Let It Snow — Please, For the Love of All That Is Good

By: | March 6, 2026

As I write this, the forecast calls for snow in the next day or so. It won’t be enough at my house, and certainly will be insufficient for the mountains. No matter how much snow falls at this point, it will be nowhere near enough to make up for our absolutely abysmal winter here in Colorado.

I live here, so I see it every day, and everyone I know talks about it, also pretty much every day. “I heard we’re supposed to get a couple inches.” “I need to remember to water my trees, because I think the buds are coming in a month early.” “My family was supposed to go skiing for spring break, but I saw a picture of the back bowls, and there’s like, nothing.”

It’s easy to dismiss our concern as something limited to the rich, mostly white people who ski as a hobby. Ski country is a big part of our economy, first of all. But our lack of snow in the Rockies is absolutely about more than ski conditions. There just isn’t going to be any water coming off these mountains come spring, let alone summer. And tens of millions of Americans will feel it.

Pikes Peak in the distance, seen from the crest of Monarch Mountain in early February

I wrote about this in the Atlantic last week, and I can’t even keep track of how many people here have thanked me for it, or brought it up in random situations — tennis practice, school pickup, kid activities. The rest of America needs to know what we’re dealing with, they say. I agree.

I pitched the story because I have been frustrated by the frequency of complaints on social media about the East Coast’s winter. I know it has been snowing a lot and it has been cold! We would give almost anything to have those conditions, so please spare me. I am worried about the state of Colorado burning down this summer. I am worried about Lake Powell hitting dead pool and seeing a dry riverbed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

West side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, seen from Bighorn Sheep Canyon

I talked to a lot of people for that Atlantic piece, and as is always the case, so many of their helpful insights and comments didn’t make it into the final story. One that stands out in particular was a discussion with Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist. We talked about how people have a hard time grasping just how much snow falls throughout the Rocky Mountains all winter, from early October through the end of April and even into May or June.

It is a mind-blowing amount of snow. Hundreds and hundreds of inches of snow fall, and that packed snow sits underneath trees, in rocky valleys, on steep slopes, and in long glacial plains between ranges. Right now, there is almost nothing in some of those plains. South-facing slopes are melting fast, and it is one of the worst seasons in recent memory in terms of avalanche danger. The snowpack feeds some of the country’s mightiest rivers, which flow to the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean both. They include the Colorado River, arguably the most-managed river on Earth — supplier of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, carver of the Grand Canyon, provider of water to 40 million Americans.

“Colorado is a headwater state. We don’t have any rivers that flow into Colorado, but we have rivers that flow out in all directions,” Schumacher told me. “The snow that falls in our mountains is the water that goes into those rivers, that serves tens of millions of people for agriculture, drinking water, everything that we need water for in the West. Most of that snow originates in the mountains.”

And we do not have enough. We have about half the median amount, in fact. Snowpack is essential to the West. We have rarely seen such bad numbers since the Dust Bowl.

14,229-foot Mt. Shavano, practically bare in January

Maybe you can see why this has become somewhat of an obsession for me this winter. I am also kind of fixated on the lack of interest from practically anyone who doesn’t live here. Just wait. Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California are going to suffer — let alone upper-basin states Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah — and you will hear about it soon enough.

The storms forecast to snow starting tomorrow, while they won’t be enough, are absolutely vital to our way of life. The flakes are about this weekend’s ski trips, but also about the alfalfa that will come in for harvest several months from now. Snow is about mountain communities’ economic security. It’s about the entire atmosphere, paving the way for the summer thunderstorms that flow from the mountains to the prairies.

Snowpack is past, present, and future, embedded in glistening walls of white covering every slope and every crevasse of every peak. In Colorado, snow is everything.

Photos: Top, snow crystal from Wikimedia Commons; inline, Colorado’s central mountains, including the Sangre de Cristo Range and the Sawatch Range, by me from January-February

Ice Skating: an Overanalysis

By: | March 4, 2026
Skating monster by Hieronymus Bosch, Wikimedia Commons

 In which Emily undergoes a trial which will stand her in good stead (what does that phrase even mean? can you stand in steads? what’s a stead? are some steads good and some bad?) when undergoing future trials. This first ran  January 3, 2019.

“This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with our plan, though, so we went ahead and rented skates.

A miniature choo-choo train chugged around the perimeter of the rink, packed with gleeful little boys. Parents lounged around the rinkside bar, day-drinking under heat lamps. No one else seemed concerned about the list of sponsors on the rink’s barrier: Marshall Medical Center, Thayer General Surgery, the West Coast Joint and Spine Center.

When Pete asked me to go ice skating with him over the Christmas holiday, I feigned excitement. Pete grew up in rural Pennsylvania and learned to ice skate as a kid. I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it hardly ever snows. Despite living an hour away from ski resorts in Tahoe, I have never mastered any sport that involves attaching blades, boards or wheels to my feet.

I wanted to be enthusiastic. But then — perhaps my fellow science journalists will relate to this  — I made the mistake of entering “ice skating” into PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database.

“Did you know that hundreds of people have been poisoned by carbon monoxide emissions from Zamboni machines at indoor ice rinks?” I asked Pete one evening, as I downloaded a case study about a girl who got impaled with an inline skate in the vagina.

There were dozens of epidemiological studies tallying the injuries associated with ice skating, ranging from broken wrists to fractured skulls to infectious warts of the feet. Many had clever titles like: “A chilling reminder: Pediatric facial trauma from recreational winter activities,” and “Skating on thin ice: a study of the injuries sustained at a temporary ice skating rink.”

Temporary ice rinks like the one in El Dorado Hills, I found, can seriously strain the capacity of local emergency rooms. Going to a rink where alcohol is served increases injury risk, as does being an adolescent boy or a beginner.  “The research suggests it’s my civic duty not to go ice skating,” I told Pete.

He wrapped compression bandages around my wrists and helped me hobble onto the ice. “This is going to be the longest hour and a half of my life,” I thought, clinging to the barrier. Kids were hurling themselves across the skating rink at knee-height, apparently intent on taking down as many adults as possible. From the vantage of the beer garden it must have been hilarious. (See Christie’s post on why falling is so funny.)

Remembering the boy with undiagnosed hemophilia who hemorrhaged after a freak skating accident in New Hampshire, I focused on not slicing any of the children with my skates. Pete glided up beside me, looking composed and carefree. He tried to start a conversation. “Can’t talk,” I growled. “Ice skating.” 

Some of my apprehension came from chronic lower back pain, which developed in my early thirties and may have started with a hoola hooping accident. I was at a party watching a twenty-something levitate the hoop with her hips and got a little competitive. “Hold my beer,” I said to a friend, and threw my back out with the first gyration. Sometimes, when the pain flares up, it’s excruciating to reach the toilet paper.

I contemplated the children tumbling across my path. They were not focused on preserving their ability to walk or go to the bathroom. They were not thinking about their anemic health insurance plans, or mentally calculating what a 40% copay for a wrist fracture would cost. Ah, to be young, and let parents pay for emergency room visits!

So focused on not falling was I that the power ballads blaring from the rink’s loudspeakers barely penetrated my consciousness. By a third lap I had gained some balance, however, and started listening to the music. I hummed along to “Friday I’m in Love,” summoning my inner teenager. Humming helped tune out the voice in my head screaming HOW WILL YOU TYPE IF YOUR WRISTS ARE BROKEN?! , and I let go of the barrier.

By the end of “Born in the USA” I had completed a full circumnavigation of the rink, unsupported. As I completed a fifth loop, Pete zoomed up beside me and offered me his hand. We skated until the sun went down and the neon rink lights came on, turning the ice lurid purple. As “Don’t Stop Believing” exploded from the loudspeakers, I released Pete’s hand and did a final victory lap. I made my New Year’s resolution: In 2019, I’ll buy disability insurance.

Not me — Sasha Cohen. Photo credit Rich Moffit, Wikimedia Commons.

Listening to My Surroundings

By: | March 2, 2026

I was walking my dog yesterday when I heard them. Sandhill cranes, their distinctive trill high overhead. It’s a few weeks early for them to be migrating through already, but it’s been a scary dry, warm winter and everything is off.

So I stopped to listen and look up. It took a minute to find them, soaring in formation, so high above that they looked like little dots. The sound is unmistakable, but you have to be listening. 

There’s joy to be found in deliberate listening, and I’ve been trying to cultivate this sense of presence lately. It’s so easy to get distracted by devices and all the stuff that you can pump into your mind by plugging in ear buds, but I don’t like how it all takes me out of my surroundings and into another place that’s not here. I understand the draw of elsewhere, and sometimes it’s just what I want, like when I’m doing household chores or a long road trip.

But I’ve come to crave the feeling of being present. So I walk. I listen. I look. I stop and sit and take a deep breath. This, here, now is what it feels like to be alive.

Video: I took this video last year, while I was skiing. Turn the volume up (and listen closely) and you’ll hear the cranes.

Snapshot: Interpreter of America

By: | February 27, 2026
Posters of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, murdered by ICE

I am an American citizen, and I don’t look like someone you would stop if you were on the street trying to harass immigrants, but I wasn’t born here. (I’m not an immigrant, either – I just happen to have been born overseas.) I’ve spent about 15% of my life in other countries. And my least favorite role in those years has been “Interpreter of America.”

U.S. power is such a wide-reaching, many-faceted beast that you never quite know what tendril of it has intersected the people you’re meeting, what feelings they might have about that, and what explanations they might demand. I’ve made a lot of earnest attempts to share context on U.S. history and culture and also done a lot of throwing up my hands and saying, “I don’t know, man, I don’t get it, either.”

When this post goes online I’ll be in the middle of a 14-hour flight to a far-off land full of very polite people who, I’m guessing based on what I’ve seen of their news, will have a lot of feelings about my government’s international trade policies (I don’t know, man, I don’t get it, either). The picture above – taken this week a mile or so from my home in Washington, D.C. – is one of the ones I’ll be taking along to try to share where we are today.

photo: Helen Fields, obviously

The Warmth of Frostlines: A Chat with Author Neil Shea

By: | February 25, 2026

I had the honor of chatting with my friend, colleague from Nat Geo magazine, and fellow LWON contributor Neil Shea, whose first book, Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic, is now out there in the world!

It’s a lovely book. In it, Neil journeys through the Arctic seeking out the ties that bind the far north’s people, animals, ice, politics, struggles, darkness, and hopes. Field trips over years saw him babysitting wolf pups (I couldn’t be more jealous), gleaning wisdom from Indigenous hunters, tracking caribou herds, searching for signs of Vikings long vanished, and visiting the front line of a new Cold War. The book reveals a deep respect for the many Arctics Neil experienced and those still to come.

Here’s our convo, edited waaaaaay down. (I left out the discussion of pin worms, for example.) Enjoy! And get a copy of Frostlines! Heck, get two copies!

—————–

JH: When did you first go to the North, and how many times total? When and how did you realize ‘this is my subject’?

NS: I went to the Arctic first in 2005 and probably another 17 times before the book was done. At some point I realized there is no such thing as “the Arctic.” There are instead many Arctics, all of them in relationship and in states of transition. I wanted to see as many of them as I could, to try to make some sense of how the top of the world is changing. Deciding to do this book didn’t happen to me one spectacular day. Over time it built up, like pressure, and only after this idea worked its way into me.

Beyond that, it was the wolves that made me do it. Meeting them changed me. I felt as thought I owed it to them somehow—to try to tell a different kind of story about them. [Read Neil’s recent LWON essay about telling that story.]

JH: I’m glad you mentioned the wolves, because for me, the animals are always the best thing about a place and I planned to ask you about them first.

I was thinking of my own experiences in the field with wild animals, and how I sometimes have tell myself to be in the moment, rather than to always be thinking as the journalist about how this or that observation might fit the story.

So, while among these animals, did you find yourself realizing, oh damn, all I’m doing is crafting text in my head about this moment instead of being in it? Or was it natural for you to set the “work” aside?

NS: It was both. There were certain moments where, yeah, I was thinking ‘I’m definitely gonna write about this!’ And I think if you’ve been doing it for a long time, you’re trained to record certain details. You know you’ll need to remember the sensory experience, for example. So, your brain clues in to those things for the good of the story.

But there were times when things happened so fast with animals that I couldn’t record them as notes. And I think those were the moments that I was probably most present for, and that are the most memorable now. I didn’t have time to get out my notebook. So, I just experienced the thing.

JH: Give me an example?

NS: Sure. In the book I describe how we had been following the wolves using ATVs, and then occasionally we’d race ahead so we could set up the cameras and film the animals as they passed. And once when we did this, the wolves had been on one course and then they abruptly changed direction and came right back and walked through the midst of us. It was so sudden that none of us was ready for it.

The wolves came right up to me. One started sniffing around the tailpipe of my ATV, and then she stood directly in front of me and just stared. Then I felt these other presences come in from the sides, so I was surrounded. They weren’t trying to eat me or anything, but they were sort of naturally hunting me. Exploring what I was. And I didn’t have time to pull my notebook; I was just there, on the ice, with the wolves.

JH: Did you feel kind of honored that they were interested in you? That’s been my experience with wild animals that choose to come close like that. You feel special.

NS: Well, I could see them communicating with each other, like dogs do with a little lift of the lip, flick of the tail, twitch of the ear. And I had this distinct feeling they were talking about how disgusting I was. I mean, they were probably saying, this guy smells bad…like sweat and fuel and filth…what the hell? And It felt like they were rolling their eyes at my humanness. So, did I feel special? I’m not sure.

Of course, who knows what they were actually saying. I sort of love the mystery of that.

JH: Okay, so the wolves were one “character” in the book, and it seemed to me that the cold was another. How did you manage working in such tough conditions? Is the cold a bad memory or was it part of the Arctic’s beauty for you? Maybe both?

NS: I have come to think of the Arctic cold as sort of this invisible fabric that holds everything together. I got to see the different ways it manifests—as ice on my boots, as an expanse of frozen tundra, as something cultural, as something dangerous. It was a constant presence.

I recently heard an Inuit hunter say, you can’t be afraid of the cold. You can’t let yourself become afraid of the cold, because that’s when it gets you. So while there was an alarm in the back of my head, and sometimes the cold made it really hard to sleep, usually there was something else going on that had my attention and pushed down any real concern for my toes.

JH: I was thinking about how, as journalists, often we pop into a place, take notes, pop back out, then try to write something meaningful…but how valuable is our take when we had such limited exposure, especially to people of different cultures? I wondered how you feel about that—if your multiple trips and the relationships you built let you feel you were more than just a visitor.

NS: That’s always the dream, right? To be able to get past that initial visitor status. When you arrive to a place, you’re in this probationary bubble, and you probably won’t escape it because there’s not enough time.

While I didn’t get to go back to every place more than once, I was able to spend much more time in some areas than a visitor would. One of the towns, I was there for three weeks, which is not that long but I managed to “embed” in a special way. The photographer and I stayed in a house that was for itinerant teachers for the local school. And as part of that, we were invited to teach classes, and we jumped at the chance because we knew we’d make connections with the kids and their parents, with the community. So, we would go in every day and talk a little bit about what we were doing, acknowledging our temporary status but stressing the depth of our interest. And very quickly we were “known” to everyone (it was a small town). We were still visitors, but that engagement made a difference in how we were seen and accepted.

That’s always a strategy for me, to not just pepper people with questions but be present with them as much as they’ll let me. You can’t really write honestly about someone based just on brief encounters.

JH: You write with a certain lyricism that I love, and you are great at being part of the story without it being all about you. I know that you’re a very exacting writer, so talk about your process…because it sounds effortless in the end, which I know is always the goal. Do you feel like you had to torture it into submission or was it as organic as it feels?

NS: I tortured myself so, so much. I look at it now, and I realize it didn’t have to be that way. And much of the best writing came out when I was able to sort of unclench and just let it happen.

I felt a lot of pressure, this being my first book. I felt an enormous weight trying to get both animals and indigenous people right. And by right, I mean to portray them honestly and accurately, and to show my respect for them.

And then there was also that feeling that if you don’t do this book right, you’re not going to get another chance. So, it was more painful than it needed to be. Self-imposed pain.

JH: This book is animals and Indigenous peoples, it’s places and politics, it’s tragic stories and hopeful stories, it’s past, present and future. How were you able to pull all these threads together?

NS: Going in, I definitely did not know how it would all stitch together. My greatest fear was that I was just going to end up with a book people described as a collection of magazine articles. And in fact, recently, somebody said that in a book review, and I was really pissed because I worked really hard to not make the chapters feel that way. But at the same time, it’s far from obvious how, for example, the wolves are related to the Norwegian-Russian border. In many cases it’s not easy to see how to get from here to there.

So, I’d write and then read the drafts of each chapter noticing how they were talking to each other (or not) and looking for places where I could make connections. Here, we’re talking about caribou, then when we get to Norway, and now they’re reindeer, but they still do the same things. Trying to make these lines connect through.

It still ended up that each chapter has its own identity, that each could stand alone. But that just emphasizes this idea that I mentioned before, that there are many different Arctics, which is something I hope the reader comes away with. It’s so big and so varied, you can’t go through the region and have the same experience in different areas. There are multiple worlds up there.

JH: You’ve managed to write a book that, despite what’s happening to the Arctic, the ice, the people, is still hopeful. Did you get the sense there is a lot of hope there? Is the doom-gloom attitude something we bring with us more than we actually find it where we go?

NS: First, I don’t think I would be able to write a book that was just a downer, and I really didn’t want to do that. It is a very Caucasian thing to do, as you say; we go in and say, ah, this place is fucked, and maybe we come up with strategies to make things better that may or may not be appropriate. And then we turn to something else.

At a certain point, despair is a privilege, right? Giving up is just an easy thing to do if you can afford it. The people in the North can’t afford to give up and just think there’s nothing to be done.

Also, there’s so much beauty and warmth up there, in the people and communities, and in the scientists studying there. They’re not all about this sort of impending doom that we talk about in the South. They’re living their lives, doing their work, period. So, it didn’t take much to step outside of the despair, because you’re there with them seeing what else there is. You’re watching people go fishing or play with their kids, you’re watching wolves hunt and raise their pups, you’re hanging with scientists excited about their research. There are plenty of places where wonder still exists. I certainly found plenty of it.

Of course, it’s also true you can’t talk about the North without those notes of tragedy. But they live together. I mean, it’s like life anywhere else, right? It’s never just happy stories, but also not everything is falling apart.

JH: How do you handle coming home? And does the whole experience feel terribly distant now or can you conjure up the feelings as needed?

Well, both. I have a calmer relationship with leaving and coming home than I used to. Also, my kids are young enough that they demand a presence that just precludes everything else, so it’s not that I come home and spend time neatly putting my stuff away and pondering the experience. I have to quickly come back into my role here, and just do it. It might be a month before I unpack my bags.

But I can still summon the most important, the biggest memories, and the others just flow in sometimes. That corny idea that a place gets into your bloodstream? There’s something to that.

JH: Setting aside the beatings you give yourself, are you mostly happy with how the book turned out?

I guess the one thing I’m not sure came across in the book well enough is my feeling that the people who should be making decisions about what happens in the North are the Indigenous people who live there. Arctic Canada and Alaska and Greenland, they belong to their cultures and people in ways we just can’t comprehend. We’re so far removed from that kind of relationship with land and animals that to go up there and pretend we can make good decisions is a crime.

So, that’s a big takeaway I want to stress. The Arctic is largely still an indigenous place, and its people are the people who should be choosing what to do with it, on it, in it, in the future.

JH: Will you go back?

I would love to go back. I’d love to keep doing stories in the North. I’d love to take my family. I’d love my sons to experience the various Arctics themselves.

I think if I do another book, it’ll be about Greenland. So, the North may not be done with me yet.

Frostlines cover photo by Neil Shea

Arroyo Acoustics

By: | February 23, 2026

I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever touched with my wee two-year-old toes). At 58, I’m visiting again, and Ann, I hope some of its sunshine blows your way. 

The last few winters, my wife and I have come down the Baja coast and listened to the sea. The Pacific was a bit loud where we camped at its edge north of Guerrero Negro, swells pounding like monsters. On the smoother gulf side south of Mulegé, it’s as quiet as a sea can be. Come down the coast further and you get some of both, ocean swells off the Pacific and calmer, deeper waters running up the Gulf of California. 

I interviewed Mickey Muñoz, Southern California surfing great from the 1950s, who lives down here and we went for barefoot runs on the beach every morning at sunrise, in and out of rocks, staying one step ahead of the waves. In his 80s, this is his form of exercise and meditation. He jogs with the sea. 

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I Can See Clearly Now/The Rain

By: | February 20, 2026

There is an Asian elm tree that I can see out of my office window. In the winter, its branches trace intricate lines against the pale sky. Every few years, an arborist casts ropes through the branches and climbs up to trim the tree. One year, he pointed out a fork in the trunk with a rippled scar. He wasn’t sure, he said, but he thought it could have been lightning.

We almost cut the tree down when we first moved in. We had plans. Additions and improvements, efficiency, sustainability, modern living. None of these things happened. I’m glad: sometimes great horned owls use the tree as a nighttime rest stop. There have been hummingbird nests, and rafts of crows.

This winter, I will see it all more clearly. I got glasses last week. What do you know, they help me see better! Why didn’t I realize it worked like that?

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And Now It’s February, Same Same

By: | February 18, 2026

A month ago I wrote a post, It’s Still January, which is a re-hash of all my other posts bitching about January. I regret nothing in the anti-January posts, but I need to add February. I have good scientific reasons. Also other reasons.

When the post was published, January 2026 was lying low. But since then I had to update with two cold snaps (like, nearly Minnesota-cold, nearly Boston-cold, nearly Yellowknife-cold), between which my furnace had a low-probability failure and the heat went out for 4 days; and then a snow storm that piled up 8 inches and an ice storm that piled up 4 more inches on top and condensed the whole mess into a solid on whose surface, still, a full month later in the mid-Atlantic, large people can walk. My garbage cans have gone nowhere and won’t any time soon. My car battery died in the cold, I wasn’t using it enough; and when that got fixed, the car itself died slowly on the interstate and with the help of modern telecommunications, I got it to a dealership that took a week to diagnose a low-probability throttle problem. I was beaten, I no longer cared, it was the dealership’s problem, it’s why God invented ride-shares. January and February are, and continue to be, an all-out brawl that raises my hair straight up off my head.

Talk about stress and cortisol levels. Because here’s the really bad news, which you already know. Stresses like the kinds January and February come up with raise your cortisol levels, raised cortisol levels cause all hell to break out in your body: physical and mental disease both, the list is long and as I say, hair-raising. Google’s impeccable medical sources all say so. Then they say the cure is to eat healthily, exercise regularly, and generally don’t have stress. Not sure which planet Google’s medical sources live on.

Fine. I’m a card-carrying science writer and as such I know to find sources that are actually science. I begin by focusing the question, then asking it right. I’m less interested in cortisol. Are bad things more likely in January and February? that is, are those months, in fact, evil?

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