Under a Sierra Snow Moon
In late December, an epic snow and ice event brought life in the Sierra Foothills above Nevada City to a standstill. Kit and I hunkered down during a 10-day power outage, fired up the generator and gas fireplace, and shifted our internal gears down to idle. Situated amidst tall Ponderosa pines, Douglas Firs, and cedars, we watched as the forest out our high picture window was transformed into glittering ice sculptures gilded with golden sunlight.
Following a late January thaw that blew in on balmy breezes, tree branches weighted down with ice and heavy snow rose back up all around the county as if hugging the sun. Because Nevada County had been declared a disaster zone, road crews began cutting down damaged branches and any trees that threaten powerlines and block roadways. The sound of generators humming has been replaced by heavy machinery and crews contracted to thin timber, thus making the county more fire safe while lessening the danger of powerline damage and future outages.
As March approaches, the snow piles left from early January are absent on the landscape. My impressions of winter are no longer white. We’ve been visited by a false spring that has me in the garden every day, even when I know that more snow is desperately needed in the Sierras where no rain has fallen now for over 40 days. The worst drought in 1,200 years according to one report.
This week during a spring-like morning walk, an enormous black bird lumbered up from the road and settled on a tree branch overhead. Even though there was no snow on the ground, I thought of Impressionist artist Monet as he captured a black magpie sitting on a snowy fence in a plein air winter painting in 1869. Down the road, I noted daffodils pushing up through dry dirt in a neighbor’s cinderblock raised flowerbed.
Later that morning, I passed masses of yellow daffodils along Hwy. 49 between Nevada City and Grass Valley. Situated 1,300 feet lower in elevation than our Sierra Foothills neighborhood, camelias, forsythia, wild plums and white service berry trees are everywhere in glorious bloom. And while their delicate pink and white blossoms raise winter-weary spirits, the gardener in me who experienced three decades of capricious winter weather in the Midwest understands why February’s full moon is called a “Snow Moon.”
Nonetheless I’ve made two visits in as many weeks to the Peaceful Valley Nursery. Unable to resist getting a jump on our spring gardens, I’ve returned thus far with pots of hellebores (Christmas or Lenten roses), ranunculus, white candytuft, society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) ; a semidwarf almond tree, red leafed nandina (heavenly bamboo), a low spreading blue juniper shrub, a large flowering rosemary plant, flowering Chinese quince bushes, and a lovely Whispering Blue Atlas Cedar.
In December and January when winter days grew short and temperatures turned cold, Kit and I walked in the late afternoon. These days, we set off on our morning walk before breakfast, just as the waning moon disappears in the west and beams of light break through the tops of the pines. New yellow stripes have been painted down the center of our quiet two-lane road that had been almost erased by heavy snowplows during the January storm. When we encounter neighbors walking their dogs, it is an occasion to pause, visit, and share news.
The morning after February’s brilliant Snow Moon, we passed a yard where a five-man crew was preparing to take down an 80-foot pine tree that had died of a beetle infestation and was being stripped of its bark by local piliated woodpeckers. A month earlier, PG&E power company had marked it for removal because it was in danger of crashing down in a winter storm and taking out the powerlines below. For 30 minutes, we watched a skilled climber scale the tree, sever its branches with a chain saw, and cut down the tree’s trunk in segments from top to bottom.
The following day, I took a walk on trails in the 331-acre Deer Creek Forest Conservation Easement area just down our road. Guided by our neighbor Carol and her 5-month-old golden puppy Cedar, she led me along a trail to the clearing where we’d both hung a red Christmas ball on a lone pine branch last December. Following the winter storm, a crew operating massive John Deere tractors and back hoes began selectively thinning trees in this stand of woods where locals have been allowed to gently trespass along trails for over three decades. In that same clearing, logs and branches are now stacked nearly three-stories high awaiting removal to a biomass-to-energy plant in Rocklin.
In the woods, there is now more room for the trees to breathe as part of this fuels reduction and forest health project. And fittingly, as February’s Snow Moon wanes, snow is back in the forecast.