SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Hard winter has already arrived in the high country of New York's Adirondack Mountains. It's a joyful time of year for NPR's Brian Mann, who went trekking above the tree line into a world remade by snow and ice and wind.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: There is just a beautiful layer of snow on the ground deep in the woods. And it is still and cold.
I'm starting early, climbing a mountain called Wright Peak. That means moving through near darkness in the hour before sunrise.
There's just enough light in the woods. I can see, but there's no color. It's just like I'm walking through this black and white world of snow and charcoal lines of the hemlock trees, the boughs already really heavy with snow.
(SOUNDBITE OF STREAM FLOWING)
MANN: It's bitter cold, but early enough in the season that I still find open streams. I hop over icy rocks.
I've come to a big, frozen waterfall, shelf after shelf of ice. And there's water flowing. You can see it kind of bubbling and moving behind the ice.
I've climbed high enough that the ice is getting thicker on the trail, and it's also just getting a lot steeper. Pulling on a little microspike. Traction - you just have little metal teeth that dig into the ice.
With my cleats digging in, I climb on. In places, I'm on all fours using trees and rocks for handholds. The air shimmers with particles of ice, but whenever there's a view, I sit to rest and catch my breath.
Through the ice fog, I can see big shelves of rock, like, the size of buildings and kind of layered in snow and ice.
People ask me sometimes whether it makes sense to still be doing this when I'm in my 60s. The truth is, it's one of my deepest joys. And one of the beauties of mountains is that you just slow down, and you move at your own pace, and you find the altitude you want to be at.
The payoff is solitude and stillness and glimpses of wild beauty. I pick my way above the tree line onto the dome of rock, and by chance, I've timed it perfectly. The wind is fierce, but the ice fog is lifting.
(SOUNDBITE OF WIND BLOWING)
MANN: At the top, I can only linger a few minutes in that glacial, wild world. Then I turn and start the long descent through the winter forest. Brian Mann, NPR News, on Wright Peak in New York's Adirondack Mountains.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAY IWAR SONG, "REFLECTION STATION") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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