I pressed the brake pedal and immediately wished I hadn’t.

Not quite so firmly, anyway.

Almost as soon as my boot touched the hard rubber square I heard the telltale scuffing sound of tires sliding on ice, felt the sudden and unsettling sensation that 4,500 pounds of vehicle was no longer rolling but rather floating.

Something my Toyota FJ Cruiser was decidedly not designed to do.

(Although its capacity to ford water, thanks to an elevated air intake, greatly exceeds the depth I’m likely to ever experiment with.)

Less than 48 hours earlier, driving the same vehicle on a different road, I was fixated not on ice but on what could be considered its antithesis — dust.

Dust, of course, is ubiquitous in summer on the unpaved roads around here.

(Which is most of the roads, if your destination is the woods or the rangelands.)

Nor is it rare for dust to persist into fall, tamped down only by the first good rain.

This year, though, was anything but typical.

For the first 20 days, October was distinguished not so much by its complete lack of rainfall — which itself is not so unusual — but by its consistent warmth.

On all of those days the temperature exceeded 70 degrees at the Baker City Airport.

Although many mornings were moderately chilly, the air warmed each day with a rapidity that reminded me more of late August than October. For my afternoon strolls about town I inevitably donned shorts and a T-shirt, attire I had become so accustomed to that the whereabouts of my sweatpants was something of a mystery, albeit one I had no reason to try to solve.

I was also used to the dust.

I was used to driving through it, spawning noxious gritty clouds that I tried to stay ahead of, even if that necessitated a higher speed and a commensurately bumpier ride.

And I was used to walking through it, each step creating a smaller but still annoying version of those vehicular dust storms.

The transition, then, from dust and sweat to ice and frigid fingers, was so sudden that I felt a trifle woozy, as though I had just tumbled off a merry-go-round propelled by energetic and muscular children.

On Friday, Oct. 21, the day the first great storm of autumn arrived, the dust was still thick where I walked above Denny Creek, south of the Powder River near the Burnt-Powder divide. The rain hadn’t started, and although it was the first cloudy day in nearly a month, the air was still mild.

Less than two full days later my wife, Lisa, and I were trudging through 8 inches of snow on the Elkhorn Crest Trail near Anthony Lakes, so fresh even the squirrels, which are forever scurrying about, had barely blemished the soft white surface.

The temperature was 24 degrees.

The season’s first snow always seems a bit jarring, to be sure.

In our somewhat elevated piece of ground, far from the moderating influences of the Pacific, the cold and the snow are inevitable.

We know this implicitly, but the difference between knowing something, and then slogging through 8 inches of it after months of sweltering, can’t help but seem new and different.

The first day in spring when the sun shines with real authority, making a patch of shade a welcome refuge for the first time since before Halloween, has about it the same strange flavor, familiar but also largely forgotten over the long span of frigidity.

Our seasons are so distinct — a reflection of their extremes, particularly in temperature, with a few triple digit days likely in summer and subzero mornings even more common in winter — that the transition is apt to seem abrupt regardless of the reality.

But this autumn was an especially dramatic example, it seems to me.

Although I would argue that, so far at least, there hasn’t actually been much of an autumn.

The conditions that define that season — periods of sunny but cool weather interrupted by benevolent storms that lay the dust and perhaps briefly whiten the peaks of the Elkhorn and Wallowas — have so far been absent.

No, in 2022 we leaped from a long-lingering summer straight to a fair approximation of December.

I resolved to myself not to begrudge this jarring jump, lest my incessant whining these past several weeks about summer’s persistence brand me a hypocrite, if only in my own mind.

But during those treacherous few minutes as we descended the steepest grades below Anthony Lakes, I regretted, if not the weather, then at least that our Cruiser was still rolling on its mud-terrain tires.

(Although, as I mentioned, it was sliding as much as it was rolling.)

These tires, with their aggressive pattern of blocks with lots of space between, are designed to fling mud away before it coats the tread and leaves your rig foundering.

They are quite effective at this.

But on ice these tires, with their smooth, sipeless tread, are about as useful as drag-racing slicks.

The studded tires are still stacked in the corner of a shed.

Where, appropriately enough, they’ve been gathering dust during these months when my only interest in ice was making sure I crammed enough cubes into my water bottle to make sure it didn’t turn tepid before I slaked my thirst.