My Mountain Home

I love my commute. The 17-minute drive to work takes me first east, within a mile of the foothills of Timpanogos, the mountain itself walling off the sky to the north. Ahead Provo Canyon's V joins Timp and Cascade, a similarly massive mountain which marks the eastern border of our valley.

As the road begins to climb to the foothills, I turn south and descend again, looking across the valley to ward Mount Loafer and Mount Nebo in the distance. That short leg is followed by another eastern jaunt leading me to the mouth of Provo Canyon, with Cascade full in my view. Then I turn south and run along the base of Squaw Peak (Cascade's foothill) until I get to work.

All along the route, the views ahead and to my left draw my eyes upward and provide me no end of visual feasting. I am continually studying cliff faces, trees, mountain contours, and the interaction of cloud and mountain. Sometimes I suddenly recognize my distraction by the view and I get nervous about the last 10 minutes of driving, in which I wonder how much attention I paid to the road.

This morning I was particularly captivated by Cascade, as grey clouds stretched across its ridge, leaving remnants among the trees on the upper slopes like cotton batting pulled thin by gentle, steady hands. In the shade beneath the clouds, the mountain's brown cliffs and green slopes were punctuated by snowfields wedged into ravines down the mountain face. Some of them likely hundreds of feet long, the patches of snow caused me to check my mental calendar and glance at Timp for comparison. Here it is, mid-June, and the top third of both mountains are decorated with abundant stripes and splotches of snow.

I've been regularly monitoring Timp's snow (it dominates my drive home each day), but somehow I'd failed to register the scattered snow on Cascade until this morning.