22 Nov FROM THE EDITOR: STORIES IN THE SNOW

The winter day is often at its coldest as dawn breaks. With crystalline snowflakes gathered on the ground, shrouding the landscape in a soft layer of white, the air is a thin, heady brilliance as it fills the lungs. The cold surrounds, stings, seeps into all that it encounters. Above, a pewter sky deepens, blushing to the east.

During this transition, I often imagine the animals: hares that have spent the night bounding atop the snow, mountain lions that trod beneath lodgepole pine, elk that pawed through that layer of white. Do they acknowledge the rising sun? Perhaps they look to the horizon, bracing themselves for the cold that comes before the sun’s warm embrace. I’ve observed our horses, heads pointed east; they are still, awaiting that liminal space.

Sometimes, I find myself caught in these moments, trudging through snow, a pack strapped to my back, the air cold on my reddened cheeks. The tracks I encounter reveal the passage of time and the comings and goings of the animals. When snowfall stops, the record begins, each passing step transcribed — there for me to interpret, to imagine. I see the way a snowshoe leaped as a bobcat weaved beneath a bush. Antlered elk plowed snow, and a couple of wolves moved through. Despite the cover of darkness, it’s all plain as day on the ground.

The recording will continue until the next snowfall, each moment of life preserved in the cold. And as the animals leave their marks, so, too, do we. Footsteps like post holes through fluffy powder, the wide spread of a snowshoe on top, a pair of parallel ribbons streaking down the bowl — the tracks left hint at the experience, the ways life marches ever forward during a Rocky Mountain winter. As the snow holds these moments, so do the pages of this issue of the Big Sky Journal. Within, you’ll find the movements — stories since the last snowfall — ripe for interpretation and poised to inspire.