The forecast app on my phone flipped this week. Where it used to say rain, it now says snow possible above 6,000 feet, and that is my annual cue — earlier than most people’s — to rebuild the winter kit that lives behind the driver’s seat of whatever I’m driving. Mid-October sounds paranoid if you … Read more
There’s a specific week in late September when I stop pretending summer is coming back. The forecast app on my phone starts showing overnight lows in the thirties for the mountain towns I like to camp in, and I pull up the average first-frost date for my zip code the way other people check football … Read more
The first hard freeze of last October caught me in the Sawtooth Valley with a water bottle frozen solid on the shelf above my head and frost furring the inside of my own windshield. Not the outside — the inside. Every breath I’d exhaled overnight had condensed on the cold glass and crystallized. I scraped … Read more