The seasons, they go round n round

We witnessed the change from winter to spring in a day's time. Though still frosty and cold, a clear blue sky rose over our tarp the next morning and revealed at last the landscape we'd planted ourselves in. Hills sprouted out of the rolling terrain, covered in boulders and jagged rock faces. Colored in between the rocky formations were yellow tufts of California-blond grass, all uniformly windswept westward. In the distance, hills dropped off into deep canyons and more rocky peaks rose behind those. The same hike we'd taken the day before, during an eerie winter mist, now proved to be a path cut into the beautiful middle of no where, tucked serenely beneath a cloudless blue sky. Icy snow, victim to the sun, clung desperately to patches of grass and the ice that had filled puddles loosened at the edges of the holes they occupied, now succumbing to the inevitable heat of the Spring sun.

The water in the river was gentle and clean, even as it cascaded over rocky drop-offs in a picturesque fall of stone, carved and shaped over years by the river's subtle but persistent erosion. A few of us took a plunge in to the freezing runoff, myself excluded. We pumped the melted snow and winter rain into out water bottles and trekked through perilous paths of boulders on our bare feet to explore every angle of the running river.