Beech Mtn. Valley Trail

A Partial List of Things I Saw While Walking Through Woods the Day After a Big Snowstorm

Bright, bright sun shining in a blue sky and reflecting off the snow covering everything, including the trees;
The trail ahead of me smooth and empty of human footprints;
Mink tracks leaping from a tree to the ground and hurrying away down the mountain;
A black seam of running water cutting across the trail and revealing dead beech leaves in the stream bed;
A solitary kinglet on a low hemlock branch;
A gigantic granite boulder coated with snow on one side, and perfectly clear on the other;
A pileated woodpecker whose black feathers jumped out in stark contrast to the white surroundings as it swooped through the woods, and the pile of tan wood chips piled on the snow under the dead snag where I had surprised her working;
The placid field of an empty parking lot with two long spruce shadows stretching all the way across it.

The trail ahead of me with no human footprints but mine;
The tracks of a snowshoe hare coming down steep talus and heading off through the woods in giant leaps, yards apart;
Snow blowing down off the trees backlit by the sun and sparkling like glitter before disappearing;
The meandering trail of a vole, ending in a small hole where he suddenly burrowed down into the snow;
Each different type of tree with it’s own distinctive pattern of snow clinging to the grooves of its bark, from the scaly pattern of the white pine to the curled shavings of the birch;
Long Pond below me with dark blue choppy water, and beyond it Western Mountain crusted with snow covered trees, and beyond it an island floating on the ocean;
Another human, an artist who works with children who I knew and had not spoken to since before the pandemic;
My tracks in the snow, with his imprinted inside them as he followed my steps up the path;
The car by the shore of Long Pond, with mountains on either side, and gulls gliding in the strong wind between them.