Читать книгу Shaped by Snow. Defending the Future of Winter онлайн

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On this particular occasion, I had made the effort. He was in between rafting trips and couldn’t leave the company’s home base in Green River. The timing wasn’t perfect, but it would be our only chance to be together for the next two months. So, in a spontaneous midnight decision, I risked the dark drive to the desert. That night, the summer heat retreated from my skin, the night grew longer and darker, and I felt frost creeping onto the window pane. That night, I dreamed of snow.

Despite the lazy days of the solstice, which draw on forever under the wide, yawning expanse of the sky, summer passes quickly, as summers often do. Upon returning to my home in Salt Lake City, the heat of the valley was nearly as stifling as the heat of the desert where I had said goodbye to Colin.

In Northern Utah, where the Salt Lake Valley butts up against the barrel chest of the Wasatch Mountain Range, summer can sometimes seem too long in the approach, everyone aching for the landscape to push through the hump of the mud season. Yet once it arrives, the heat that presses in around the scrub oak and sagebrush of the valley can be overwhelming, suffocating. It’s in the mountains where the cooler air collects, settling on the granite rocks that give structure to creeks and streams, slithering between pillars of pines, wafting the rich, intoxicating scent of soil into the forest breezes. I crave these cool currents.