Just as spring definitely opens with the great avalanches, so winter opens as definitely with the great snow-falls. One day all is clear and bright. The snow-line has retreated to its very highest level. The hard ice of the glacier is revealed far up from the snout. The maximum number of crevasses are open, and the wide-yawning bergschrunds form moats at the foot of all the final snow slopes that lean against the great faces of the peaks. Next morning all is grey and wet and cold. Clouds cover everything; winds rage; large snow-flakes in countless millions fill the air and drive across the ground. The drifts pile up and up, and all the ground is covered, white to the very depths of the valleys. For two or three days or longer the storm rages, and when at last the sun bursts forth again and the clouds withdraw their curtains, lo! the visible world is deeply buried in the white winter garment that will not be withdrawn till spring once more arrives. As a rule the first great snow-fall of winter comes thus definitely upon the Alpine world. Others that follow may be as great or greater in volume, but they only emphasise existing conditions; they do not, as this one does, change the face of Nature.
Thus the annual drama of the mountain world is played in its four acts, year after year, with infinite variety in detail and great uniformity in the large features. We talk of the seasons as definite divisions, but we must remember that their progress and succession is an affair not merely of day following day but of moment following moment. It is the steady progress, the gradual, imperceptible advance, that the close observer of natural beauty loves to watch. To-day is not absolutely like yesterday, and will not absolutely resemble to-morrow even though all three prove faultlessly fine. The superficial observer may note no change, but that is because he is superficial. There is always change, and in change the life of things consists.
To know mountains truly, means to recognise the changes which pass over them and happen amongst them. A mountain-lover may be compelled to live in some city of the plains, but, if he could, and in so far as mountains are his chief delight, he would live amongst them, not merely in one season but in all. No man, however, is or can be entirely single-minded. We cannot confine our affections to a single category of natural beauty, nor even to Nature alone. We are folk of many interests. Even the most enthusiastic lover of mountains is something more, and fails from the ideal. Mountains must take their share with other interests in the life of any one who cares for them at all. In so far, however, as they are an interest for any of us, it behoves us to make that interest wide and comprehensive, not restricting it to mountains as mere things to climb, nor to mountains of a particular character or at a particular time of year, but allowing it to embrace mountain scenery as a whole and at all seasons. Those of us who can do this, will find that the wider and more varied our experience of and sensitiveness to all varieties of mountain scenery becomes, the more intense will it likewise grow to be at any special moment, and the more keenly will any particular effect of beauty affect our hearts. In mountains, as elsewhere, all seasons of the year are marked by beauties that belong specially to them. Each season prepares for that which is to follow, and every day that passes is a transitional step from the one to the other. Let me commend my fellows of the mountain brotherhood to bear this fact in mind when they are wandering amongst the hills. If they attend not merely to the spectacle of the moment, but to the changes that are daily wrought out before their eyes, they will find their pleasures enlarged and their capacity for enjoyment increased. They will obtain a greater consequent understanding not merely of the aspects and moods of the mountains, but of what I may call their settled character as manifested by the larger mutations of aspect which they undergo in passing through the vicissitudes of the seasons of the year.