Author: Suzy Loeffler

I am bundled against the cold, but the sun rises earlier each day and low light through the trees has a newness. It illuminates the lightly frost covered underbrush. Last year’s Osha umbels, Oregon grape, and wild rose are now dry, brown, and drooping yet sparkle with crystal light. This forest I walk through is the ancestral land of the Tabeguache and Uncompahgre Ute people. People who had many centuries of relationship to these forests. They intimately knew enchanted alpine meadows, dramatic valleys, and rugged mountains. They lived a migratory life, hunting and gathering across the high mountains in the summer, then settling into the lower dryer valleys for the winter months.