Summertime Crested Butte, Colorado, some 22 years since I was last here working on a winter ski lift. And I have never seen it like this: snow only on the upper peaks, while down here near the base, and on the way to the old T-bar lift, all that lay beneath wintertime snow (and even springmelt) is now revealed, bright and shining green: long, tall grasses; aspens white truncked with round flickering and flitting green-to-gray leaves; dandelions large stemmed and leaved, rising to a big yellow flower or cosmic cluster of seed; yarrow stretching off along the ground in an infinite number of indentations like a rivery floodplain or liver system; small blue birds sitting on ropes courses; new trenches where they’re improving things along the line of lift. And then from slightly down the mountain I spy somethign dark against the pale blue of Sunday morning sky, gliding, rising, slowly circling, wider and wider, higher and higher—some kind of raptor—hawk maybe, brown mostly, circling up from out of the aspens, until here’s directly overhead, and the red of his tail is obvious. He circles around us standing on this one piece of open ground above the old T-bar and the nearby lift; round and round above us he circles, not flapping, merely gliding, not rising, just circling in the morning light; sun above, slightly to the north and east, rising ever higher over us, over the circling red tail, over that butted peak of the rocky mountain looking down. And we stand there in that circling moment, together, until we begin to move, or he does—circling off towards the west, and is gone.