Outdoors
Rec
B
Saturday, April 23, 2022
The Observer & Baker City Herald
Back to the meadow
Sixth straight April hike
to Eilertson Meadow
proves the most difficult
JAYSON
JACOBY
ON THE TRAIL
E
ven before my snowshoe
broke I was good and ready
to get mad.
The busted footwear merely afforded me a focus for my
simmering anger.
Although it takes a certain creativity to get terribly per-
turbed about an aluminum peg the approximate size of a Tic
Tac breath mint.
As with many episodes of wrath, this one was largely
irrational.
A triumph of emotion over reason.
The whining of an entitled brat.
Not that I recognized it as such at the moment when I
looked down and saw that the snowshoe on my right boot
was askew.
Severely so — the snowshoe, which is supposed to point in
roughly the same direction as your toes, was about 90 degrees
off, the way a person’s actual foot is in those awful sports
videos I can’t watch without feeling sick at my stomach.
I had thought, for the past 10 minutes or so, that that shoe
seemed to be sliding around in an awkward fashion every
few steps.
But I put this off to the quality of the fresh snow coating
the Rock Creek Road, which follows its namesake stream
into one of the great chasms that cleave the east slopes of the
Elkhorn Mountains northwest of Baker City.
That quality being terrible.
Snowshoeing through powdery snow, even many inches
of it, can be almost a pleasure, particularly if the terrain is
gentle. Dry snow has little heft to it — it doesn’t clutch at your
shoes, like a toddler who is forever grabbing your pantsleg
and throwing you slightly off balance with each tug.
The snow on the Rock Creek Road was closer to
quicksand.
As is typical for snow that falls nearly a month after the
spring equinox, it was sticky and dense, heavy with moisture.
This is fine snow for bolstering the scarce snowpack.
It is much less so for slogging through.
Especially when one of your snowshoes suddenly turns
from a somewhat useful accessory into an appendage more
akin to an anchor.
My wife, Lisa, helped me effect a repair, by means of a
keychain, that would have worked perfectly for MacGyver
and helped him foil a whole cadre of henchmen.
Alas, I am not him, lacking both the classic 1980s mullet
and a team of screenwriters.
We made it some fraction of a mile before the snow-
shoe, missing that crucial peg, resumed its previous
dangling posture.
Lisa, although both of her snowshoes were intact,
was tired of hoisting a couple pounds of slush with each
step, so we decided to cache them in a drift and continue
unencumbered.
(Well, we kept our boots and socks on. We’re not, you
know, crazy.)
It was one of those days in the mountains when the utility
of snowshoes is not as certain as I would like it to be.
That I had felt the need to strap them on in the first place
had merely primed me for the subsequent tantrum when the
snowshoe failed.
We were hiking there along Rock Creek, on the day before
Easter, because it’s become a tradition.
Or possibly a compulsion.
The difference between the two can be a trifle murky, as
anyone knows who, for instance, sets off large explosives
when the old year gives way to the new.
My purpose in coming back each April to Rock Creek is
to take photographs.
A particular sort of photograph — the repeat.
The idea is to replicate a viewpoint so as to compare
whether the place has changed, and if so to what degree.
Repeat photography more typically is employed to illus-
trate changes spread over many years, decades or even cen-
turies, since the duration of the interval often coincides with
the scale of the difference.
The subject of my experiment in repeat photography is
rather mundane by comparison.
In April 2017 I hiked to the automated snow-measuring
station at the eastern edge of Eilertson Meadow, along Rock
Creek — what’s known as a Snotel. I did this for no reason
other than I like to get out in the mountains in the spring,
when the air is especially fresh and the occasionally cloying
summer heat inconceivable.
I of course had my phone, and of course it was equipped
with a camera (this particular phone is today a dusty relic rel-
egated to my bedside table, since I subscribe to the notion
that it is unAmerican, or at least anticapitalist, to not replace
consumer electronics regularly, no matter how well the cur-
rent version is working).
Anyway I took several photos of the site, which is inside a
low split-rail fence, mainly, I think, to prove that I was there.
I returned the next April. Again I had no defined purpose.
But again I had the phone, and it occurred to me — I think
because the measuring site, unlike the previous year, was
snow-free — that I ought to take photos from the same van-
tage point by way of comparison.
Four years later this annual excursion has become some-
thing of a habit.
Although the amount of snow has differed each year, and
in some cases dramatically, each of the five trips had a com-
monality — they happened on a sunny day.
Moreover, each trip was preceded by at least a few dry
days, with no fresh snow.
There was old snow, to be sure — even in 2018, when the
measuring site was bare. The Rock Creek Road is well shel-
tered by thick forest and in places by terrain, so the sunshine
works only slowly.
See, Meadow/Page B2
2022
2021
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald, File
The snow-measuring station at Eilertson Meadow, in the Elkhorn
Mountains northwest of Baker City, on April 16, 2022. The water
content in the snow was 3.8 inches.
Eilertson Meadow Snotel on April 17, 2021. The water content in
the snow was 1.6 inches.
2020
2019
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald, File
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald, File
Eilertson Meadow Snotel on April 19, 2020. The water content in
the snow was 1.8 inches.
The Eilertson Meadow Snotel on April 21, 2019. The water
content in the snow was 9.5 inches.
2018
2017
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald, File
Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald, File
The Eilertson Meadow Snotel on April 21, 2018.
The Eilertson Meadow Snotel on April 22, 2017. The water
content of the snow was 3.1 inches.