Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they are always present.

I’m not perfect. I think more highly of snow and ice than love. It’s easier for me to be interested in mathematics than to have affectation for my fellow human beings. But I am anchored in something in life that is constant. You can call it a sense of orientation; you can call it whatever you like. I’m standing on a foundation and have no farther to fall. It could be that I haven’t managed to organize my life very well. But I always have a grip– with at least one finger at a time– on absolute space. That’s why there’s a limit to how far the world can twist out of joint, and to how badly things can go before I find out.

One of the things you can learn from snow is the way great forces and catastrophes can always be found in miniature in daily life.

If I’ve desired and sought out brief periods of solitude and introspection, it has always been in order to return to the social group as a stronger person. But I haven’t been able to find that group.

Nothing was more reassuring to me than the knowledge that I would die. In these moments of clarity– and you see yourself clearly only when you see yourself as a stranger– all despair, all gaiety, all depression vanish and are replaced by calm. For me death was not something scary or a state of being or an event that would happen to me. It was an ally in the effort to be mentally present.

The white fields where the snow has settled form hexagons in the dark. We’re running through the universe.

///

from Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, 1993

One more from before the snow: the way to Pelican Cone.