Calendar

Four seasons on Sulphur Mountain

I stopped asking people “when is the best time” because the honest answer is another question: what kind of quiet do you want? The mountain does not have a single personality. It has a wardrobe.

Spring

Spring on the summit is late and argumentative. Town can be in shirtsleeves while the boardwalk still holds a dirty seam of snow. I have walked up there in May with sun on my face and ice in the shade of every plank. Bighorn sheep use the shoulders of the road below more confidently than they use the summit itself; I have counted them from the cabin more often than I have stood beside them. Ravens, on the other hand, treat the upper station as a year-round office.

Wildflowers start lower and climb. If you want colour, look at the verges on the way up before you look at the peak. The air still has a winter edge after four in the afternoon.

Summer

Summer is the season people imagine when they pack as if they were going to a lake. The summit disagrees. Even in July the wind can make a short-sleeve shirt feel like a dare. The reward is duration: you can linger. I like the long evenings. Light on Cascade Mountain at eight in July is a slow copper that does not happen in November. The boardwalk smells of warm wood. People talk more. The ranges stack themselves with a clarity that makes you understand why someone built a scientific station up here instead of in town.

Crowds are real. I go later, or I go earlier, or I accept that I am sharing the rail. Sunrise visits are quieter and colder. Sunset visits are social. Evening visits, after the day-trip pulse, are the ones I protect on my own calendar.

Autumn

Autumn is short and I am greedy with it. Golden larches do not last. They arrive like a decision and then they drop. A mid-September weekday, if the road is behaving, can feel like the mountain handed you a private room. The light is lower. Photographs get easier and then suddenly too easy, all gold and no discipline. I try to look at the rock as much as the trees.

Nights come in. If you stay for the end of the light you will want a warmer layer than your pride suggests.

Winter

Winter is why I started writing any of this down. Snow makes the boardwalk into a different instrument — squeak, scrape, the particular hush when wind drops. The cosmic ray station looks correct in a drift. Your camera battery will lie to you. So will your face if you forget a wind layer. I have had visits of twenty minutes that felt complete and visits of an hour that felt like I had borrowed someone else's luck.

Sheep still use the lower slopes. Ravens still lecture from the rails. The townsite, seen from above, looks like a model someone forgot to put away.

Sunrise, sunset, evening

Sunrise is for people who do not mind starting cold. The valley holds blue for a long time; the first hit of sun is a thin blade on the highest teeth. Sunset is theatre and I do not pretend otherwise. Evening, especially in high summer, is my compromise: enough light to walk, fewer elbows, a chance that the sky will keep a little colour after you thought it was finished.

Stargazing gets mentioned because the summit is a dark, windy place with a lot of sky. I have stood on the deck after the last useful light and watched the first stars show up like someone turning up a dimmer. I have also given up after four minutes because my fingers quit. It is not an observatory. It is a mountain in the dark. Dress for the second sentence, not the first.