Trifter

As my wife, Maura, and I got out of our car in the Taconic Range at Petersburg Pass, New York, occasional clouds floated overhead in a bright blue dome of sky in late-August. We climbed up the steep Taconic Trail winding back and forth over a grassy slope lined with once-pink azalea bushes overlooking the green and fertle valleys of New York and Massachusetts. The trail leveled off at about 2,500 feet and led straight north into hilly Vermont. Our destination?–the Snow Hole some three and a half miles away. With the temperature at eighty degrees we doubted very much if any snow could possibly be left over from the past warm months of June and July, but we were intent on proving ourselves wrong.

   After about a quarter mile the trail dipped down into some densely mixed woods of maple, birch, spruce and pine with a thick undergrowth of maple saplings. A bit later the trail emerged into another open meadow affording a broad view to the west of the Helderbergs and Catskills of New York. Higher up on a rocky mound, shrub willows swayed in a refreshing breeze. Every now and then the call of a white-throated sparrow interrupted the silence of the meadow.  Again the trail entered dense woods of gray-barked ashes and white maples with leaves slightly tinged to yellow. Little chipmunks scurried across the dried leaves of last fall, and brown toads hopped about until they suspected their being noticed. At this point they would freeze and hope that we would not even see their camouflaged bodies.

   As we crossed the border into Vermont we noticed that the trees  had extended branches to the lea side of the wind. Apparently winter winds were even more fierce up here. Meadows dropped off more severely into the valleys below. Our trail followed along a much narrower ridge line not more than thirty yards wide with New York on one side and Vermont on the other.

   One open field in particular, some two and a half miles north of Petersburg Pass, dropped off so sharply that I felt as though I were walking along the roof of a tent. From here we could see seventy-five miles north into the Adirondacks of upstate New York. The wind, now, had become cool and crisp and was continually filled with the fragrance of northern forests. We soon discovered hundreds of blueberry bushes laden with coal-black blueberries having a taste as wild and ambrosial as any on Earth. We sensed that the Snow Hole could not be too far away as we entered a forty-foot high Canadian maple forest. And there it was–a sign saying Snow Hole pointing toward a short side trail.

   We descended some fifty feet to notice angular gray granite rocks that sloped down rapidly into a deep pit. As we trekked to the edge of the hole covered with thick growths of fern and moss, the air temperature dropped. We suddenly heard voices and soon we walked up to an old Vermont couple who sat at the entrance way. The white-haired gentleman said that when he was a young boy his father carried him on his shoulders to this very spot and that practically every year since, he had paid a visit. As they talked, we held on to the roots of a big ash tree just above a forty or fifty foot hollow filled with white snow! The Vermonters suggested we go down to have a closer look. Each ten feet we descended, the temperature dropped a degree. No ferns or moss grew way down here.  Finally we stood on about three or four feet of hard-crusted snow where the temperature must have been only forty degrees– a full forty degrees cooler than Petersburg Pass!  We could even see our breaths in the frosty air. I thought I was dreaming until Maura threw a snowball at me. As we climbed back out the heat of summer gradually took over. The old Vermonters seemed delighted with our joy.

   We slowly ambled back to Petersburg Pass through forests of trees tinged with color. Thanks to our encounter with summer snow, we could not help but think of the coming of fall and winter. We knew that we would come back up here in a month or so to experience the full glory of a Berkshire autumn when fiery patches of yellow maple, the deep scarlet of oaks and the purple of sumacs would surely inspire future artists the likes of a Winslow Homer or a Robert Frost.

Image via Wikipedia