Natural Perspectives:

Most young people today are raised in cities. They lack knowledge of life in the great outdoors. I consider myself lucky that my father took me hunting for rabbits and fishing back in Indiana. I learned to track from him. I could tell which way a rabbit was headed and whether or not it was in a hurry. Those weekend outings in Hoosier farm country during my youth certainly weren’t wilderness experiences, but they gave me an appreciation of nature.

When Vic and I were in Connecticut during graduate school, we lived for a year on a 7-acre farm while the faculty member who owned it was on sabbatical. Vic began birding that year. We raised lambs, grew a garden—our first together—and enjoyed winter walks in the snow through the woods. It was fun to read the signs in the snow to see what animals had been by since our last walk.

A number of years ago, Vic and I had a writing assignment to cover birding in winter at Yellowstone National Park. Keep in mind that Yellowstone doesn’t just freeze in winter, it blasts the landscape with temperatures of 30 degrees below zero. And that’s not counting the wind chill factor. Two feet of fresh snow had fallen. A whole series of winter storms were lined up one after another, promising even more snow. No problem, we thought; we enjoy cold weather. The fresh snow would make for good tracking.

When we stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac in Bozeman, Mont., that January, we were blasted in the face with an icy wind laced with snowflakes. The cold took our breath away, but the arriving locals remarked with pleasure about how warm it was. I hadn’t been worried about the cold until then.

On our first night in Livingston, Mont., we braved 25-degree weather to enjoy the hot tub on the roof of the historic Murray Hotel. By the end of our stay, we found ourselves at historic Chico Hot Springs. I will never forget that freezing dash to the hot springs. With the thermometer reading 3 degrees, we shed our shoes and coats to mince barefoot across slick ice. Those 15 feet to the hot springs was the coldest trip of our lives. Once in the water, our eyelashes froze together. Our hair became coated with steam, which quickly froze. We looked like snow monkeys.