The mountain in the front yard

Phillip Elliott‎ photo

The mountain in the front yard changes daily. In fact, it changes hourly and sometimes even faster.

It changes with daylight and darkness. It changes with light from the passing moon. It changes with precipitation, rain and snow. It changes with the season, dark green in summer, some reds and yellows in the fall and it wears a shroud of white in the winter.

It changes with the angle of the sunlight and the moonlight as all the interstellar bodies in our galaxy move in their orbits. At times it turns a dark red in a sunset, at others, purple and pink. Sometimes in bright sunlight the focus sharpens, at others it loses that sharpness in the filter of mist or fog or low-hanging clouds. At times it even disappears into the smoke from a nearby wildfire.

As a friend of mine does with Denali, I wake each morning, pour my chocolate and then check to see if the mountain is out. It’s out more than Denali as I can attest because Denali is the mountain in my front yard that I watch in winter.

Denali dwarfs this mountain which stands at at a little higher than 6,000 feet, but its proximity makes it look bigger. Only about two miles away it rises almost from the bank just across a river in a valley prone to glacial winds and dust.

Today it changed in a new way and took on a new look. On one of the lower ridges a large black line of a scar now runs down hill through the snow. It was cut by a rock slide some of the neighbors actually heard. So now we have to wait for more snow to cover the wound in the mountain and make it pure once more, ready for what changes are yet to come.