Jacoby

I took my first snow-induced fall of the season a week before Halloween, which is not a record but is, I believe, earlier than average.

The tumble was jarring, as tumbles tend to be.

Injecting a dollop of frozen precipitation into the proceedings — and also up my coat sleeve — enlivened the experience.

I am quite capable of losing my footing in any season and in most situations.

But my first foray into the snowbound forest, after a summer and early autumn when I tend to become complacent amid the typically dry and less treacherous woods, is apt to devolve into a series of slips.

I feel a compulsion to get my feet cold and wet each year when the Elkhorns and Wallowas turn white.

This year the first significant storm arrived on Oct. 25. When the clouds thinned out later in the week the snow line was rather low — not a great height above the valley — and seemed to me somewhat heavy for October.

On Sunday, Oct. 29 my wife, Lisa, and I drove to High Mountain, which despite its grandiose and singular name is in fact a series of modest summits several miles north of the Anthony Lakes Highway.

Although the area is not especially lofty by local standards — the tallest point nearby is around 7,000 feet — I figured there would be enough snow to confer a wintry feel.

Indeed the snow was a bit deeper than I expected.

We missed the junction with the road I had planned to hike. This is not uncommon, I’ve noticed, so thoroughly does even a moderate amount of snow — 4 inches or so — alter the landscape and obscure otherwise obvious intersections.

Anyway we continued for another half a mile or so to another side road. I had never walked it, and knew nothing of its route, but my GPS receiver at least corroborated the brown fiberglass sign marking the road’s start (and number: 4380-030).

We started into the woods, the typical dense lodgepole stand that marks the 1960 Anthony fire.

(Many lodgepole cones are serotinous, meaning they need the heat of a fire to release their seeds. Thus are lodgepole typically the first conifer — and in some places seemingly the only conifer — to colonize scorched land.)

I lost the way almost before the rig was out of sight.

I would like to blame the tracks of a lone elk I was following but this would be unfair to the elk, which I’m certain knew exactly where it was going.

The road was nothing like an expressway, to be sure, as we learned once we actually stumbled across it. In places lodgepoles that must have been a few decades old were growing in what I judged was the road’s center.

I suspect that without the snow I would still have recognized the 90-degree turn the road makes just after its beginning.

But even a few inches of snow can hide, or at least camouflage, the cut trees and gentle deviations in the topography that reveal a road.

The other thing snow is, of course, is slippery.

This is true to some degree of snow in each of its many types, from the porridge-like consistency of slush to the sugary texture of powder frosted with hoarfrost.

But it seems to me that the first snow makes for a particularly precarious situation. The new snow that Lisa and I trudged through hadn’t had time to consolidate, as the storm, as is typical around here, was followed by a spate of cold, dry weather that sucked from the snow some of its meager moisture.

Because the snow wasn’t very deep, with every step our boots plunged to the ground.

Or, in my case, onto a wrist-thick lodgepole limb slathered with an icy scrim having the approximate friction of a ball bearing bathed in motor oil.

Even on flat ground these obstacles will bring me down almost every time.

Yet even as we floundered, the glorious spectacle of a mountain forest, on a cloudless day after a fall of snow, more than compensated for the occasional awkward step.

It was as close to a perfect day as I hope to see.

The sky was the peculiar shade of blue that I see only when there’s snow on the ground and flocked on the trees. The color reminds me of nothing so much as Crater Lake, and has rather less in common with a typical sky.

The temperature was in the upper 20s — low enough to keep the snow from becoming sticky slush, but far from frigid.

The greater gift, though, because it’s so rare in the mountains, was the near absence of wind.

I find even a modest breeze the most annoying of weather phenomena.

I would much prefer to hike when it’s zero degrees than when it’s 32 but against a stiff headwind.

It’s much easier to combat arctic temperatures, or rain, by donning proper clothing. But even garments with “windblocking” fabric, though an improvement over conventional clothing, can’t counter the wearying effect of constant wind.

It’s a factor as much mental, it seems to me, as physical.

Road 030, indistinct though it is, at least returned to the main road, so we made the hike into a loop.

(I detest backtracking almost as much as I do wind.)

Actually we made two loops.

Rather than retrace our driving route on the High Mountain Road, I decided that since we were only a mile or so from its junction with the Ladd Canyon Road — Forest Road 43 — we ought to go that way, which has the benefit of a panoramic view of the peaks around Anthony Lakes.

Both roads, by the way, require a legitimate four-wheel drive vehicle, one with ample ground clearance and, ideally, a transfer case with low range. This is no place, particularly with winter looming, for an all-wheel drive sedan or wagon.

And even one more significant storm likely will close off the high country to vehicles that have wheels rather than tracks.

I thought of this long purgatorial period as we walked.

I suspect that more years than not, snow lies on the ground along Road 030 for at least half the year. There are still four distinct seasons, to be sure, but winter surely is the dominant member of that quartet.

I’m glad I spent a couple hours there before the longest of the seasons has settled in for its long, cold stay.