Melting In

I drove up to my cabin yesterday morning to see how everything overwintered.

Enough deep, hard-pack snow remained that I could not drive in from the main road.  To reach the cabin, I walked across the top of the snow, which varied from a foot to three feet in depth.

Amazingly, I broke through the crust (ending up knee-high in snow) only once.

As I trudged across the snow, I came across two interesting displays of melting snow.  The newly minted heat of spring had generated enough heat in a stick and the tip of a fir limb blown onto the snow from nearby trees to cause them to melt down into a hole of their own making. 

The result is something of a natural shadow box in the snow.

—Mitchell Hegman