Wilderglyphs – Winter’s Thaw
By Josh Boling
Broadcast 2.26 & 3.1.2025
Winter wilderglyph: hoar frost on ponderosa pine. Photo by Allison De Jong.
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No season departs with clarity, but Winter leaves with the most stories to tell.
We find ourselves, my daughters and I, preparing to toddle into the forest through what is proving to be a poorly calculated weather window. A late-winter rain has quickly replaced the sunny skies we’d hoped would persist. We persevere, though, because we have come to find things. And as we climb the snowbank guarding the trailhead, the trepidation of weather and a progressing overstimulation are replaced by an easing drizzle, quiet snores on my chest from my 7-month-old, and an excited curiosity in my 3-year-old. She’s found her first wilderglyph.
Wilderglyph: (wil•dər•glif) noun: wilder—of the wilderness, wilds, or natural world; glyph—meaning picture. Wilderglyphs: pictures of the wilds. I apply the term to most any natural phenomenon, permanent or non-, that I might happen upon and find curious, surprising, or whimsical. The zebra-striped and sun-dried sapwood of a high-country spruce. The frozen concentric ripple rings of an ephemeral pool in a shadowy box canyon. Wilderglyphs are nature’s most diverse artistic happenstances, as varied as the consortium of elemental forces and ingredients that create them.
This one that my daughter stands over now is a pool of water, small and simple, a product of the dripping rain deposited from fir limbs above into a shallow bowl carved by warmth into the rotten crust of snow below. She hasn’t yet noticed any of these mechanisms of winter’s end. She only sees that which does not match what she knows about winter so far. It is an unfamiliar story to her in this snowy landscape.
Our geologic winter seems to be leaving with stories to tell as well. Scientists from Montana State University recently discovered the ancient remains of a mature white bark pine forest high in the alpine tundra of the Beartooth Plateau. These arboreal bones have been covered by a permanent ice patch for over five millennia, and their climate-change-induced revelation tells the story of a very different ecosystem—an old-growth subalpine forest that thrived for centuries hundreds of feet above the current tree line. This ecological snapshot of the past may give us insight into what a not-too-distant future may look like. It’s probable that as the planet continues to warm, ecosystems will ebb and flow, migrating back to distantly familiar elevations and latitudes—albeit at an unfamiliar rate. To understand and respond to these ecological changes, we will need to relearn to interpret a distantly familiar consortium of elemental forces and ingredients.
It is within only a few feet that we stop again with even more excitement. Footprints. Multiple species: the snowshoed bipeds crossing paths with the hoofed and antlered. I let my daughter’s imagination wander before asking what the prints might mean.
“Monsters!”
We both consider the possibility for a moment before I offer a guiding question.
“What about deer?” I ask. “They have two toes,” I add, pointing out the cloven-hooved shapes dug deep into the snow. Consensus is eagerly reached. A few more feet bring several more two-toed paths leading into the trees, and an excited imagination follows them in all directions, wondering, I think, about each of their stories.
The definition and discovery of wilderglyphs will differ for everyone, and ‘familiar’ is a relative term. My daughter attempts to resolve a snow-melt puddle beneath dripping fir boughs while scientists rediscover a forgotten ecosystem in a glacial graveyard. Finding wilderglyphs is less about spotting the most phenomenal, intriguing, or imaginative designs of nature and more about learning to pay closer attention to the stories they tell.
Every week since 1991, Field Notes has inquired about Montana’s natural history. Field Notes are written by naturalists, students, and listeners about the puzzle-tree bark, eagle talons, woolly aphids, and giant puffballs of Western, Central and Southwestern Montana and aired weekly on Montana Public Radio.
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