I can still remember the contour of the mountain if I close my eyes. The blue-green color of the trees. The texture of the hardpack snow as the snowcat chewed it up and spat it out the back of its metal tracks. Every curve of the winter trail, every shortcut we’d take after the season ended and we were the only ones left in the upper mountain valley. Knowing that trail was vitally important because every time there was a whiteout, all you could go by was what you could see 5 ft in front of you. The snow would fall so thickly that the landscape and the horizon would blend together into an indistinguishable mass. The trees sometimes seemed to float in the sea of snow as if they were islands being revealed through dense fog. If you didn’t know the groups of trees then you could end up making a wrong turn off the trail into a stream bed. I remember squinting trying to see further through the snow as the lights reflected the white of the flakes back at me. Luckily there were few occasions that we had to drive through such storms. Most days the snowfall wasn’t very thick.
My favorite time to drive the snowcat trail was in the springtime when the sun warms the air. The Uinta ground squirrels began popping up out of the snow in extraordinary numbers. Suddenly driving felt a bit like playing whack-a-mole. The squirrels would get scared when they’d see and hear you, ducking into their snow tunnels and down into their burrows. You can only see them really well when the snow is melting, they don’t come out of their dens in winter. Once spring comes they seem to be everywhere, then the snow melts and suddenly they are camouflaged, seeming to have vanished.