A Walk in the Snow

I went out to a little north facing slope near the Vermillion Castle yesterday afternoon.  I walked for an hour or 90 minutes in near perfect silence.  It is a relatively quiet area anyway, but the snow was falling so thickly that it muffled even the sound of a few chickadees.  I saw one coyote track, but was otherwise alone.  The low clouds and dense precipitation reduced visibility to just a few feet.  The only forms to guide me were the black trunks of stunted trees—pinyon, ponderosa, Douglas fir, oak, mountain mahogany, and juniper.  It was a silent, binary world of light and dark, black and white, up and down.