I went for a snowshoe walk with my son last weekend. The snows have been heavy this year, but we were on a well packed mountain road through an aspen forest. It’s often hard to make sense of the chaos in a bare aspen grove. Without the leaves, aspens are wiry and scraggly. The trees grow so dense, that the branches interlace. It’s difficult to find an isolated specimen that reveals a beautiful silhouette against a snowy backdrop. The nature of an aspen forest doesn’t allow for single specimens to stand out alone. Aspens reproduce at the root level. Each new shoot is often a direct clone of the parent plant. Therefore, the trees grow in close proximity to one another, sprouting from these roots. Most of the pictures I’ve made this year are at the margins of a grove, maybe at the edge of a meadow or along the side of the road. Since I can’t isolate a single tree, I try to show the grove nature of this tree by including multiple trunks. I don’t normally attempt to include the entire tree. I’m drawn to the perimeter of the grove and show the line of where the grove meets or interfaces with the terrain. The irregular line across the image is the dominant interesting feature for me.

As I mentioned, the snows have been heavy. At times I’m discouraged by three months of a monochromatic landscape. As I walk along mountain roads or wander through groves and forests, I ponder upon the world 6-8 feet below my snowshoes, at the soil line below the snow. My true passion is photographing wildflowers. I wait all winter for the first plants of spring to break the surface of the forest soil and burst into bloom. For now, the flower seeds are peacefully sleeping below the snow for another few months. This period of hibernation is needed to insure a good bloom in the spring and summer. And so, I must patiently continue waiting. The wait only makes the anticipation all the more exciting and the reward more enjoyable. I’ve been watching storms move across California all week. The desert bloom forecast is looking good although there are still many variables yet to come into play. The deserts got a lot of rain this week but some of the wildflowers require moisture in the fall. I’m not sure if these rains will guarantee a good bloom. We had a super-bloom two years ago. Super-blooms are only supposed to occur once in a single decade. With weather patterns seemingly more and more irregular, it’s hard to predict what will happen. March is usually when the magic begins in earnest in the desert.

On the other hand, a heavy snowpack in the mountains bodes well for the high meadows. For the mountain flower meadows, it all depends on how it warms up in the spring and how fast the snowpack comes down. It’s a long game of wait and see.