April: Six Degrees of Connectivity

By late April, the snow is gone from the beaver meadow. The promises of March are starting to be fulfilled: insects are on the wing, some of the willows have furry catkins along their branches, and fish jump from the quiet waters of the beaver ponds. I can no longer easily get around the beaver meadows on foot unless I wear chest waders. The sound of the beaver meadow in March was primarily wind. By April, the sound is primarily moving water. The water gurgles, shushes, and whispers. In another month it will roar with the melting snows. Another three miles up the creek valley and 1,500 feet higher, one of my long-term study sites still lies under 6 feet of snow, but in the meadow I see only one patch of tenacious snow-ice in the deep shade beneath a spruce along the northern edge of the meadow. I know that snow will still fall here during late spring storms, but it will melt quickly. March felt on the cusp, as if it could as easily tip toward winter or spring. Late April is definitely spring headed toward summer. The beaver meadow remains a riverscape more brown and tan than green. The willows are still leafless, although some of the branch tips are turning pale yellow-green and others seem to be taking on a more vivid orange hue. I can see the leaf buds starting to swell. The grass has just begun to grow in dark green tips steadily forcing their way through the thick mat of last year’s dead stems. Clusters of new leaves on low-growing wintergreen are the only other sign of green outside of the channels. Some of the smaller side channels are thick with emerald green algae undulating slowly in the current. A stonefly lands on my hand. Its slender, dark gray body seems surprisingly delicate for a creature that has hatched into the vagaries of April air, with its potential for blasting winds and sudden snow squalls.

March: Water Superheroes

By mid-March, daytime temperatures above freezing have left muddy puddles all over the unpaved road that runs above and beside the beaver meadow. This road extends to the national park trailhead farther upstream but is now closed for winter. I enter the beaver meadow on a lightly overcast day that is windy, as I expect March to be. Lack of recent snowfall and warm temperatures have caused the snowpack to shrink down, and I no longer break through into hidden pockets of air around the base of the bushy willows. I do break through the ice on my snowshoes, sinking in a slow motion that allows me to scramble and keep my feet dry . . . mostly. I sink in above the ankle at one point and the resulting icy ache makes me appreciate the ability of beavers to stay warm. The snow covering the higher peaks and the adjacent lateral moraines appears about the same, but numerous spots of bare ground have appeared along the creek banks. The remaining snow resembles a blanket draped over the undulating, grassy ground rather than an integral part of the landscape. I stand on the snowbank at the downstream end of one of the larger beaver ponds. The dam merges into a vegetated berm and appears to be intact, but I can hear water flowing swiftly somewhere beneath the snow. Most puzzling is that I can’t see where the water is going: the nearest downstream standing water has no apparent inflow or current. Mysterious, intricate plumbing surrounds me. The beaver meadow is on the move, flowing and changing, preparing for the season of birth and growth. Standing water is noticeably more abundant than a month ago. Interspersed among the ice and snow are big puddles and little ponds, some connected and draining, others isolated and still. The still pond waters have a shallow covering of meltwater underlain by ice with large, irregularly shaped air pockets trapped in the upper layer. These I can easily break with the tip of my ski pole. Thousands of tiny bubbles deeper in the ice look milky.

January: Of Rocks and Ice

The beaver meadow is quiet in January. For many plants and animals, winter is a season of subdued activity, or of waiting. North St. Vrain Creek remains open along the main channel, the water flowing clear but tinted brown as pine bark between snowy banks. Densely growing thickets of willow closely line the banks. Each stem starts pale brown near the ground, then grades upward to shades of maroon or yellowish orange at the branch tips. In a bird’s-eye view, these startling colors make the meadow stand out distinctly from the dark green conifers that define the edges of the meadow. Spruce and fir trees grow sharply pointed as arrows; pines present a slightly more rounded outline. Snow falls silently in thick flakes from the low, gray sky. The upper edges of the valley walls fade into snow and clouds. The sun appears briefly as a small, pale spotlight behind the clouds to the south. Snow mounds on the patches of ice in the shallow channel. The water flowing beneath creates flickers through the translucent ice like a winter fire of subdued colors and no heat. Tussocks form humps of straw-colored grass above the dark, frozen soil. Rabbit tracks line the snowy bank, sets of four paw marks with a large gap between each set. Something small crossed the bank, leaping one to two feet at a bound, two paws with slight drag marks behind them. In places the powdery snow has drifted deeply, but mostly it is shallow over a frozen crust. Beaver-gnawed sticks and stumps poke up through the snow. A large flood came through four months ago, in mid-September, washing out dams that the beavers have not yet rebuilt. Chunks of wood deposited among the willow stems by the floodwaters stand far above the January flow of the creek. A dipper fishes the creek, wading rather than swimming, at home in the cold water. The slate-gray bird is the only visible animal, busily probing the bed with its short bill, then pausing to stand and bob up and down.

November: Beavers to the Rescue

By late November, snow covers much of the beaver meadow. I visit on a sunny day well above freezing, but the low-angle light comes with long, long shadows. The meadow is noisy with continuously rushing wind that keeps the bare willow branches swaying and sculpts the snow on the lee side of plants into streamlined mounds. Individual grass stems have traced downwind crescents on the snow surface. Tracks of wind, tracks of animals: the activities of the meadow are once again made visible in the footprints of moose, hare, squirrel, coyote, and birds. The snow is mushy in the warmth and many of the tracks are blurred, but I also cross fresh, sharply defined traces left by four little leaping paws, with just the brush from a long, slender tail behind them. The prints are so delicate that they barely indent the snow, but clearly a mouse was stirring here recently. The fragile tracery of tiny claws in the snow seems vulnerable, but I know the animal is probably better adapted to the cold than I am. The main channel of the creek remains open, the water golden brown between white banks bulbed with ice along the edges. The creek flows quietly, the sound of moving water submerged beneath the wind. The larger side channels also remain open and green with filamentous algae, but I break through the snow-covered thin ice on the smallest side channels. The off-channel ponds are frozen more solidly. Mats of dried algae quiver in the wind on one newly drained pond. Downwind, the snow is dirty with silt blown from the exposed bed. A layer of sticks, sand, and muck floors the pond with a woody carpet created by the beavers. The main beaver lodge is freshly plastered with mud and sticks, but the ice on the surrounding pond remains unbroken and the snow is trackless. Away from the pond, snow into which I sink to mid-calf obscures the details of the ground. The upright stems of willows and aspen trunks dominate the foreground.

December: Saving the Dammed

At the nadir of the year, this is how morning comes to the beaver meadow. Just as the sun rises above the eastern horizon, a flush of pale rose lights the snow newly fallen on the highest peaks. The beaver meadow remains in shadow, silent but for the creek flowing quietly between its rims of ice. The air temperature is well below freezing and frost whitens the pine needles like a dark-haired person starting to go gray. Wisps and sheets of snow flag off the summits in the steady wind. Over the course of a few minutes, the summit snow warms from pale rose to faint orange and then a rich, warm gold that also lights the rock outcrops at lower elevations. The wind reaches the beaver meadow before the sunlight, coming in abrupt blasts that shake loose the little tufts of snow remaining on the pine boughs. The wind sends the snow crystals slaloming across the ice on the creek with a dry, skittering sound like that of blowing sand. Before long, the meadow is submerged in a continual rushing sound created by wind gusting through the pines up slope, along the valley walls. The lateral moraine to the south keeps the beaver meadow in shadow until 9:30 a.m. Nothing is so slow as waiting for the warmth of sunlight on a cold winter morning. When the sunlight does reach the meadow, it brings out the colors of water, ice, grasses, and willows. Flowing portions of the creek change from gray to orange brown. The snow reflects the light in a painfully intense glare broken by the deep, long shadows that everything casts. With the sunlight comes a steady wind that blasts the crystalline snow onto my face like grit. Not much snow has fallen yet, but North St. Vrain Creek is completely frozen in places and covered with snow. The ice records the movements of water, freezing the pulses and turbulence in ice ripples and ledges, motionless swirls and bands. It seems a miracle that any water still flows in this gray and white world of ice and snow.

August: Legacy Effects

Emily Dickinson wrote a lovely poem using a brook as a metaphor for one’s interior life. The poem includes the lines: . . . And later, in August it may be, When the meadows parching lie, Beware lest this little brook of life Some burning noon go dry! . . . No chance of the little brook going dry if it runs through a beaver meadow. The movement of water across and through the North St. Vrain beaver meadow has slowed perceptibly by August. Some of the secondary channels barely flow and the main channel is easily crossed on foot. The water remains high in the main beaver pond, but few of the small dams winding across the meadow have water spilling over them. My feet are less likely to sink into wet black muck as I wander through the meadow, and even the moose tracks leave less of an imprint in the drying soil. Plenty of water remains, however, and the meadow is a much brighter shade of green than the adjacent, drier hill slopes. Many flowers remain in bloom across the meadow. Stalks bristling with the elaborate, richly pink blossoms of elephant’s head rise above standing water. Dusky purple monkshood flowers in slightly drier soil, as do the showy blue and white columbines. The blue bell-shaped flowers of harebell mark the driest sites. The late-summer flowers are joined now by the spreading tan or scarlet caps of fungi, as well as green berries on the ground juniper and kinnikinnick growing on the drier terrace beside the beaver meadow. Songbirds born this summer are fully feathered and capable fliers, and some of the birds have already left the meadow for the year. Early morning temperatures carry a hint of the coming autumn. The beaver kits grow steadily more capable, too, and by now they are used to foraging on their own. Presumably, this frees the breeding adult female for more time spent in dam and lodge repair or starting the food cache for the coming winter.

The Beaver Meadow on North St. Vrain Creek

There is a place, about a mile long by a thousand feet wide, that lies in the heart of the Southern Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Here at the eastern margin of Rocky Mountain National Park, along a creek known as North St. Vrain, everything comes together to create a bead strung along the thread of the creek. The bead is a wider portion of the valley, a place where the rushing waters diffuse into a maze of channels and seep into the sediment flooring the valley. In summer the willows and river birch growing across the valley bottom glow a brighter hue of green among the darker conifers. In winter, subtle shades of orange and gold suffuse the bare willow stems protruding above the drifted snow. The bead holds a complex spatial mosaic composed of active stream channels; abandoned channels; newly built beaver dams bristling with gnawed-end pieces of wood; long-abandoned dams now covered with willows and grasses but still forming linear berms; ponds gradually filling with sediment in which sedges and rushes grow thickly; and narrow canals and holes hidden by tall grass: all of these reflect the activities of generations of beavers. This is a beaver meadow. The bead of the beaver meadow is partly hidden, tucked into a fold in this landscape of conifers and mountains. The approach is from Route 7, which runs north–south across the undulating topography of creeks flowing east toward the plains. Coming from the north, as I commonly do, you turn west into the North St. Vrain watershed on an unpaved road perched on a dry terrace above the creek. The road appears to be on the valley bottom, but beyond the terrace the valley floor drops another 20 feet or so to the level at which the creek flows. I instinctively pause at this drop-off. The conifer forest on the terrace is open and the walking is easy. The beaver meadow looks impenetrable and nearly is. I have to stoop, wade, crawl, wind, and bend my way through it, insinuating my body among the densely growing willow stems and thigh-high grasses.

October: Of Beavers and Humans

By mid-October, the first snow has fallen on the beaver meadow. There is no sign of snow when I visit a few days later, but the air feels chill in the shadows and a cool breeze leavens the sunshine’s warmth. Mostly, the beaver meadow seems a golden place. Many of the willow, aspen, and birch leaves have already fallen, but enough remain to create a glowing ménage of yellow, gold, palest orange, and tan. Each leaf refracts and filters the light so that it comes from every direction rather than only from above. Aspens on the north-facing valley slope stand bare and pale gray. Those on the south facing slope form bursts of gold among the dark green conifers. The beaver meadow remains lively with activity. Dance flies move upward and downward in a column of air backlit by sunshine, their delicate bodies shimmering in the low-angle light. A little black stonefly lands on the back of my hand. I resist the urge, bred by summer mosquitoes, to reflexively slap it away. As I cross smaller side channels, brook trout dart away from the warm shallows where they have been resting. The narrow band of white on each dorsal fin flashes as the fish moves swiftly toward deeper water. When one small trout gets momentarily stuck between two exposed cobbles, I cup its slender, wriggling body between my hands and help it along. Windrows of fallen leaves form swirling patterns on the water surface and streambed. Filamentous algae grow in thick green strands along the side channels, where lower water exposes wide bands of mud along the channel edges. The mud bands record the comings and goings along the channel: precise imprints of raccoon feet and deer hooves and blurrier outlines left by moose. Moose beds mat down the tall grasses scattered among the willow thickets. As usual, the beavers themselves elude me, but I see fresh mud and neatly peeled white branches with gnawed ends on some of the dams. Lower water in the beaver pond exposes an entrance hole in the side of the lodge.

September: Alternate Realities

The first week of September mostly feels like summer. The air on the dry terrace bordering the beaver meadow is richly scented with pine. Purple aster, blue harebells, and tall, yellow black-eyed Susan still bloom. Fungi are more abundant on the forest floor, and the tiny, purplish berries of kinnikinnick are sweet to the taste. The air is warm in the sunshine, but strong winds hurry rain showers through at intervals. Patches of last year’s snow linger on the surrounding peaks, even as the first light snows have already fallen in the high country. Down in the beaver meadow, the leaves of aspen, willow, birch, and alder are starting to assume their autumn colors. Here and there a small patch of yellow or orange appears among the green. Blades of grass have a pale orange tint and the strawberry leaves have gone scarlet, even as white asters, purple thistles, and a few other flowers continue to bloom. The creek is noticeably lower, its cobble bed slick with rust-brown algae. Exposed cobble and sandbars have grown wider as the water has shrunk back from the edge of the willows, and the main channel is easy to cross on foot. The clear water is chillingly cold in both the main channel and the side channels. The smaller side channels no longer flow, and a drape of mud mixed with bits of plants covers the cobbles. Wood deposited a year ago has weathered to pale gray. The older, marginal beaver ponds have shrunk noticeably, and the water is lower in the main ponds, where tall sedges now lie bent on the top of the declining water surface. The beavers remain active: following fresh moose tracks, I come on a newly built beaver dam on a small side channel. By the third week of September, autumn has clearly arrived in the mountains. The air remains quite warm during the day, but nights of frost are swiftly bringing out the autumn colors. Whole stands of willows and aspen now glow golden or pumpkin-orange.

July: Of Fish and Frogs and Flying Things

By mid-July, abundant water continues to move in all directions within the beaver meadow. Water flows noisily down the main channel, creating deep pools where it mixes with water entering from secondary channels. Deeper waters well up from beneath overhung banks and the willow stems along the banks remain partly submerged. Pieces of driftwood collect where the channel bends, floating in perpetual circles atop the shadowed water. The water is clear of suspended sediment but stained slightly brown. Flow is noticeably lower in the secondary channels, where algae and bacteria stain the cobbles reddish-brown. Shallow water runs down a beaver trail toward the main channel, and I can easily imagine the trail eroding into a small canal over a period of years. The fern-like stems of rust red that grew beneath the pond waters earlier in the season have now emerged and bloomed, revealing a row of pink flowers of elephant’s head. Diminutive white twinflowers bloom near the conifers at the edge of the meadow. Stalks of pink and white Pyrola flowers rise above their ground-hugging leaves, which have been green since April. Mountain bluebells form clusters of indigo among the green hues of the grasses and sedges. Broad white blossoms of cow parsnip create a canopy above the other herbaceous plants. Aptly named shooting stars resemble tiny bursts of yellow and white trailing spiraling pink petals as they lean over the ground. The songbirds are less vocal than in June now that they are busy tending to nestlings weak at flying, but I can still hear the notes of chickadees, sparrows, and warblers, underlain by the distant croaks of ravens. Hummingbirds continue their mating displays, diving toward the ground as though intent on suicide, only to pull up at the last moment. The red blazes on their throats flash like fragments of momentary flame amidst the thick greenery. Mosquitoes are more noticeable now, despite the damselflies and dragonflies busily hunting back and forth across the openings among the willows. Beds of matted grass lie dispersed across the meadow.