“Hydrogeology in action,” said my neighbor Anna, with her usual wry wit, as she pointed out the high-water mark where the river was lapping up onto her lawn.
Well put.
Last winter’s record snowfall has been coming down the mountain this week, bringing plenty of the mountain down with it. The Wind River and its tributaries, which are normally crystal clear, are muddy and brown. The banks have disappeared. The water is level with the land.
For neighbors with riverside property, this is no mere curiosity. My friend Mary left home 3 days ago, and has been sleeping on someone else’s cot.
Her worry wasn’t just that her lawn is now a lake. Like many of us, she had heard about uprooted trees coming downstream, possibly with catastrophic consequences. She didn’t want to wind up like old Doc Welty. He drowned in the worst of nightmares during great flood of 1919, when his cabin was dislodged overnight as Horse Creek swelled and rose.
Living well above the river, I (and my dog) find the flood only a minor inconvenience. Favorite hiking spots are denied to us.
In the Town Park, the dog’s beloved Riverwalk is awash in both directions on the south side of the footbridge. So we’re limited to the more public north end of the Park, where he’s not free to run and roam. And I won’t even let him dash down and paddle in the river as usual, lest he be swept away.
The back half of the beautiful Wind River Access site west of Stony Point, where we like to wander around in the pine duff under a forest of conifers next to the river, is now inaccessible (unless I want to get my feet wet). A charming stream has wandered across the peninsula, turning that area into an island.
But the flood has granted unexpected pleasures. I turn off the dirt road at Sheridan Creek and the dog and I follow a game trail off into the woods. Father along under the trees, in a low spot we have always crossed on foot, a whole new lake has materialized — crystalline blue, complete with several floating ducks.
Here’s a little waterfall I’ve never seen before because it hasn’t existed, at least not for the past decade or so. Now it’s trickling merrily down a slope toward the highway, in a spot I pass every day on my morning bike ride.
You know how you can learn about something in school, and read about it later on, and be able to explain it to someone else, but somehow never really get it? For some reason, at the sight of that little waterfall, with the memory of a record snowfall, the light finally dawned.
Ah, yes! The melting snow has to get down the mountains any way it can. Here it happens to be digging this little ditch a little deeper. I think of the Grand Canyon, which I saw only last month. Same concept. (Duh.)
Some afternoons, as usual, a crazy wind blows up and gusts a lot of dust around. Downwind comes a fraction of the badlands, being carved by that invisible sculptor. It also roils the already swollen river, and more of the banks fall away.
Where the land is flat, the onrush of water carves new islands in the oxbows and creates little swamps. The river is changing course.
Every day, we’ve been watching the distance between the surface and the under-side of a particularly low bridge. Yesterday there were barely two inches of clearance. This afternoon there was about a four-inch gap.
News sources predicted the flood would be at its worst last night, and I haven’t heard any reports of fresh disaster. Presumably life will return to normal again, until the next time Nature decides to bring up something else to keep us busy.
© Lois Wingerson, 2017
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We’ve just returned from a visit to Prescott, Arizona, a former mining town south of the Grand Canyon. The town wears its history like a badge.
It’s easy to check. I looked up the National Register of Historic Places online. Several properties in Dubois are listed, in fact. They include two original guest ranches (the CM Ranch and Brooks Lake Lodge), Welty’s store, and the Twin Pines motel.
I lived here for several years before I learned 
Nobody’s hosting any guided walking tours to High Rise Village, the first of many ancient Native American occupation sites to be identified at a very high altitude in the Greater Yellowstone region. Until then, nobody suspected that the earliest humans in this area occupied villages at such breathtaking heights.
“Someone asked me what kind of yoga I practice,” Becki said recently, during a morning class. “Hatha yoga? Vinyasa yoga? I told them I practice Dubois yoga.”
Our tai chi instructor, Matt, is the local plumber. He gladly tells us how he wracked up his body as a younger man working in construction, to the point where he could barely walk, and how tai chi slowly helped him to recover.
For many weeks, it’s been like this up at Sheridan Creek, one of my favorite hiking spots: A slow and steady slog through the slush. Not much fun. Good exercise.
Don’t count on it, someone said recently. Fire that hot sterilizes the soil for a long time.
Today, the dirt road was nearly dry, with a stream of snowmelt running along the side.
Close to the road, these were easily visible. We saw blades of new grass and sprouts of fern beginning to peek up from the soil.
Instead, I noticed fronds of white extending toward the soil from many of the fallen trunks. I saw these bands of powdery white around the base of many of the dead trees that were still standing.
And who had walked downhill before our dogs came trotting uphill to add their tracks? I guessed it was a goose. (That’s a bear spray bottle to the left, for perspective.)
Avoiding the dreaded “mud and slush” season, we would always head back East about now. Just in time to see the crocuses popping above ground and the trees turning spring green.
As we gain access to formerly snowbound spots, we make great discoveries. The dog found a whole ribcage, probably elk, that was nearly large enough for him to walk through.
There was no sign of charcoal on the stones, so there may have not been a fire. But I could see that those pine branches would have made a dandy hut, when they were still green with needles. And the structure is very solid. It will be interesting to see how long it stands. I’m sure nobody will be motivated to take it down.
This morning we awoke to a typical spring surprise: A few inches of wet snow. By mid-day it was gone, and the sky was mostly blue. That’s spring for you: Nothing if not fickle.
Who knew that I had chosen to down tools and leave town during 
“Yeah, we upgraded your broadband, and your old modem won’t work any more,” she said. “Can you drop by to pick up the new one? Just give me a name and a password and we’ll set it up for you.”
Returning after our brief escape from the land of snow and ice, I’m struck by the contrast between two places we visited.
We stayed with friends in their short-term rental, part of another new development of hopes unrealized. Those condos are being rented because they have not sold. Walking the dog, I wondered how many blinds were drawn for shade and how many to disguise vacancy.
The edge of an RV park that used to be waterfront is now hundreds of yards from the shoreline of Lake Mead. The Alfred Merritt Smith Water Treatment Facility, opened in 1971 to improve the lake water, is now located nearly a mile from the water’s edge.
The brilliant blue water line of Lake Mead is also bordered by a white stripe, so that it looks from a distance like a fancy swimming pool. What they call the “bathtub rim” clearly marks how much the lake has fallen. Above the bathtub rim, and on the edges of that island in the left of the picture, the landscape is striped in hues of brown and gray.
Driving up-mountain this morning, my husband mentioned an article he had just seen in the Wall Street Journal. Nothing about executive orders this time–unless (and I’m dreaming now) it’s an order from executives to their direct reports to get outdoors and take a walk at lunch hour.
We ambled through a silent forest. The view ahead was a palette of four colors. The trees that waved above us were, of course, forest green. Beyond them, the sky was an uninterrupted swath of deep periwinkle–except for a contrail high above, which the wind had spun into a ribbon of lace. Each step drew us into the shadows of deep purple and the snow, which was of course pure white.
Back when I worked in an office in Manhattan, it was my habit to spend lunch hour at the gym whenever I could. I’m a firm believer in the 
The benefits of exercise and exposure to nature aren’t the whole story. Numerous studies have shown that 
Is it snowing or just blowing? That’s often my question first thing in the morning, when I look out the window.
Suddenly all you can see is white. The headlights of approaching cars emerge from the white mist like pairs of ghosts. You navigate by watching the vertical roadside markers. Thank heaven the highway department adds a few extra feet at the top this time of year.
The genuine labor is snowshoeing, as I find when I head off toward a neighbor’s house so my dog can play with his dog. The elliptical and exercise bike gather dust in the house, because this excursion across the back yard is a far better workout.
All too often, the dog follows close behind me and steps on my metal heels, adding to the workout. But sometimes he gets bored with my tramping and decides to run around me.
Here’s our first Christmas tree in Dubois.
Here’s the last tree we had in Brooklyn. It looks like a fashion model in comparison to the rangy, lanky specimen we have in Dubois. But it dropped needles like crazy. This year’s tree sucks it up from the tree stand like beer and holds on like a cowboy at the rodeo.
When we got our less-than-perfect tree into the Wyoming house, snow was still falling from the branches and there was ice on the trunk. Of course we had to re-cut the trunk. I got on the other side of the saw, and pulled ineptly, holding onto the trunk as we sawed through about four inches of sticky, sappy wood.
The house looks and smells wonderful inside, and there’s a winter wonderland outside. Since we put up and decorated the tree, I have seen through that back window behind it two moose, a rabbit, many deer, the usual cattle, and a lone wolf crying out to find a mate.