The forest trail had survived worse. Mountain forest snowstorms are often the last vestiges of snow and ice, clinging until deep July. Frozen land. Thawed land. Animal bones litter these parts. Years of shoes, mountain bike tires, paws, and hooves wear their curves into the land's memory.
A few days after the winter inversion lifted, I went for a trail run with the dogs. The familiar firmness of winter dirt was not there. Instead, the ground gave way—straight down, no warning, no slide. Just a sharp crunch, and my feet kept dropping into the ground, like a spoon cracking the top of creme Brule. It was as if the earth had exhaled each time my feet hit the trail.
I adjusted, slowed, and paid attention. The earth could not hold me: crunch, pop, hollow sounds. The ground was lying.
What unsettled me wasn't the sensation itself but how quickly my body lost trust. Muscles tightened. Balance recalibrated. I began walking the way you do on unfamiliar ice, even though there was no ice to see. The ground had changed its rules without telling me, and my body knew it before my mind could catch up.
The rocks on the trail finally stopped me. They had fallen straight down into the trail, leaving behind precise outlines of their negative space. Not scattered, not rolled away—just dropped, straight down. The earth held them, then let them go, just as all lives lived.
Our typical knowledge is
ground = compresses;
ice = shatters.
This was
ground = shatters.
Photos from my personal archive of the Cascade Range: (left) long shot of wintry mountain range; close-up of thawing ground; frozen fog on forest road; night skiing lights on mountain ridgeline.
Ice formed in the dark. Water migrated upward. Structure rearranged itself while I went on with my days, unaware. Ice had formed not on the surface but inside the soil itself; thin sheets stacked as a quiet architecture (i.e., ice lenses). When the sun returned, it softened only the top layer, leaving a crust-over emptiness. Welcome to a freeze-thaw segregation of soil physics.
My point load was ruining the trail; normally, it's spring, when the land managers advise staying off the trails to prevent destroying surface uniformity. But here I totally ruined it in winter.
I kept thinking about how I trusted the ground when I wasn't next to a slope. How much of my life do I move through it that way, assuming support is inherent rather than conditional? Assuming what holds me up today will hold me tomorrow simply because it always has.
We often think of collapse as something dramatic. Loud. Sudden. But this wasn't that. This was quite weak. A slow exchange of one state for another. A surface that continued to look like itself long after it had lost the ability to bear weight.
The trail will recover. The soil will settle. The ice will disappear completely. From the surface, nothing will mark where the ground once gave up. It won’t remember me, but it will stay with me.
