Snow falling on beech leaves

Snow! Winter is coming! It's really exciting to see! There have been unseasonably warmish days in the mountains during the past few weeks but there is snow on the high peaks and more to come and soon. I love being out in the woods or even high on a ridge in a snowstorm. Anyway, winter approaching brings reflections, ideas, on things to write about for this blog. I have a long list of things. It's endless, really, and I've been getting positive reviews of the blog from readers and some have offered to contribute articles. That's very exciting! I look forward to the blog becoming an inclusive forum and would appreciate a diversity of approaches and perspectives for looking at the natural history of the White Mountains. For my part I'm kind of compulsively pulled towards fundamentals like the overall health of the mountain environment through water, soil, climate including air quality, and what I call 'perturbations' or disturbances in the landscape like landslides, hurricanes, and fires. Even beaver dams, to an extent, are perturbations. They momentarily change the status quo, or 'balance' of things. Finally, I want to get down to some of the details in the plant and animal communities and explore interesting concepts like 'range' and 'distribution'. The WMNF , from my perspective, is a healthy ecosystem measured, in part, by the health and diversity of the plant communities here. That diversity is one of the truly wonderful and unique things about the White Mountain.