TRAMPING REPORT

A Small Tribe of Wayward Grazing Goats
Wandering along the High Brook Ravine
22 January 2011

 

The sun is sparkling and winking behind snow-laden trees as it begins to sink behind the prodigious rise of the Acteon Ridge to our south; while we, a humble group of six, step our small steps into the deep snow, tramping in the shadows along the High Brook ravine. It’s cold, and the time is wandering away from the day; and so, I turn the group off the old Jeep Road, heading for what seems like the last patch of sunlight left in this part of the ravine. It’s a beautiful wood: hemlock, maple, beech and giant yellow birch trees. I’m looking for a log on which to sit, but there is no such place in the sun; and so, we stand, happily, and drink hot raspberry tea, eating nuts and fruit and chocolate, talking about the tramp: how it has been just great, winding our way through the few blow-downs that blocked our route, talking and stopping, the sky, a bright hard blue, and the snow-whitened hemlocks and pine trees, indicative of a windless day, standing still in the coldness. We are a sylvan community of man and vegetable, enough to make R.W. Emerson smile from somewhere very far away, as we stand snow-lit, the sun twinkling, and the shadows dancing in the current of the universal being.

As we begin our descent, losing the sun almost at once, catching it again fifty yards downhill, we weave through the seams of light and dark, the frozen brook now on our left, almost totally ensconced in snow and ice. Occasionally, a skidder road, coming down the hill on our right, offers a potential ski run for another day. The forest is quiet. Following our own tracks back, we talk about the joys of tramping off-trail, of cutting a new path in the snow, being pioneers with each soft step. On returning, there is a different feeling, a sense of ease and comfort that we are where we have already been, and we walk with confidence now, no uncertainties, no trepidations; but rather, we are content beneath a snow-drooped canopy of conifers, snowbound, and heading down a trail of our own choosing, our own making, toward home.

At the beginning of the hike, we came up through a former clear-cut, with the mountains of the western rim of the Mad River valley at our backs; but now, as we emerge from the woods, descending, the view of Welch and Dickey, Foss Peak, Green and Tecumseh, bursts across the sky in front of us, and I am struck by the irony of beholding the view at the bottom of the hike, rather than at some illustrious summit. This seems somehow profound, but I can’t quite put my finger on it: something about beauty revealing itself where it pleases, so that after we’ve reached our destination, and have somewhat reluctantly begun the journey back, our spirits are lifted once again by the mountains in our eyes, and we rise to an even greater height, a veritable snow-phoenix, born again out of it’s own white ashen powder; when in fact, all we did was walk up into the woods about as far as we could go, sort of doddle and linger a bit, then turn around and retrace our steps back down the slope, like a small tribe of wayward grazing goats…

Submitted by Dan Newton