This is what it’s like to ski through the burn.  

The snow covers everything, heavy and still.  It holds the ground, tacked down with animal tracks.  Large holes from elk, small rivets from ground squirrels and chipmunks. Dotted skids of birds and mice.  The hoofed sinker of moose.  

Too, there are my tracks. Two long, skinny rivers I place through the snow.  Snakes.

The snow is only there on the ground.  A covering, muffling all other sound for miles around.  All I hear is my own breathing and the snow schussing beneath me.  When I stop moving my heart pounds louder and then there is a bird overhead screeching and then he is gone and all is silent.

The burn that I ski through is huge.  It covers miles and miles.  It is older than I am and it looks like it might have been yesterday.  The landscape is all black and white, like an old photograph.

In summer, coats of wildflowers and small scrubby trees fill in at earth level the otherwise barren scrub.  Then it is a crazy quilt of bright, flowery color and black, dusty trunks.  But even then, when you get to knee level or hips or above, it is wide open.  The trees that are left standing are blank, blackened sticks.  Stark and limbless, armless, leafless. An artists notation for trees more than trees themselves.  Some are huge and still have thick, blackened skins clinging to them, half ripped away.  Or tops violently torn, leaving ripped and scarred necks.  They were old, these huge ones.  A hundred years or more.

Some are like veins up-ended, black and delicately laced toward heaven.  Others are crumpled and hunched or bent over and broken, a trunk lying black across the flats.  It’s like a vampire forest.  A haunted woods.  An apocalyptic scene of landscape in carnage.

Skiing through this silent, glazed twilight when the snow starts to pink up, with the underbellies of the clouds turning pink and orange and everything still and glowing, the trees have a gentle austerity that is a witness to the wild. 

These scoured turrets bore witness to a passionate burning brought on by one stroke of lightning lighting auspiciously down, here, at the edge of this wilderness.  At the feet of these mountains.  As if the trees were offering themselves up.  Their very flesh the stuff to make the fire of.

To burn and then to stand, scoured clean, and bear witness to the spaces they opened.  The views which now go on unblocked forever by leaf or limb.  To bear witness winter after winter to the quietly thickening blanket of snow.  

I ski through these fields upon fields and I think it is not so bad to burn and be what other people might consider devastated.  And then to be re-birthed into this silent peaceful moment.  To know that no more damage can be done.  To know that you stand no matter lack of arm or hair, you stand and you can be still.

Be beautiful, in fact, in light of sunset snow.