Through Dark Timber
Reflections on Autumn, Grief, and Golden Time
At a favorite trailhead, I lift my old dog out for an autumn walk. She looks just as eager as ever, though her movements are slower now, less steady. Still, this is a good day.
A few years ago, she would have leapt from the car, barely contained. But everything has its cycles and seasons, and we just move through them. And no one should miss the mountain aspens when they change color in the fall.
Still I did not make it up to see this indescribable display last year. My dog was dying. I was on deadline. My deadline was submitting a grant (that we were later awarded) to help support local farmers shifting into or expanding regenerative practices.
I’ve had my dog since she was seven weeks old, and I drove her home from a Denver area rescue almost 14 years ago. Last year, despite our absence, the aspen on the mountain still did its thing.
We start down the trail, first through the dark spruce. We used to walk a few miles even on a shorter hike, and now I wonder if we will make it to the bridge.
My dog does not mind. A short hike has just as many sniffs as the longer one if you just slow down, she seems to realize. And there is so much happening in a forest in the fall - all the business of all the denizens getting ready to hunker down until spring.
Some say that the aspen grove on Kebler Pass is the largest living organism, and others say it is a similar clone called “Pando” on the Fishlake National Forest in Utah. In any case what looks like tens of thousands of trees spread across hundreds of acres - old trees, young trees, dead trunks and new shoots - is a landscape that you walk inside of and meet all the forest community. But this community exists within a single being.
Aspens reproduce through their root systems, sending up what appear to be individual trees but are actually genetic copies—ramets—of a single organism.
What we call a grove is often one being, and maybe part of an even larger whole, rooted across the landscape, expressing itself through dozens, hundreds or even thousands of stems. The roots can live for millennia, far longer than any individual trunk, sending up new shoots as old ones die. Fire, disease, a hard winter—the grove absorbs many losses while the organism persists, sending up new growth when conditions allow.
An aspen grove takes on an essence of its own when it puts on autumn gold. Inside the light glows from golden canopy to golden leaves scattered across the ground. The October grass is tan. The late season flowers are solidago and rabbitbrush and some lingering mule’s ears. It’s a golden moment, and the scent is of fall, the signs of late-season activity are everywhere. Because winter is near.
As I walk, I think about deep roots and the resilience they represent. This has already been a consequential year.
Almost as soon as my organization was awarded the grant a new administration in DC yanked it away again. It sought to connect local small-acreage and low-income farmers with grant and other resources and provide stipends to derisk shifts into practices that boost soils, benefit pollinators and increase rural and farm resilience.
And it wasn’t just new projects being killed in the crib - I am also watching thirty years of my own work, as an environmental and climate activist, undone and in some cases intentionally broken beyond repair.
And my organization is dissolving. I founded it 10 years ago and now I am closing the door and shutting off the lights.
So the moment, for me, is about disappointment, disruption, and dissolution. But my dog is still dying.
A year ago, when it seemed she was at her end the vet found a treatment. The expectation was it would give us a few more months, maybe a final winter. It is a terminal condition, don’t expect a year.
But it has been a year and that is a lesson in disruptions. Sometimes they are not what we expect. Each year I bring my dog up to walk inside and among the Kebler aspen groves.
But I did not go last year, because of all those things. I was my own disruption and I robbed myself, and my dog, of a ritual that is more than just a drive up the road.
So now we sniff about and walk inside, while the roots that connect weave through the ground we walk on.
This time we stop just across the bridge, at the edge of the dark timber and just inside the aspen. A small grove where most leaves have fallen already, still golden on the ground but starting to turn brown.
The bare branches reveal shapes on and of the trees. In winter the snowy landscape and pale trees will settle into quiet, revealing hidden features, burls and knots, that summer leaves and life concealed.
My old dog has shown me that slowing down is appropriate. The seasons do change and cycle, we just move through them. New shoots and dead trunks all exist inside that whole.
We celebrate the golden time when we have it, as we do each other. Then the leaves fall, winter comes while the forest rests for spring.
My dog cannot go further. Even on this short walk we have both come far. We start back. I carry her through the dark timber, shadows lengthening toward the car. It has been a good day, with winter in the air.
Sadie Dog, Puppy Girl. May 2012 - October 2025. Just the Very Best Dog.
