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Drainage Lines on Snow
Last night I dreamed of a passage along a narrow river in a thick forest followed by a perilous descent down steep snow on a mountain.
And then this morning a friend sent me this picture.
Actually, I had asked him about the photo yesterday, so that explains my receiving it. I had asked because the lines in the picture had originally puzzled me. They appeared to be flow-lines, but this is a snowfield, not a glacier, and even if it was a glacier, the cause of the darkening wasn't obvious. But after talking about them with Steve Warren at the UW on Monday, I came to a simple conclusion. They are indeed flowlines of a sort, but it is not the ice that flowed. Rather, it is liquid water. That is, they are channels created by rainwater drainage.
Still, it doesn't detract from their beauty, does it?
And, in a weird way, it connects to my dream... as if my mind had assumed the form of a raindrop and fallen onto the snow.
--JN