A meditation on Alpine snow

Dappled bitterness and beauty

This is something of a special edition, fifth-week, hybrid Detail Diary and feature post. As usual, if reading on email you’ll probably have to click on the title or “read in app” to see the whole post, and/or on the Detail Diary Notes to see all the photos.

---

When I lived in Idaho, I became intimate with snow, both the sparkling novelty of it and the long gritty drudgery of it. Since moving to the milder climes of Europe, though, I’ve gotten out of practice, even skipping the Christmastime dip into Idaho winter for the last few years in favor of Paris and Rome. I may now live in the ski capital of France, but Grenoble itself barely sees a dusting. All the snow is up high. And I don’t exactly ski.

But finally, at the tail end of my first winter here, I had the chance to reacquaint myself with the staggering, perilous, humbling prospect of snow. For three days, I stepped out of the pink and green and gold of unfurling spring in the valley and plunged into the drifts of alpine winter at 2100 meters.

The occasion was our annual Laboratoire d’Écologie Alpine group retreat at the Jardin du Lautaret, an alpine research station I’ve written about here—also my first taste of the French Alps last March. This year, although our visit was several weeks later, there was more snow, and more vengeance in it.

Soon after we crossed the snow line in the last few miles of switchbacks up the Col du Lautaret, visibility decreased to a few meters and snow was streaming across the road beneath the tires. The near-whiteout didn’t let up for twenty-four hours. We had warm, safe buildings in which to eat, sleep, and discuss science, but we thought we might not get any of the stunning mountain views we had (also) come for.

 It turns out changeability has its upsides.

But first, that blinding glass wind. Trudging up the hill from the carpark with ice driving into our faces, unable to raise our eyes beyond our feet, is a cosmic reminder, however brief, that winter here has the upper hand. We would be one extended power outage or evacuation emergency away from a nasty situation.¹ The caretaker forbids us from walking between the chalets alone at night; even the short tromp through the drifts and a few trees has plenty of scope for disorientation and disappearance.

Within minutes of arriving, in fact, I manage to get a foot stuck in rotten snow, tumble, and badly bang my knee on a hard rind of ice. I spend the first day of discussions and presentations icing my knee with clumps of snow scooped into a bag², listening to the wind howl outside the conference room.

Without wind, the snow is less threatening (and vice versa). But as long as mist and clouds smother the sun, there’s the matter of depth perception. The deep snow has begun to take on the ruts of our punching-through, ankle-wobbling steps, but the ridges and holes have no shadow. All is one smudged dimension of dull white. I tromp gingerly, squinting, knee twinging, with a ski pole.

At noon, a magpie sails through the marbled mist, the first bird I’ve seen.

The wind does its work gradually, and blue weaves into the sky, into the corners of the windows and our peripheral vision, before we consciously realize it’s there.

By late afternoon the landscape is alive with light in the way only snowy landscapes can be. All is white velvet brindled with blue. Light hangs in the mist and every flocked tree is a beacon. The mountains are sculpted in blaze and shadow. I stand in the snow and marvel.³

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow…

Into this crisp, serene brightness come the birds. I hear them first, chink-chinking twitters, then pick them out clinging to pinecones and feasting on seeds—goldfinches. When they take flight and swirl into the luminous air over my head, they are doubly gilded.

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings…

Julien spots a fieldfare (grive litorne) perched on a spruce, a thrush I've probably seen before but didn't recognize the soft cream of its belly. Flocking with the goldfinches we find coal tits, with their pitch-black masks, and redpolls, with their rosy breasts and crowns. Two more magpies revel in the sun.

The next day follows the same pattern of driving mist, heavy, then light, then bright. We see sun through the window, and by the time we step outside, we’re in a shadowless cloud again—but we know we only have to wait a few minutes for the sky to reappear.

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim…

I walk a little farther afield with my friends to see the snow-kiters profiting from the Lautaret wind, skiing uphill by power of parasail. Even as a non-skier I know the powder loose and light under my boots is exquisite.

It’s easy to understand the childlike abandon of my friend who throws himself spreadeagle into a snowbank and lies there smiling for several minutes, cradled by molded powder.

The sky stays clear into the evening, and the light turns tender as it glides along the drifts. The sunset smolders in the west window of the chalet, catching apricot in the mist rising off the mountaintops like a gentle echo of fire.

Our last morning brings warm wind from the south and the snow begins to soften. It’s strange—even though melting snow signals a return to easier times, that emergence we’re already celebrating down in the valley, it also feels like a loss. The snow-free landscape may be more hospitable to us (and of course beautiful in many other ways), but it is also de-transformed, familiar and limited, like gravity.

Bitter days and perilous nights under snow are seemingly cancelled out by the hours of crystalline light and calm, when the snow is like a living creature suddenly tame enough to touch and ride. Melting means the death of this otherworldly creature.

Maybe that’s the novelty of three days talking, even in spite of the shard-filled wind. As I said, I do know what a whole winter’s worth of snow is like, and I know I don’t enjoy spending two days out of three struggling to exist outside. On the other hand, neither have I cultivated the kind of significant-other relationship with snow that a dedicated skier might. But my fondness for the changeable, scintillating creature remains.

In the Alps, snow is a threatened species. Temperatures up here are warming twice as fast as the northern hemisphere average and snow scarcity is already curtailing lower elevation ski seasons. Ski tourism isn’t the only concern; water storage and snow-adapted ecosystems are at stake, too. The seasons in their places, the stable cycle of wonder that should belong to a temperate, mountainous latitude in the Holocene.

I won’t deny, in any case, that I was delighted to see the cherry tree outside our office upon our return to two hundred meters. In our absence, a handful of blossoms had exploded into a frilly canopy.

There is always something to wonder at.

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

1. This thought entered my mind when the cooking dinner set off the smoke alarm in the chalet, all of us in socks and our coats in a pile.

2. If nothing else, I relished the irony of icing my knee with the very ice that injured it. Also, lest you worry, it’s healing quickly.

3. The poem excerpts following this line are from “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets. Read the whole poem here.