Deep Freeze

The dog days of winter

I love winter.

A controversial statement for many, I know.

I love every season, each with its own mood, color, ebb and flow. Each season has its place and time and way of expressing itself.

But there’s something especially resonant about winter.

In the Colorado high country, the snowpack builds up over months, complex slabs, layered on top of each other like sheet cake. If you’re lucky enough to be the first to walk across a fresh layer, it looks smooth and thin as frosting, but it’s deep enough to bury you above the waist if you step into it without snowshoes.

Winter is not a monochromatic thing. Rather, it unfolds in micro-seasons, each phase a new layer on the snowpack, each revealing a subtle shift in winter’s personality.

Winter begins with the Solstice, a period of deep rest, hibernation. It’s a time of naked branches, of clumps of snow on still evergreen boughs. A time of nesting and hibernating, of staying inside. Our nervous systems sigh, sinking into dark mornings and quiet rituals and candlelight.

Then, slowly, more layers of snow. The Solstice transitions into the Deep Freeze. The energy begins to change. January and February are too cold to nest. Mid-winter calls us outside to bear witness to frosty morning breaths and the subtle, barely perceptible shifts of light as a few more sunbeams accumulate each day.

The most surprising thing about the Deep Freeze is how dynamic it is. Counter to what you might imagine, it is not a narrative frozen in ice. The Deep Freeze tells its story through rivers, creeks and streams, ever-moving bodies of water who shape-shift with the radical fluctuations of Deep Freeze temperatures.

One of my favorite spots to observe the dynamic dance of the Deep Freeze is along Clear Creek, a local body of water powerful enough to carve out canyon walls, yet shallow enough to invite you in to see, first-hand, how the Deep Freeze changes from day to day.

Halfway into February, Clear Creek has already experienced three arctic blasts, the kind of cold that instantly freezes the inside of your nostrils. When the blasts break, subsequent 35-degree days feel balmy.

During these blasts, a layer of ice forms on top of Clear Creek, but she never fully freezes over. The constant flow of water creates shapely windows on the icy surface. It’s a game of “I spy”, walking along the bank, camera in hand, looking for art in ice.

Icicles and ice crystals, each uniquely designed as a snowflake, grow along the creek’s edge, forming teeth and mouths and cavernous windows into the frigid, subterranean blue waters below.

In between cycles of arctic blasts, temperatures warm just enough to semi-thaw, creating puddles on water and chunks of floating ice and half-frozen waterfalls. Then it freezes all over again.

The days of mid-winter have a languid, elongated, groundhog-day quality to them. But we’ll soon be transitioning again. Out of the Deep Freeze comes the Thaw of late winter, the chaotic yo-yoing season out of who’s mud and muck will burst forth the chaos of early spring.

But I’m not ready for that, yet. This year’s snowpack isn’t quite done growing, and we are exactly where we’re supposed to be.