At the bustling Colorado ski resorts--busy by regular season standards, not to mention a global pandemic shutting down businesses--fresh, soft snow can be sparse and hard to find. If you want to find the powder, you need to go where few have gone, and that tends to be in the trees. I spotted an opening in the trees where the woods began at the edge of the man-made ski trail. With a twist of my hips, knees, ankles, and skis, I sprayed a cloud of snow and turned to enter the trees, slowly disappearing from the chaos of the resort. Here, I found myself surrounded by thin evergreens, my knees absorbing the momentum of turn after turn, weaving between the trees. My body warmed and I drew deeper breaths, I pulled down my mask to inhale the sweet, mountain air. Noticing a thick patch of trees ahead of me, I stopped hard, spraying snow against the wall of trees in front of me, penetrable by a fox or a marmot, but completely impenetrable for a human on skis. I laid down on my side into the soft snow with my skis perpendicular to the slope and lightly pushed my head into the snow pack, peering along the snow at the blades of light cutting through the trees. Few places are quieter than the middle of a snowy forest, not even the trees returned the whisper of my breath. The snow slowly made its way through my layers, not the wetness, just the cold and I remembered that my family might be waiting for me at the lift near the bottom of the hill, but I was overtaken again with the purity of the silence, the sparkle of untouched snow, and the stillness of the forest. I decided to lay there for just a moment longer.
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