The Frames

More than most things, I can remember sitting on a rock in a narrow slot canyon in the middle of winter. I’d come up from Section 16, a loop of a trail in the foothills of Pike’s Peak, and cut off trail through Juniper and bare scrub. Then across a narrow steel grate brdge over what I’d always assumed to be a concrete sluice use to route water from snow melt, then trespassing as I crossed the cog railway that ran to the summit. I’d been there before, but never in winter. The lower trail was pocked with bits of snow that had melted and refrozen into crucnhy ice, but after I’d crossed the railway there was enough snow that I had switched to snowshoes.