Not this year. In one of the driest springs in Colorado history, our watershed’s snowpack was 26% of normal on April 1. The impact on fire danger, drought, agriculture, economy, and ecology is going to be profound.

But this is the new normal in a climate-changed world.  Colorado has warmed 2.3° F since only 1980.  The Upper Colorado River Basin suffered close to record-low precipitation in March—normally our snowiest month—and record heat. Snowpack peaked at the earliest date and lowest amount ever. This collapsed the ski industry, and many resorts closed in what is typically their most profitable month. 

The kayak run my friends and I like best is called, ominously, “Slaughterhouse.” It flows through an alpine forest at 7,000 feet, near the town of Woody Creek.  Kayakers must navigate tight channels and churning holes, steering around boulders the size of VW buses. 

Though many of us have kayaked this stretch hundreds of times, we never paddle the same river twice, to echo Heraclitus, because flows are always minutely different, as is the turbidity of the water, the quality of sun, or clouds. At the same time, there is a Zen to the repetitiveness: a remembered left turn below a spruce tree to hit an eddy; a crucial line that splits two rocks; the plant smells we recall from last year and the previous 30. 

This friend group of men in their forties and fifties—a photographer, a paramedic, a ski mountain manager, a caterer—has become attuned to the river. We continuously observe snowpack and storm cycles throughout winter, with an eye to runoff. We know that when it reaches 500 cubic feet per second (cfs) we can float Slaughterhouse for the first time. 800 to 1000 cfs is juicy, a joyous party, and that level often holds steady for many weeks. The water gets pushy around 1300 cfs, and some of us stop paddling when it gets too scary. No need to worry this spring: Slaughterhouse, which can peak above 7,000 cfs, topped out at about 250 cfs. 

We know each other like we do the river. Banter focuses on making fun of our paddling. One meme of an upside-down kayak shared on a group chat read: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I lied about having a solid roll…where are you?” If you do happen to swim out of your boat, the group instantly switches from a bunch of jerks to a coordinated rescue team. Expect to hear “Are you doing OK?” for the rest of the day. 

Later, expect to be made fun of at that location for the rest of your life. When we gather at the takeout, we drink beer and reflect on our glories and failures, loitering past dinnertime. 

To be a good kayaker, you have to be willing to suffer the consequences of a mistake. Typically, that means being upside down in cold water, unable to breathe or see. Boaters call this underwater experience “the white room,” or “being Maytagged.” You accept the fact of an inevitable frigid swim, because, as old kayakers say, “We’re all between swims.” This season, the mistake we must endure is a societal one. 

In a sense, kayakers are prepared for the hot, smoky summer ahead: We’ve learned to endure some inevitable pain. Harder to manage will be the loss. We’ll have to forgo the camaraderie, ritual and traditions that come from decades of recreation tied to seasons, place and environment. The truth is, as the planet warms, we’re in danger of losing a sense of who we are. 

The philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a term for this: solastalgia, the distress caused by environmental change, creating a “homesickness you feel while still at home.”

It is widely understood that climate change will forever alter our physical world. Indeed, it already has. It’s less obvious that it’s also coming for our friendships, our identity and the spirit and rhythm of our lives.  

Auden Schendler is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Basalt, Colorado, and is the author of Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul.

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You might call this unusual because Durango has access to a backup supply. In 2011, voters approved spending $6 million to buy 3,800 acre‑feet of water storage in a reservoir called Lake Nighthorse. The rationale was simple: The town could build a pipeline and ship that water into its system whenever dry times occurred.

But since then, not much has happened.

Former city manager Ron LeBlanc tried to move the project forward before retiring in 2019. An engineering study in 2023 concluded that the town should connect Lake Nighthorse to its system using one of three possible pipeline routes. Still, no construction began.

Durango’s mayor, Gilda Yazzie, says the city paid for its share of a pipe at the base of the dam, along with what’s called a manifold—a device that would split water among the four users of Lake Nighthorse. But nothing has been built to connect that manifold to Durango’s water system.

Lake Nighthorse itself is the scaled‑down result of the Animas–La Plata Project, authorized by Congress in 1968. That project would have covered the Animas and La Plata river valleys with canals, pumps and pipelines. Instead, the final plan built just one dam and one pumping station, leaving the Animas River free‑flowing.

That decision helped protect the area’s natural beauty while also attracting more people to Durango. Some of those new residents have since moved into fire‑prone areas. Many Western cities have learned the hard way about not securing enough water to fight wildfires. Fires racing through Los Angeles in 2025 wiped out entire neighborhoods. Water storage ran out and hydrants went dry.

Durango water engineer Steve Harris has 52 years of experience in the field and is known for promoting water conservation. He thinks Durango is making a serious mistake by not connecting a pipe to Lake Nighthorse.

“The city has a century of the Animas and Florida Rivers being so good to them with steady year-around flows that they don’t even know they need storage,” he said. “They may only find out during a water crisis.”

Right now, Durango has 10 to 30 days of water stored in its Terminal Reservoir, which holds 267 acre-feet. That’s annual water consumption for about 600 households; Durango has over 9,000 households. The city depends mainly on the Florida River, with large draws of summer water from the Animas River. When the two rivers flow normally, the taps run. If both rivers dry up or clog with debris from fires, the city could run out of water within weeks.

Climate change and a 25‑year drought highlight this risk. In the last eight years, on 34 days, the Animas River averaged less than 100 cubic feet per second, a low level reached only twice in the previous 120 years. Close calls have already happened. In 2002, the Missionary Ridge Fire filled both rivers with ash and debris and forced the city to cut back pumping. In 2015, the Gold King Mine spill sent millions of gallons of waste into the Animas River, stopping city pumping for a week.

When Harris spoke at a Durango Neighborhood Coalition meeting last year, residents expressed overwhelming support for more water storage. That message hasn’t reached city leaders. Mayor Yazzie said voters were happy to support a $61 million sales-tax–funded municipal building and popular new recreation projects. But she said raising taxes for a major water project would be difficult.

“We are looking at a potential water and sewer fee increase to keep the toilets flushing,” Mayor Yazzie said. As for building a pipeline to Lake Nighthorse and a much-needed new water treatment plant—an investment water engineer Steve Harris estimates at about $100 million—“it all depends on how much the citizens are willing to pay for water. “

Durango’s reluctance to invest in its water system stands out in the West, where water storage is usually characterized as urgent. Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, built three separate intake tunnels into Lake Mead to make sure it could keep taking water even as the reservoir dropped.

Durango’s Lake Nighthorse pipeline remains a paper concept. This winter, with snowpack in the San Juan Mountains the lowest recorded in generations, it’s time the town acts to guarantee more water. Fighting flames with empty hoses would be a sorry sight.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Durango, Colorado.

The 4^th paragraph has been changed to reflect Ron LeBlanc as the ex-city manager of Durango. Previously, it read Steve LeBlanc.

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I took delight in the abundant crops of acorns and bright red madrone berries. The madrone trees were thronged with feeding robins and hermit thrushes, and the oaks were alive with squirrels, jays and woodpeckers. Although neither acorns nor madrone berries will be part of my Thanksgiving feast, my feeling of thanks for this bounty came easily and naturally.

Then, further up the trail, I passed through a stand of dead ponderosa pines. Throughout the West, many forest areas are experiencing severe conifer die-offs, and these skeletal dead trees represent fuel for the wildfires that we all fear. Looking up at them, I certainly didn’t feel any stirrings of gratitude.

But just then, a hairy woodpecker landed in the largest snag and began to hammer away, anticipating a feast of beetle grubs. For the woodpecker—and the beetle grubs—the dead trees were a gift, something to be grateful for.

So, what else was I missing? I looked down at my feet. There was the usual jumble of the forest floor: fallen leaves and conifer needles, bits of lichen, with some scattered manzanita berries. If anything in nature deserves to be called humble, it’s layers like this of decay.

But as soon as I knelt and focused my attention, there it was, waiting to be acknowledged: gratitude. From a nearby clump of brush came the sounds of a towhee’s big feet scratching through the fallen leaves. For towhees, the duff is a banquet table, spread with a cornucopia of seeds, insects, sowbugs and spiders. For the seeds, the litter of the forest floor is where they need to be, where they have their only chance to germinate and grow. For the insects, sowbugs and spiders, it is a world complete, their grazing land and hunting ground, the habitat that makes their lives possible.

I stood and took a long drink from my water bottle. That water came from the watershed surrounding me, its stream fed by snowmelt and filtered through the ancient granite soils of the Siskiyou Mountains. I took a deep breath. The oxygen that filled my lungs and keeps me alive is the gift of photosynthesis, produced over billions of years by plants and cyanobacteria.

To state the obvious, none of this—none —is humanity’s doing. The birds, the berries, the decaying leaves, the spiders and the sowbugs, the life-giving atmosphere and the life-giving water—all are gifts that we receive, some so essential we cannot imagine their absence. Others are so useful it seems they were made for us especially, and for those we sometimes remember to be grateful. Others appear to be of no use to us whatsoever, or even to be intended for our harm, and why would we ever be grateful for those?

But nothing in nature is wasted.

Every gift given is accepted: the dead tree by the beetle, the beetle by the woodpecker, the woodpecker by the hawk, the dead hawk by the scavengers, then by the decomposers, then by the germinating ponderosa pine seed rising from the fertile duff.

All of this is one oversimplified cycle of gift exchange. The world we inhabit is a web of reciprocity far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less control. To be alive at all seems a miracle.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us imagine the world we share with every living thing. Let us give thanks for this planet, this blue and green ball spinning in a lifeless void, holding us all and making possible our every heartbeat, our every breath. And not just ours, but the existence of all life, and of all the interrelations that make our world healthy and resilient and diverse and beautiful.

This year, when I sit down to my Thanksgiving feast, surrounded by loved ones, I will try to be mindful of every kind of giving thanks.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and ecologist in Oregon.

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Many people lost everything and are now sheltering far from home, where they face an uncertain future. Unfortunately, climate change is part of their story.

On October 12, ex-Typhoon Halong, the second and stronger storm, slammed into the villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. A late jog in the storm track gave the over 1,000 residents little warning.

As gusts topped 100 miles per hour and seawater surged inland, houses never built for such conditions floated away or crumbled. In Kipnuk, people crawled through the windows of flooding houses and waded in darkness and howling winds toward their neighbors, only to find their homes gone, too. The school provided shelter.

Rescuers arriving in Kipnuk found nearly all homes destroyed and failing water, sanitation and power. Far from Alaska’s road system, the village of 700 evacuated, in what became part of Alaska’s largest-ever civilian airlift.

Helicopters plucked people from eroded runways, carrying them 60 miles to Bethel, population 6,200. As shelters overflowed, C-17 military transports thundered in to bring survivors to Anchorage, another 300 miles from home. Exhausted survivors filed from planes without much more than their clothing.

Many do not know when or if they’ll ever return home.

Their plight is unique in America. No roads lead to these communities. No utility trucks are headed their way, something we see after Western fires and Atlantic hurricanes. Everything arrives slowly and at exorbitant cost by barge or plane, mostly in summer.

Additionally, many residents live by a subsistence economy. They have lost hard-won winter stores and precious boats, snow machines and other expensive tools for securing food. They are American refugees.

In a day, these members of close-knit and culturally distinct communities suddenly scattered to Bethel, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and elsewhere. People are generously sharing necessities, but they can’t replace connections, like the daily use of Yup’ik language and humor, or a young person walking in the door with fresh traditional soup for an Elder.

Although fierce fall storms are common in Alaska, scientists have long warned that ongoing warming in the North Pacific and Bering Sea can energize the storms beyond historical norms. Today, a stubborn Pacific marine heatwave exacerbates the warming. It’s premature to say how much warming fed these storms, but the science warrants dialogue and research, not the recent zeroing-out of federal research funds.

Declining sea ice and thawing permafrost have also dramatically increased erosion in dozens of Alaskan communities, especially during fall storms. The recent storms tore away more land, edging waters closer to vital power and other infrastructure. At the village of Quinhagak, the storm swallowed 60 feet of shoreline and scattered thousands of Yup’ik archaeological artifacts.

Federal reports name over 30 Alaskan villages imminently threatened by erosion. Investing in their resilience to avoid the trauma and astronomic cost of relocation—or sudden destruction—was behind Biden-era clean energy and infrastructure laws, which Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and other Alaskans helped author.

But the new administration abruptly canceled dozens of projects, including a $20 million EPA plan to fortify the now decimated Kipnuk. The work would not have started in time to make a difference by this fall, but what just happened signals an urgent need for investment in vulnerable communities.

The disaster comes amid a government shutdown and the gutting of  Alaska public radio, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Weather Service, which now flies fewer weather balloons to aid forecasters near the Bering Sea.

Yet Alaska’s National Guard, Native consortiums, businesses and nonprofits have embraced survivors. They are cleaning up and flying pet-rescue missions. In Anchorage, shelters have opened for survivors, and an already stretched school district is compassionately working to absorb at least 130 displaced students, for whom urban schools may bring further shock.

Western Alaska communities, already bearing their share of the disaster, are also acting on ingrained Yup’ik and Iñupiat values as they support their neighbors. It’s how Indigenous people have thrived here for 10,000 years.

Outside Alaska, news media didn’t give this disaster its due and has since moved on. But people should know about these storms, and can consider giving to the Alaska Community Foundation relief fund coordinated through Alaska Native and other organizations.

Tim Lydon lives in Alaska and is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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The survival of spotted owls meant a lot to me as a young environmental activist. In 1985, I spent days living on a plywood platform perched high in the canopy of an Oregon Douglas fir. The tree was majestic, over eight feet wide at the base—just one of many in a stand hundreds of years old.

 If you’re a certain age you might recall the banners: GIVE A HOOT: SAVE THE SPOTTED OWL. They spawned a bumper sticker in what became a culture war: SAVE A LOGGER, EAT A SPOTTED OWL.

My 40-year career as a conservationist began in those Northwest timber wars as I joined other tree-sitters and protesters to halt the logging of gigantic old-growth trees.

The threatened survival of federally endangered spotted owls in the region’s forests became the central issue in a storm of litigation. In 1994, the dispute finally led to President Clinton protecting 24 million acres of ancient forest housing the owls. But even then, barred owls were invading from Eastern states, stealing a prey base of small animals from the spotted owls. The numbers of spotted owls continued to plummet.

Last August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed off on a controversial Barred Owl Management Strategy that relies on hiring sharpshooters to kill up to 16,000 barred owls a year at a cost of up to $12 million. The plan aims to give spotted owls a chance to survive.

During the 1990s, President Clinton’s sweeping forest plan to save the owls by saving old-growth forests was among many highlights of my conservation career. But I also recall numerous lows-lows. The first was when I learned that loggers had chain sawed that huge tree I’d occupied.

Mostly, I’ve managed to be hopeful about conservation no matter the grief from accelerating losses on the ground. But here’s the dilemma: How are we to process the steady decline of the spotted owl? Conservationists won an epic battle against logging because of these owls, only to see their habitat becoming the arena for an owl-on-owl smackdown.

Must the solution be that we shoot one species to save another? The plan is based on research overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose experiments showed that removing barred owls in limited areas could help spotted owls survive.

When the federal agency’s plan was announced, animal welfare interests sued to block it, arguing that it would fail. They also claimed the costs would add up to more than $1 billion over three decades. Officials at the agency say they will start small and demonstrate their plan’s effectiveness and affordability.

Mixed feelings like mine are shared. Madeleine Cameron, who was part of a University of Wisconsin team involved in experimental removals of barred owls, told the Seattle Times: “I personally did not decide to do owl work thinking this is where my career would be. You get there through watching all your favorite owls disappear.” Meanwhile, some biologists foresee adaptation and hybridization. “Sparred” owls already exist in the Northwest, filling the niche of displaced spotted owls.

Reluctantly, I support killing some barred owls. But like Cameron, this is not what drew me into conservation. And now the whole issue might be academic as the Trump administration disrupts scientific research and agency continuity.

Elon Musk’s cost-cutters fired more than 400 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees in March, an action the Supreme Court upheld April 8. With voluntary retirements and likely further reductions in force, it’s a real question whether the agency will have the funds or staff to carry out the shooting of barred owls.

Meanwhile, the bullies of the forest are winning.

Mitch Friedman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit spurring lively conversation about the West. He heads Seattle-based Conservation Northwest, which he founded in 1989 after years with Earth First!. His book, Conservation Confidential: A Wild Path to a Less Polarizing and More Effective Activism, is about to be published.

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DeVoto summed up the platform pressed by Western elected officials of his day in a memorable punchline: “Get out—and give us more money.” This “economic fantasy” is still with us, as DeVoto predicted, “yesterday, today, and forever.”

The new, fossil-fuel-friendly heads of federal land management agencies are serious about the “get out” part of that plea, firing thousands of their employees and closing dozens of offices across the West. Their list targets Fort Collins, Colorado; Flagstaff, Arizona; Moab and Salt Lake City, Utah; Lander, Wyoming; Boise, Idaho, and more. Local economies will lose millions they’ve depended on.

But Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t doing so well with the “give us more money” part. Voters who elected Trump may not get what they bargained for.

I have a home in southern Utah, in Torrey, gateway to Capitol Reef National Park. My neighbors in Wayne and Garfield counties, who gave well over 70 percent of their votes to Trump, often complain about federal overreach. They see conservation of national public lands as “locking up” land.

Yet Westerners love all that financial support coming in from the agencies they profess to hate. They rely on the federal government for so much more than they often acknowledge.

After a charming presentation about cowboy culture at Torrey’s nonprofit Entrada Institute recently, my wife asked a young rancher what his family did for health insurance.

“My wife works for the Forest Service,” he said. Indeed, government employees make up 23 percent of the workforce in Utah’s Garfield County and 25 percent in Wayne County. These salaries and the benefits that come with them are crucial to family stability.

A revealing interactive map in Grist magazine shows the reach of investment by the federal government through legislation passed by the Biden administration. I click on the town of Torrey and find tens of millions of federal dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law flowing into the county.

Think upgrades of rural airports, solar panels on small businesses, bridge replacements, removal of lead from drinking water—and on and on.

And then on February 14, the Department of the Interior announced the firings of more than 2,300 public servants at the Department of the Interior, including the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Geological Survey. With this “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” southern Utah communities will feel accelerating impacts — loss of income and benefits, more money going to unemployment payments, understaffed parks and monuments, irate visitors.

My inbox and social media feed are flooded with anecdotes about what these firings mean. One man grew up in a Park Service family and then worked as a park ranger himself for years. He transferred to the Forest Service recently, becoming a “probationary” employee only because he was new to his position. He lost his job and his career thanks to the Trump administration.

When rural Westerners say “get out” to the feds, I don’t think this is what they have in mind.

President Trump is also considering once more eviscerating national monument protection for Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears in southern Utah. These monuments have been good for local communities and economies.

The monuments haven’t locked up the land; ranchers still have their grazing permits. Pre-existing mining and drilling claims remain in force. And the conservation and tourism values of these designated preserves expand every year.

According to a recent Colorado College poll, 84 percent of Utahns support establishment of new national parks, national monuments, national wildlife refuges and tribal protected areas. Still, Utah’s governor, attorney general, and congressional delegation continue to waste millions on fruitless lawsuits attacking those same preserves.

Westerners are evolving; politicians aren’t keeping up. And yet we keep re-electing these same officials. Maybe, just maybe, the Trumpian war on civil servants will force a reckoning. We’ll re-evaluate why we need a robust federal presence in the West.

And our war against ourselves will end.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He worked for the National Park Service, BLM, and Forest Service in his twenties and has been a conservation advocate ever since.

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If you look at the last century in New Mexico, stretches of higher temperatures have lengthened; heat waves are hotter and nights, consistently warmer.

Rising heat and expanding aridity harm ecosystems and wildlife and hotter days are dangerous for anyone outside, especially people without housing or access to cool spaces. Extreme heat even interacts with certain medications people need for their physical and mental health. 

It should be no surprise that we’re facing another crackly-dry spring, summer, and fall. Fans watching the March 2 Oscars on Albuquerque TV saw flashing red-flag fire warnings. The next day, high winds and dust storms blasted the state; near Deming, a haboob of fast-moving dust shut down highways.

As of early March, 92 percent of New Mexico was experiencing drought, with almost 30 percent of the state in severe to extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Arizona is in even worse shape: 100 percent of the state is in drought, with 87 percent in severe to exceptional drought. And the interior West’s three-month outlook is for warm, dry conditions — especially in Arizona and New Mexico.

Here in New Mexico, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District—which supplies water for farms—is warning runoff season will be short and river flows, low. The district’s leaders are urging farmers to plan for extended periods between irrigation deliveries and say that without summertime monsoons, they will not meet everyone’s needs this year.

During the 1900s—including during the infamous 1950s drought and earlier in this century—armers could often still expect full water allocations in a dry year.

Now, when farmers don’t receive water—and the Rio Grande dries for long stretches—it’s not only because there isn’t enough snow melting off the mountains.  It’s also because consistently dry soils suck up any moisture, making both forests and croplands thirstier.

Not only that, but decades of persistent drought and warming temperatures have desiccated reservoirs along the Rio Grande and its tributary, the Chama River.

On the Chama River, Heron Reservoir is 14 percent full; its neighbors, El Vado and Abiquiu, are at 14 percent and 51 percent respectively. Further down the watershed, on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico, Elephant Butte Reservoir is only 13 percent full, and its neighbor, Caballo, nine percent full. 

In New Mexico, some water users, including the irrigation district, rely on water piped from the Colorado River watershed into the Chama and then the Rio Grande. This year, most of that supplemental water won’t be there.

The view upstream on both watersheds is also troubling, especially in Arizona, New Mexico and southern Utah where the snowpack is “below to well-below median.” Last month, the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, were 34 percent full, the lowest they’d been in early February for the last 30 years of records.

I’m alarmed by many things happening right now, including the disappearance of climate data from federal websites and the gutting of federal workforces and budgets. We need wildland firefighters, scientists, and the staffers who kept our parks and public lands functioning.

But as a reporter who has covered climate change and its impacts in my state for more than two decades, I take the long view along with a local view.

We have known for decades that the planet is steadily warming and that the impacts of climate change would intensify. And we must resist focusing solely on the current chaos of the federal government.

There’s never been a better time to become immersed in local politics or organizing, and to hold state and local leaders accountable for action on climate.

We can collaborate on local solutions and work together to better deal with the crises we face. Really, we have no choice.

Laura Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues She is longtime reporter based in Albuquerque and the author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate and Water Bodies.

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This makes me a contrarian amid all the hoopla over returning light. Yet, as we freefall into a climate-changed world, it seems more people are giving darkness and its benefits a fresh look.

We begin feeling the loss of darkness only a few weeks after solstice. By February, the low-angle lighting that has graced our lives since November is gone, chased off by a sun that arcs higher each day. Some years, if the weather is too clear, it ends even earlier.

I’m no curmudgeon, and I think sunshine has its place. In summer, I like to grow a few potatoes, and I appreciate birdsongs and the general flowering of things. Still, the dark of winter just makes me happy.

I’m cheeriest on nights like tonight, when my walk home from work is brightened only by streetlamps and lighted windows reflecting on snow. Unseen flurries melt against my face as I pass our snow-quieted ballfields, where an owl gives a lone cheer from her bleacher seats high in a cottonwood. Sometimes I hear coyotes in the woods beyond. They remind me that lynx, hares, moose, and others remain busily active in the dark.

On clear nights, my little eyes can see over 2 million light-years to the Andromeda Galaxy, or even nearer neighbors like Betelgeuse, the Pleiades and our local bear, Ursa Major, overhead. Sometimes there’s the aurora, too, flowing and even lancing across the sky, backlighting snowy peaks and the ghoulish crowns of ancient hemlocks.

Even by day the darkness seems comfortingly near, as my shadow attests. While in summer it cowers close, hiding from the sun, in winter it freely wanders the snowy hills with me, stretching far ahead like a comically slender space alien as we cross fields of diamonds. Beyond, low-angle light tints the mountains pink and purple.

My town is full of walkers. In the dark, we don headlamps and reflective vests, while our dogs sport lighted collars. We look festive, like our homes at this time of year. And while I’m all for safety, I cut my light when there are no cars. My pupils swell to drink in the night’s ambient light. Snow illuminates the world and trees become silhouettes among the stars.

The beauty of all this captivates me, but darkness offers more than aesthetics. With sleep hygiene back in fashion, we know dark nights promote healthy sleep, the deep kind that recharges our bodies and reboots our minds.

In these hot times, the coolness of the dark is also gaining value. In the north, winter’s long nights help protect our snow, which insulates glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Each is an essential component of our local landscapes, but they are globally important, too, for maintaining sea levels, storing carbon and moderating weather.

It’s true in the temperate zones, too, where winter’s reprieve from the sun helps the Colorado and Columbia rivers and all their tributaries maintain the cool temperatures that native fish need throughout the year.

In summer, every minute of darkness helps preserve that coolness, slowing the evapotranspiration that increasingly taxes lakes, rivers and wetlands. It even helps desert soils and plants like the saguaro, which wisely opts to flower and transpire only at night. Wildland fires often abate in darkness, too.

Darkness also increasingly shelters workers from heat, the top weather-related killer of Americans. Especially in agriculture, the extreme heat now plaguing the Southwest and Pacific Northwest increasingly forces agricultural workers to clock in before dawn or during evenings.

But in an insidious twist, climate change is warming nights faster than days, contributing to longer autumns, shorter winters and less relief from heat stress for people, plants and animals. In a recent example in Arizona, once-sturdy saguaros dropped limbs or toppled over after experiencing record-high nighttime temperatures.

All this points to a rising need for the cool and calm of night, and the many benefits brought by darkness, dormancy and cold.

Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Girdwood, Alaska.

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