When the storm broke this morning, it left Mt. Juneau covered in six inches of new snow. While Chicken Ridge’s streets glistens under gray light, sun seemed to explode off Mt. Juneau’s new snow pack.
I pack the little dog into the car and drive up Douglas Island’s Fish Creek Road. We passed the parked pickup trucks of hunters who hope to shoot one of the deer driven out of the mountains by the new snow.
Unlike the deer, Aki loves snow. She shoots out of the car and onto a newly white meadow. Finding it too deep for walking, she moves across the meadow with a series of leaps. I walk behind her, surprised that my stride roughly equals the distance covered by one of the little dog’s jumps. The new snow clumps up on her hair so she stops often to chew snowballs off her legs. Once she plunges her face into the snow cover and clears her face of it by twisting her head back and forth. I can almost hear her ears snap.