Losing the forest for the trees

The sun was actively burning away the slow, few day accumulation of frost which had blanketed the forest. Anywhere the low sun could no longer reach remained covered in the most beautiful, minuscule ice crystals.

"There was really no choice but to go slowly."

I would often lose track of where I had walked. The subtle markers tied around trees became lost easily in the low sun at my face. The ice and frost covering the rock faces meant baby steps forward was the only way, but slowing down was exactly what I needed.

Five hours of the most still silence, and just one ptarmigan to send my heart into my throat

Like out of nowhere, an idling Dash-8 aircraft appears a metre from your ear. That’s what it is to be adjusting into a forest of silence, of just the light crunch of my footsteps on some hardened frost covered flora and the occasional sniffle, and to out of nowhere have a ptarmigan try to fly out of a tree I’ve walked under.

There is only one way down a rock face covered in frost and ice, and of course that is by a light bum slide.