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

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She nodded, her eyes unblinking in her pale face.

“Ready.”

It felt as though hours passed, but we were beneath the cover of the trees within two minutes. As the adrenaline faded we began comprehending how cold we were. The declining path was flooded with hail that had partially melted into slush, and we slipped and fell all three miles to the house.

My grandparents and father were waiting anxiously when we arrived. My dad had found his trail, more protected than the one we were on, and made it back two hours before us. My mother and I were both so weak it was all we could do to strip out of our wet clothes and into the dry ones they gave us. I felt flushed and nauseous, and a headache was attacking my head and neck. My limbs ached. It took hours before we felt good enough to drive home.

I had experienced unexpected Wasatch storms that had sent me running for cover many times in my life, but none as ferocious as that.

Breathing

There is a place at Snowbird named after my grandpa that’s home to some of the most beautiful wildflowers in the Wasatch. It’s a small, cupped hand, the upper cirque of a glacier long gone, called Junior’s Powder Paradise. Powder Paradise, its common name, is the upper section of Mineral Basin, the same place where my grandparents posed for a picture among the wildflowers. A ridgeline leading to Twin Peaks encircles almost 180 degrees of Powder Paradise. In the summer it contains a lazy stream which, due to high arsenic levels, flashes bright copper back at the sun. Dense, green moss encroaches upon the shores of the stream. The water gathers at the lip of the cup, becoming a small pool before ducking under the basin’s rim, disappearing into the mountain, and reemerging as small, babbling waterfalls on the other side.