The Language Of Snow As A Vocabulary Of Place

Snow, pure and pristine, refreshes; falling soundlessly it cleanses the air of dust and soot, and it softens and smooths the world.  For awhile it conceals some of our sins and unplowed it heals the highwayman’s scars. In the gloaming the sky is snowing while I hear a chorus of wolves far away.

Snow can fall in central Yellowstone any day of the year but it falls with increasing frequency in September, coming and going until it becomes permanent in November then omnipotent through the long winter until the spring equinox when it recedes in gradual decline to disappearance.

I feel an exuberance as winter sets in—the sparkle of a full moon lit snowfield, the tracery of blown snow on the windward side of a stand of lodgepole pines. There is pleasure even in the face of a blizzard, hunkered down, sheltering within the lee of a tree well to chew some biltong. Then, of course, there is the comfort of a cup of tea within sight of the fire where a cat naps, while outside the stars flare in a deep-cold mid-winter sky.

The convention that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow has been repudiated in recent years though a Canadian site documents 30 Inuktitut words for snow and ice. 

Beautiful snow words from around the world: sastrugi, the wind drifted/eroded surface texture of snow.  Sun cups. Sun made snow slab and its cousin wind-slab. Snow rollers, sometimes as big as a tire where snow has rolled down a slope forming a tight coil. Snow snakes, those “pendulous droops” of snow formed when solid snow behaves like a viscous liquid. Graupel, wind driven pellet snow that stings the face and signals the presence of beautiful snow squall clouds.

A few snow words of my own:

Wet and dry snow, when the sun turns some of the surface of the snowpack to liquid water molecules that cause the underlying dry powder snow to stick in clumps to the bottom of my skis.

Sandpaper snow: when the air temp is very cold so the snow has no glide, and it is like skiing on sand.

Mash-potato snow: wet snowman making snow, press a dime into the snow and you can read the date in the cavity left when you remove the coin. 

Styrofoam snow: common in late winter when the days are warm and the nights cold.  You can walk on it in the morning but fall through it with every step in the afternoon. 

Greenhouse snow, delicate windows of ice that form under the strengthening late winter sun above the snow so you can peer through them down into the voids around sage bushes.

On windy days, when the trees begin to creak and groan, one must be cautious skiing through the forest.  Heavy pillows of snow, some a hundred pounds plus each, have accumulated on pine tree branches and boughs overhead.  When they fall from their perches they create formidable impact craters on the snow pack below. Best not to be hit by one.

And there is the “whump”, that hollow sound as one skis across the snow pack that signals the collapse of a weak layer and the potential for an avalanche.  It is a warning sound, like the woof of a bear, not to be ignored. 

On cloudy days when the light is flat and there are no shadows nor highlights, when the eye can’t distinguish between a hole and a hill and it is easy to ski off the crest of an unseen snow cornice.

Then, there is the poignancy of the winters’ passing. In the early years snow brought welcome isolation from the frenzies of the world of man. Not only is snow an effective thermal insulation against the cold, it is also a fine insulation against the white noise of the secular world.

But, in the course of my tenure here, there has been a steady shrinkage of the boundaries of the nivean frontier. Snowmobiles access the previously inaccessible. Snow plows, welcome in mid-April when first we came here, are interruptus of the bliss when they arrive now-a-days the first week in March. In Yellowstone our defined winter has become a much abridged version of nature’s winter.

With human-caused climate change, the effects of which I've witnessed, we are losing more than the snow which makes winter winter. We are losing an amazing medium that makes Yellowstone Yellowstone for half of the year.