Light On Two Sides of Every Room (Pattern 159)

Spring is in the air, and in the trees and bushes. But there is still four to five feet of snow on the ground here in the village. It is decreasing about an inch everyday, more or less, depending on sun, rain and temperature. This morning I awoke to clear skies and about an inch of new snow that had fallen over night.

Chalet 6 from Chalet 14

This is a view across Chalet Hill Road from the SE corner of Chalet 14 toward Chalet 6. The snow bank in the foreground is from the snow that slid off the roof over the winter, and is still about seven feet above grade. The tree is a hardy, resilient maple - a vine maple, perhaps - that gets bent by the roof snow each year.  Only a couple weeks ago the snow was high enough that it obscured the window. 

Chalets 10, 9, & 8 from Chalet 14

This is a view from the NW corner of Chalet 14 - from the north window. In this picture, Chalet 10 is to the left (it has a clipped or Dutch gable); Chalet 9 is in the middle, and Chalet 8 is to the right. Martins Ridge is behind all... This window is in the kitchen of Chalet 14, on the NNW corner facing north, and on the gable end wall - so it usually does not get obscured by snow. The WNW window of the kitchen (over the sink and facing West) is on the eave side of the roof and has been obscured by snow for weeks.

About half of the windows therefore remain clear of snow, and half are obscured. We can be thankful that the original designer(s) did not use an inappropriate kind of roof form here (say, a fully hipped roof), or all the windows might get covered. To be sure, much of the deepest accumulation off the eaves happens on the uphill side of the buildings: the downhill sides have a greater elevation change between grade and window sill. And given the village is on the north side of the valley, those windows that remain less obstructed are on the sunnier south sides. A happy coincidence? I think not.

I have inferred, but not yet explicitly stated that the rooms on the main floors of the Chalets have windows on two sides. [The upper floors have windows only at the gables, as they usually do not have dormers (at least on the smaller chalets).] This is a rather wonderful daylighting strategy, and enables us to have good light without turning the lights on - especially noticeable in winter when the snow bounces a lot of light into the buildings even on overcast days.

I should also mention that Chalet 14 is the least well day-lit building of all the chalets: it sits in a bowl shaded by trees, and it is still wonderful.

This configuration of having windows on two sides of a room is an important traditional design strategy. In A Pattern Language, the authors state:

The importance of this pattern lies partly in the social atmosphere it creates in the room. Rooms lit on two sides, with natural light, create less glare around people and objects; this lets us see things more intricately; and most important, it allows us to read in detail the minute expressions that flash across people's faces, the motion of their hands . . . and thereby understand, more clearly, the meaning they are after. The light on two sides allows people to understand each other.In a room lit on only one side, the light gradient on the walls and floors inside the room is very steep, so that the part furthest from the window is uncomfortably dark, compared with the part near the window. Even worse, since there is little reflected light on the room's inner surfaces, the interior wall immediately next to the window is usually dark, creating discomfort and glare against this light. In rooms lit on one side, the glare which surrounds people's faces prevents people from understanding one another.

Pattern 159 

A Pattern Language was published in the middle 1970s and presented notions about the built environment that were successful because they resolved or mitigated social tensions. It is more than just an architectural cookbook, it is a way to start thinking about design wholistically and humanely. The primary author, Christopher Alexander, went on to write a series of books that quite clearly used A Pattern Language as a point of departure, culminating in the publication of The Nature Of Order. The notion of pattern languages influenced other fields as well, especially software design. But the Pattern Language remains the most accessible of the set. What it does is lead us from prosaic kinds of buildings to ones that become poetical in density of meaning, interpretation, and experience. It is very cost-effective design, too, because we start getting more bang for our buck. Chalet 14 has to have windows - by having them on two sides of each room, we get the light that makes this a place apart. But it is also anchors this building deeply and securely to this place. 

Don't take my word for it - check out a copy or purchase a copy and have at it. You will recognize why you like some places and why you don't like other places. It will make you think differently about the next house you want, or how you want to remodel your present house if you like the location. If you don't want to pop for the book, think about subscribing to the website - the link to the quote will take you there. 
Again, from Pattern 159:

When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.
Therefore:
Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.

Pattern 159 

By mid-morning today, the fresh snow had come off the trees and was dripping down off the edges of the eaves. 

Spryte Rider & the Eleventh Essential

About thirty-eight years and a couple months ago, I was involved in a mountain climbing incident. Not an accident, but an incident - which are preventable. The proximate causes of the incident were: 

1) being 17 years old; and
2) having that young male sense of invulnerability
3) making some stupid decisions; followed by
4) some better decisions; while
5) being on a sketchy part of a mountain; during
6) a long stretch of bad weather.

Toward the end of the interlude, we were able to get to a better part of the mountain when the weather improved. A thousand or so vertical feet up the mountain, we saw an orange snow vehicle let some climbers off, and then it turned and made its way down to us. The passenger door opened, and a mountaineer got out and looked us over. Then he asked "Are you the climbers we are looking for?" 

One thing led to another, and we accepted a ride back to Timberline Lodge. The tracked vehicle was a Thiokol Spryte, and I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. And I decided that someday, I would like to live somewhere that we needed one to get around in winter. 

Twelve years later, Laura and I spent a year at Holden Village. One of my responsibilities that winter was driving a Spryte. And it was cool. I was hoping to get to drive it this winter too, but alas, have not. 

Holden Villages Thiokol Spryte

The Spryte has a cabover body, with an inline six cylinder gas engine between the driver and the passenger. Direction and speed are controlled by two sticks, like a bulldozer. It is noisy inside the cabin - ear protection is more than recommended. The tracks are forty-four inches wide each, and the overall width is about eight feet. This Spryte has a six way tilt blade on the front, just like the one that was on Mt. Hood back in 1976. I sometimes wonder if they are the same one... 

The incident netted us a ride in a Army Reserve Huey down through the clouds and a stay in a hospital for frostbite, and perhaps to feed us up a bit. We had been up there a good while, burning calories that we could not replace. 

My older sister - a newly licensed nurse - came to visit me in hospital, and washed my greasy hair while my hands were swathed in bandages. My mom and dad came too - a long drive; I was not too proud to tell them I loved them. A few weeks later, my uncle Jim came by, and picked me up (literally) and set me on the banks of the Cowlitz River and we netted smelt - something people have been doing there for millennia. 

I missed about six weeks of school that winter. But a few short weeks after the incident, we attended a debriefing on the Search and Rescue (S&R) effort. It was pretty humbling. Afterward, the searcher who had met us with the Spryte asked us to step aside to a private alcove for a moment. I figured some choice words and phrases would be given to us and I was prepared to say Yes Sir and No Sir and Thank You Sir. 

But all that I needed to say was Thank You. Dave Paulson gave us a poem by Rene Daumal, and I have kept it ever since. I wish I could tell him what a great gift that poem has been for me. But I think, that like many or perhaps all mountaineers, he knew that already. 

The Eleventh Essential

"You cannot stay on the summit forever. You have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this. What is above has seen what is below. What is below has not seen from above. One climbs, one sees, one descends, one can no longer see, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions based on what one has seen from above."

-Rene Daumal

Our Mom & Dad, and our aunts and uncles raised us to have a healthy respect for and a deep appreciation of places that are apart, that have stream music, where the chickerees chip, and the voice of the turtle - or at least the voices of the ringneck dove and the raven - are the loudest things. Mom & Dad belonged to The Mountaineers, and made sure we well-educated in the ways of the mountains too: I was probably five when I learned to not step on rope. We kids new enough to be ready when we went out.  Even now, it is hard for me to go for even a day hike without having the ten essentials with me. The eleventh essential is never left behind. 

Spring Time

When does spring arrive?

 The solar calendar has spring arriving on or about the vernal equinox – March 21 or so in the northern hemisphere. The boat builder and raconteur Robb White says that in southern Georgia and along the Gulf Coast of Florida winter might only last a few weeks and spring arrives in January. Someone who lives in Jasper or Edmonton has no doubt, some other experience and with shorter summers.

The Ides of March has come and gone and I think I have begun to see when spring arrived here in the valley of Railroad Creek. – for it has arrived, I am more certain everyday.

For me, spring arrived on the mornings of the 26^th and the 27^th of February, but I did not spec it at the time.I walked out the door Wednesday morning at about 0715 and onto the top layer of snow (about five feet above the ground). It was a grayish day still, with a high overcast: thin clouds through which blue sky was visible. My ears picked up the first hints of spring – bird song, twittering, tweeting, chattering. A flock of birds was flying up valley, and I heard them before I saw them. Twenty or thirty silhouettes wove a tapestry of song – I could not make out details against the early morning light, but they wove in and among each other with bright motions. The songs were familiar, but I could not place them.

I walked out onto the snow the next day too, at a slightly different time  - I do not recall if it was earlier or later; but it was perfectly timed to catch the same experience. I do not know if they were the exact same birds, but the songs and the braided flight path was the same. And I still could not make out details visually.

This morning I looked out the window after getting dressed and opening the curtains, and saw three or five birds on the ground near our neighbors Christmas tree adjacent to the porch – saw them and heard the same songs. Juncos!

Dark Eyed Junco

I should have recognized these birds - for the last ten or twelve years a pair has nested on the beam supporting the rafters of our front porch, raising at least two and sometimes three broods each summer. We see them out the windows of the living room, bringing twigs and grasses to rebuild the nest. And then one day we only see the male, mostly. If we quietly look, with slow motions, we can see them in the nest. We try not to use that door, but they become accustomed to us, at least somewhat. At some point thereafter we hear tiny cheeps, and then little chick faces peering at us over the edge of the nest. 

When the babies come out of the nest, their first flights are fluttery and direction is kind of random (hardly any tail feathers yet!). They usually end up in or under the shrubs near the front door, and get fed at that location. For the next day or two, there is mad motion of young birds going here and there and the adult birds going to them. By about the third or fourth day they seem to be flying better, and sticking together better as well. And then they all disappear for a few weeks. The parent birds return alone, and the brood raising starts again. 

We still have plenty of snow on the ground, but it is decreasing by about an inch every day and more when it rains like it is raining this morning. Now that my eyes are open, I see other signs of spring: the spruce tree flowers have bloomed, and the buds cover the snow under the spruce trees. The cottonwoods along the banks of the creek have little buds. When I was home last weekend, the magnolia buds looked big and fuzzy. We planted that variety of magnolia because it blooms around the time of the boys' birthdays. In Eugene, it bloomed closer to St. Patricks Day, but in Gig Harbor it usually blooms between the boys birthdays. 

Spring is sprung.

References
Junco
Dark-eyed Junco

Snow Much Fun!

Walking on water is no great trick, at least for part of the year around here. For a brief time in late winter and early spring, the snow on the ground has consolidated enough to walk on without snowshoes or skis – at least on cold mornings. After noon, and especially on sunny days, the snowpack warms up enough that walking is replaced by ‘post-holing’ – stepping on snow away from the paths that have been packed down leads to a nearly immediate sinking sensation. We learn not to run: if we posthole while moving fast our momentum (“Inertia is a property of matter!”) will lead to at least a face plant, or maybe injuries to bones and joints from being bent where they should not.

Every season here is the best season. But winter comes with a special gift, as liquid water gets replaced with more solid stuff. This last winter was strange, in some ways (and yes, I am speaking in past tense because spring has come to Railroad Creek Valley): after so little snow that we were on track to set a record for the least annual snow, we got about 140 inches - mostly during February – enough to bring us up to our average of about 250 plus inches. Seemed like it snowed every day, and snowed hard, too!

Holden is situated between a couple major avalanche chutes, and there are countless others up and down valley. In the village itself, we need to be aware of ‘roofalanches’ – the snow that slides off the roofs. We expect snow accumulation on the roofs up to four or six feet deep (consolidated – more on that in a bit); and snow loads of about 230 PSF (pound per square foot). Many of the buildings here have big enough roofs that means there is about fifteen tons of snow up in the air. When it lets loose and slides down and then drops – well it is not only spectacular, but also somewhat dangerous. Seven tons of snow (one side of the roof) could do some damage to one’s person, or to other persons as well: kids here learn to stay out of roofalanche zones, and adults learn to look our for kids that might forget.

‘Nough said. If pictures are worth thousands of words, then, let us lay on, MacDuff! (Can I call you MacDuff?)

West Side of Chalet 14 - Up to Mid-January 2014

West Side of Chalet 14 End of February 2014

The preceding views of Chalet 14 are kind of a touchstone for me: the view of the back or side porch  is what I see when I return to where Alex and I are living this year. Alex, on the other hand, usually goes between school and chalet via the front porch. So: a view of the front porch from the north, and what it looks like on the porch:

Chalet 14 from Chalet Circle:
view of Copper Peak (right)
and Copper Basin (center)

Chalet 14 Front Porch, looking toward Chalet Hill Road

Bent Snow, Chalet 14 East Side at Front Porch

As the snow builds up beside the house, one looks out the window and sees solid walls of snow. Sometimes, out of the corner of  my eye, I saw the snow and thought "snow cave" - with some mixed feelings even thirty-eight years after living in a series of snow caves. But the feelings are mostly good - snow caves have been, are, and will be places of refuge and security. Cozy in a way, and the closest I will ever get to living in water like a cetacean, polar bear or other marine mammal. 

A while back I gave a matins (brief reflection or devotional in the morning) in which I used the phrase 'plastic deformation' in regard to the snow here. Afterwards, an engineer who was in village complimented me (I think) by saying he never would have expected to hear that phrase in that setting. Everyone - sing with me! (You know the tune: I'm too sexy for my shirt...") "I am as geeky as the plastic pen protector (in my shirt pocket)..." And please -  do not ask me if I actually have a plastic pen protector. It could get kind of embarrassing.

Stairway over the Triangle Garden
Between Lodges 2 & 3

Our winter paths are different from our summer paths because they need to skirt the roofalanche zones. Consequently they can present challenges such as slopes too steep to walk comfortably (and sliding is not an option sometimes and for some people; the little kids do it all the time, though). We have been cutting steps in the snow for decades, but LED rope lights add a bit of charm and make the path not only safer but somewhat delightful as well.

The larger buildings in the village tend to be unheated over the winter as well, due to our limited power. We could heat them with, say, biomass - as we do heat most of the buildings. But since we have limited power for cooking and heating, we limit the village population as well - which helps minimize transportation issues as well. So the larger, colder buildings accumulate snow on their roofs which usually does not slide off until it gets warm, or rains (and really, those things tend to arrive together anyway). The presence of liquid water at the zone where the snow meets the metal roof will eventually let the roof slabs slide.

Lodge 2 After the Roof Slabs Slid
(note cap of snow left at ridge)

Roof Slabs Slid - North Side Lodge 2 from East
(about seven tons of snow, falling about 16 feet)

Earlier I mentioned accumulation and consolidation of snow on these roofs. Many roofs did not slide all winter until a week or two ago, so the four or five feet of snow on them was actually the consolidated slab of the total snowfall - say, 250 inches compressed to fifty or sixty inches. Dense and heavy stuff. Beautiful.

We are only about six days from equinox, I think, and the longer days seem to give me more energy. So I will go burn off some of my extra energy, and wish you joy of the same. - Matt

Back To The Well - For A Piece Of Wood

Matins

0800

Thursday 

2014-03-13

Some wells we keep returning to because what we find there is not only essential, but refreshing and revitalizing. I keep coming back to certain writers – Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, Ursula LeGuin, Willam Stafford, Joanna Macy… I have pulled buckets from these wells and shared them as water this year. But if the matins I have presented have a theme, it is that of country – not music, not ‘tis of thee – but the common unity of land, plants, and animals, and the water and air that moves through us all, and the sunlight that drives the winds and weather and hydrologic cycles in and through which we have our being. 

In the essay “Living Dry” Wallace Stegner writes:

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c, anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.

Therefore I ask your indulgence if I sometimes speak in terms of my personal experience, feelings, and values, and put the anecdotal and normative ahead of the statistical, and emphasize personal judgements and trial syntheses rather than the analysis that necessarily preceded them. In doing so, I shall be trying to define myself as well as my native region. “

Where The Bluebird Sings To The Lemonade Springs,

pp. 58-59

Driving to Chelan from Gig Harbor this last Monday morning, we left in the dark and travelled in the heavy rains of late winter. Up Highway 18 past Tiger Mountain, one of the Issaquah Alps, remnants of a mountain range older than the Cascades mountains that stretch from Mt. Si near North Bend to a smaller peak next to Hood’s Canal. Thence up to Snoqualmie Pass, with the heavy rain changing to heavy snow. By the time we were ten to twelve miles east of Snoqualmie Pass, we were moving into the range shadow of the Cascades and into the more arid intermountain west. The trees were a mix of Douglas fir, pine, spruce, and hemlock, with cottonwoods replacing the alders along the water courses.

Holden is also about ten or twelve miles from the crest of the Cascade range, and we live in a woodland of similar mixed species. But of all the trees here, the doug fir stands out.

In an attempt to bring more than the sense of hearing to this matins, I have brought a baulk of wood to pass around that we may bring other senses to bear upon this notion of place and country. It is an ordinary piece of Douglas fir which I pulled out of the firewood stack when I stoked the furnace in the dark hours this morning. We burn literally hundreds of cords of this wood in this valley, and have perhaps come to take this wood for granted. That would be a mistake. It is a wood of rather extraordinary properties, and grows nowhere else in the world. [Pass the wood around.]

A Baulk of Wood for Breakfast (Matins)

This wood is valued for its long straight grain and moderately easy workability. It is pretty tough for a softwood, and it gets harder as it gets older. Many carpenters have found they need to drill pilot holes in old fir framing. Shipwrights love it for masts and planking: the largest wooden ships ever made were made with Doug-fir. These scond-tallest trees in the world can reach four hundred or more feet tall – good for masts, and only replaced when we learned how to make steel thin enough and strong enough to replace wood. Some shipwrights say that if we did not have wood, we would have had to invent it and call it miracle W or some such. Lucky for us, though, it grows on trees.

In the rest of the world, this wood is known as Oregon pine, but it is not a pine. The common name of Doug-fir is also misleading because it is not a true fir either, not of the Abies species. The binomial name Psuedotsuga menziesii hints at another confusing thing – tsuga calls out the hemlock family, but it is not a hemlock either, as the ‘psuedo-‘ prefix should tell us. And finally, the species name of menziesii refers to the naturalist Archibald Menzies who actually figured out that this tree was not a pine, nor a fir, nor a hemlock, but something more subtly unique.

Take a look at the piece of wood wending its way through the dining hall. It has a naturally occurring salmonish color – a beautiful kind of coincidence, as the range of the tree pretty much overlaps the range of the local anadromous salmon and trout. The salmon go out into the ocean, and pickup nutrients that are returned to the streams in which they were born – but that is a subject for another matins. The wood has a distinctive smell – perhaps even varying by watershed, solar exposure and and elevation, kind of like wine grapes. But I don’t know that for sure, I have not smelt nor tasted enough Doug-fir to say with certainty. This piece, unfortunately, was cut so long ago, and has been in the wood pile in the basement for so long it smells more dusty than Doug-firish.

The soils of these surrounding woodlands are not particularly fertile. Most of the biomass is in the trees themselves, where the chloroplast takes in the carbon dioxide from us animal-types, combines it with water and sunlight, sequesters the carbon in the wood cells and fibers, and returns the oxygen to the atmosphere.

Take a breath – go ahead. The oxygen molecules that we need may have come from a Doug-fir, they might have been part of the breath of a pine marten, or a western tanager, or maybe even a trout. At the level of our cellular respiration, our body uses the oxygen in several kinds of chemical reactions and then hooks excess carbon atoms onto the oxygen molecules and when we breathe out, we feed the plants around us. We are intimately connected to these trees, even as we are intimately connected to the soils of California’s central valley, or to the cornfields of Iowa, or to the wheat fields of Kansas.

The trees breath, we breathe.

We breathe each others breath.

In each other, we have our being.

Thich Nhat Hanh says that breathing well is a good thing to do. Let us breath in and out intentionally – holding the notion of ‘good’ in our minds as we breath in; and then the notion of ‘thanks’ as we breath out. Let us do this three times, maybe more if you need or enjoy the air.

[Breath: In: good. Out: thanks]

[Breath]

[Breath]

Go in peace. 

Sometimes An Exception Illustrates The Rule

Errata: 

Douglas-fir  - of particular interest is the section on how big these trees can grow, towards the end of the page.

The naturalist Archibald Menzies

The naturalist David Douglas

Playlist for today (Saturday 15 March): Dvorak's 'American' Quintet, some Greg Brown (live),
Compositional note: the format and content are not exactly as presented at matins this last Thursday morning. That morning I forgot to lead with the Stegner quote. So it is not quite the same as it was then, but then neither is the author. C'est la vie. 

"To Wake Up In Eden"

One morning in December I stepped out onto the front porch to see how the air felt, and to see if any new snow had dusted the old. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of movement – a dark brown critter with short legs, long nose and tail and the brightest dark eyes one could imagine was staring back at me from across the road at the base of Chalet 6’s porch. The pine marten regarded me for a moment and then went up the stairs onto the porch. It looked at me over the porch wall caprail, and through the scuppers – playing a kind of hide-and-seek or perhaps marten-in-the-box.

Martens have to be about the most intensely alive creatures ever: they this aura of wild energy that radiates in a way that is hard to describe. As they go about their business, they are absolutely still one instant and then in fluid motion the next.

Wallace Stegner describes an encounter with martens this way:

How is it to wake up in Eden? Our sleeping tents are pitched in a half circle facing the cliff and the east, but the weather is so fine that we sleep outside. Night after night we awake at odd hours to see the black sky with big bright stars burning holes in it. We watch the Dipper and Cassiopeia do their slow dance around the Pole Star, and the misshapen boat of the moon sail up and over and down. Finally, we wake to find the east lightening, going pink, the flat clouds in that direction taking fire. Lying snug, we wait until the sun surges up over mountains far to the east. The green-and-brown camp, the white tents, come clear, long shadows stretch, and on the cliff edge, haloed with pure light, the martens have appeared.

There are seven of them, half-grown, apparently left to amuse themselves when their mother takes off before dawn to forage. Their fur is a rich, sleek brown, their throats nearly white; their eyes are black buttons, their whiskers bristle and glisten, their bodies are so slim and undulant that they might be swimming instead of running. In the strong, flat light they appear to leave streams of bubbles behind them as they pounce, wrestle, scoot suddenly into holes, chase each other up trees and out onto limbs. Though their round ears perk in our direction if we move or make a noise, they are more curious than afraid. We have walked within twenty feet of them before they retreat, and they never fully disappear; their button eyes are on us from among roots or behind trees.

“Crossing Into Eden”

Where The Bluebird Sings To The Lemonade Spring, p. 38

As I stood watching the marten across the road, I had that feeling of being watched, of something behind me, and heard a small scratching sound. The hair on the back of my neck and on my arms raised, and I turned slowly to see another marten on the porch just six or seven feet away. As we made eye contact it froze for a moment then spun around and disappeared over the edge of the porch. A few moments later it popped up to look at me and then disappeared again. This continued for a few more episodes and then the marten whirled and disappeared around the corner of Chalet 14. I turned back to the first marten which had been watching me watch the other one. It dashed off the porch and sniffed around the skirt boards and then loped up hill to Chalet 7. As I watched it flow and freeze, I got that feeling of being watched again. I heard a scratching sound right at my feet and looked down – slowly – to see a marten peering up at me. It had quietly jumped from the ground to the porch, and was looking up at me from under the porch rail, directly between my toes. The look on its face was both curious and calculating: “Is it tasty?” It whirled and jumped off the porch and then popped up again, several times. Then it loped down hill, ran up the trunk of the big old vine maple that is bent and pushed out by eight decades of roofalanche; and then disappeared around the corner of the building. I looked up to see the first marten disappearing around the corner of Chalet 7.

Pine marten at base of Chalet 14 vine maple 8 December 2013

Again, from Stegners Crossing Into Eden:

Pine martens, first cousins to Russian sables, shy and rare and coveted and hunted, held to be intolerant of the human presence, share that peaceable kingdom with us for the length of our limited stay, and on Eviction Day, as we walk the trail back toward civilization with our eyes looking back over our shoulders, we see their silhouettes looping and undulating along the cliff edge. Like the Ancient Mariner burdened with his albatross, we bless those happy living things, and some weight drops away, leaving us freer and better than when we came.

Where is this place? somebody asks. How do we get to it? (p. 39)

This place for me, is of course Holden Village, and we have been sharing this valley with martens for decades. My first encounter with them was during the winter of 1988 – 1989, when they would get into the winter kitchen of Koinonia (formerly Dorm 5 in the mining days). We would trap them in live traps and send them down valley, or even across the lake – but they would come back, looking for mice, and for the compost that feeds the mice.

During August of 2012, we helped remove the compost from the bins where Holden has been composting food waste for three or four decades at least. We needed to remove it because the location is part of where the mine remediation process will be revising the topography. As we shoveled, an adult pine marten watched us, curled up in a corner of one of the empied bins, only three or four feet from where we worked. Even this winter, when we take food waste to the temporary compost bins, we are sure to startle them from their self-appointed rounds.

Marten tracks in snow

Marten tracks on porch of Lodge 2

One final quote from Stegner, musing about going back to the place he met the martens:

The martens would almost certainly be gone, for even as permanent wilderness, the basin receives many more visitors than it used to, and martens will long since have been either illegally shot or trapped, or have retreated deeper, into country that is not only without roads but without trails or frequented camps. But what pleasure it is to know that there is back country for them to retreat to, that nobody is going to push roads through that wilderness, that no RVs or trail bikes or tote goats will roar through those forests and stink up that clean air. The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks.  (p.39)

One of the things that sets Holden apart, I think, is that even if living here year round, we still come to this place as visitors. Even the mining company that ended up with the liability for the mining operation is trying to erase those footprints, or at least reduce the footprint the operation has left on the valley. I am reminded of the Rene Daumal poem about the Eleventh Essential – but that is a subject deserving of its own post. 

A Walk In The Snow January 2014

My brother came to visit us here at Holden during mid-January. Actually he came here to do some framing in Lodge 3, the dorm for guests that we are remodeling this winter. But we enjoyed the visit aspect too - it had been twenty-five years since he had been up here - which, understandably enough, was how long it has been since we were last here as long term staff. And getting to spend a whole week or nine days with him is a rare treat.
This has been a curious winter for weather. By the time he came here, we had only had thirty inches of snow - and that had compressed to just a few inches or even to bare ground. It looked as if we were not only on track to match the lowest snowfall on record, but set a new low as well.

The Hotel from Main Street Early January 2014

 Here is how the weather played through early winter: the classic weather pattern here is snowfall followed by rising temperatures and sometimes rain- but also often accompanied by clearing skies and a rather warm wind: a chinook, in the jargon of those folk who have lived here longest. The snow would consolidate and compress.
This year we also had a lot of very cold weather, for here at least. I know our friends in the mid-west don't call 10 or 12 below zero (Farenheit) very cold - but for here it is cold. The snow would sublimate - simply disappear in sunlight at those temperatures. Or it would turn to ice - and hard, shiny slick ice at that. Chains or trail crampons on our boots were needed unless one had great balance and reaction time (those under thirty, by observation).
The cold has also affected our power: decreasing the volume of water coming out of Copper Basin, and thereby decreasing power to levels we usually don't see for another two months, toward the end of March. Cold enough, one time to actually freeze the water flowing over the steel grates at the hydroelectric diversion structure and requiring us to fire up the fifty year old diesel generators (at a cost of some $1,000 to $1,500 per day...). Without deep snow to insulate the buildings, we were also using up firewood at an alarming rate. Whereas on a normal winter day we might stoke the furnace three or maybe four times each 24 hours, we needed to stoke six or eight times - and that kept the temperature up to a tropical fifty-five or fifty-six degrees.

Annual Power Graph - Red This Year

But somewhere in the middle of January, the weather got nice: that is to say it snowed, and on the weekend at that. Friday the snow started coming down - kind of sparse at first. By Saturday afternoon it was snowing hard and by Sunday morning we had about sixteen inches of snow. The consistency was somewhere between powder and the customary Cascade Concrete (heavy wet snow). On went the snow shoes, and off we went. 

Looking Up Valley from the Vehicle Bridge
West of the Village

My Brother: View North toward Martins Ridge

Tracks in the Snow on the trail to the Ballpark
(Douglas' Squirrel, I think, a.k.a Chickeree
makes chirrupy little chirps or chip sounds; dark
brown top, orange brown chest and tummy).

The snow has continued to fall, breaking the record for February: one hundred forty some inches. And during the first two days of March, we have had about sixteen inches of snow already. It is beautiful. But the snows of February are deserving of a post of their own.