Spring! What a fun and goofy season. One minute it’s snowing, another it’s hot and sweaty. While talk of the weather is basically the small talk anywhere you go, it’s always fun to hear people’s different reactions and moods based on what is going on in the sky. Today I chatted with a group of local friends, who were biking up a trail I was running down, and the feeling of spring fever was unanimous. We commented on the smell of the fresh rain, the animals, the flowers, and the mountains still capped with snow. The weather felt invigorating.
We are surrounded by beauty, especially as trail runners who have a dose of it in their daily diet. Despite the chaos in the world, this earth is still so damn beautiful. So here are some observations on spring from different outings the past few weeks. Outings that are consistent reminders of that beauty.
The author’s campsite in nature. All photos: Hannah Green
The Fauna
A few days ago, I was hiking up a road where I live in Silverton, Colorado, and something caught my eye. A moose popped out just ahead of me, blending in with the various shadows of the spruce trees. I stopped and let him cross the road. I said hello and chatted with him to alert him I was there. Eventually I cautiously hiked up the road, but the moose had disappeared into the camouflage of the forest, apparently uninterested in small talk about the weather. He’s a year-rounder here too, so I guess he gets a little bored of it. As I hiked, I noticed his tracks criss-crossing the snow on the road. And then another set of tracks appeared … bear! Everyone is waking up, including the hibernating bears, with the slowly warming temperatures.
Yesterday I was running and stopped to watch a herd of elk move high above me on the hillside. Later I was walking and came up behind a grouse that was so well camouflaged into the colors of the trails I felt like I was looking at a “Magic Eye” book — hopefully someone remembers those books with crazy patterns, where if you focused your eyes just right they would turn three dimensional. He eventually waddled off the trail. I tried to talk him out of it so as not to waste his energy but he still loudly, and dramatically, took flight into a tree — they didn’t quite get the gene of easy flight.
Spot the grouse!
I get so much joy from seeing wildlife, and I think it’s one of the real reasons I love being out on my two feet so much, so I can join them. I think we forget that we too are wild animals, or at least used to be, and I think when we strip away everything and just move through the landscape, we can get back there.
The birds of spring are quite invigorating to hear as well. Red-winged black birds are one of the first harbingers of spring you’ll hear up high in the mountains, and they’ve been all around town as the snow melts. They like the wetlands and migrate back north in the spring. I always have a picture in my head of a little cabin in a high mountain meadow when I hear them.
Western meadowlarks also seem to be more talkative in the spring, in the big grasslands and prairies. About a month ago, I was visiting my friend, who was working on a ranch down a little lower in elevation, and the meadowlarks singing loudly across the sagebrush were another reminder that spring was here. Their unique call reminds me of walking our family dog growing up. The call of the meadowlark was the first one I could identify as a little kid, and it always got me excited because it meant the days were getting longer.
There are so many birds out there, and while I’m not a birder, I love getting to know them just a little bit. While I ate dinner in my tent along a desert river the other night, I watched a little black bird floating around on the water until it got dark. Too small to be a duck, I knew it could only be one thing — an American Dipper. One of North America’s only truly aquatic songbirds, according to the Cornell Lab’s “All About Birds.”
The Flora
I love flowers. Their splashes of color and scents are intoxicating. Summertime alpine hillsides are dazzling, and spring is just the beginning of what’s to come.
Last weekend I was working my way up a desert canyon while backpacking and was constantly enveloped by various floral scents. The barberry bushes that are normally quite annoying with their very pokey leaves were in full yellow bloom. The vibrant reds of the paintbrush and penstemon contrasted with the tall, yellow Prince’s plume and the purple flowering buckthorn bushes. The cottonwoods were fully leafed out, and when I camped by the river, the all-too familiar aroma of the willows permeated the canyon walls.
The flowers of a boxelder maple in bloom.
Today I was on a run up high where I live and noticed bushels of yellow flowers. I don’t often have service on my runs, but I stopped and snapped a photo, my phone telling me the bright, unique blooms were “Corydalis aurea,” a member of the poppy family, which you could only maybe correlate based on the leaves, because the flowers look quite different from poppies. There were also the tiny, white star shaped flowers poking out — a flower I still haven’t identified, so if anyone knows, tell me — and the ever-present splotches of yellow dandelion blossoms.
Buds are swelling everywhere and seeds are popping. The aspen trees in my yard are growing their soft tassels of seeds, the willows are furry, and the grass around town is finally realizing the snow is gone and is poking its head up, transforming the drab gray and brown to a soft green.
Opening Our Minds
Aside from the flora and fauna, the mountains look a little different every day, different patches of snow gone from their sides. I marvel at the rain clouds and peaks coming in and out of view as I round the switchbacks. The river, despite being quite low this year, seems particularly loud this evening, and I realize that one spring element is pleasantly absent: the wind. Without it I felt like a sponge soaking up all the sounds and sights and smells.
In an art class in college, one of our projects was to go on a “dérive” and document our findings. The French artist, Guy Debord, was a proponent of the “dérive,” which is best described as aimless wandering, or observational, but unplanned walking. The point was to get us to simply observe, without preconceived expectations or goals or destinations, and to literally just become attune to our surroundings. Tonight’s run, although I had the goal of getting to the top of the hill and back down, reminded me of this as I soaked in my surroundings more than normal.
Maybe it’s spring and the changes with the season, but I hope to continue to observe more intentionally in the future. Sometimes my mind gets bogged down by stress and the inner chatter carries me through a run, but the runs I really love are the ones where I just seem to exist and can see the forest for the trees.
Oenothera caespitosa, more commonly known as a tufted evening-primrose.
Call for Comments
- What do you love about spring in your part of the world?
- What natural beauty did you notice on your runs lately?
