15 June 2009, Waterville Valley, N.H.

Serendipitous sighting; a young doe, complacently foraging beside the road, close to the thrusting waters of the Mad River. Must have been a yearling. Small, muscular, graceful, tawny and busily lunching. The surrounding mountains well draped in a low cloud cover, white shades of mist relentlessly rising as the forest aspirates its excess of rain. Rain fell in a delicately light drizzle.

Earlier, on the highway in the Franconia Notch, the panorama of the surrounding mountains, the puffed clouds, ragged and darker now and again presented an ethereality of mountain heights nudging the atmosphere we call sky. At the elevation of the Notch, and the provocation of peaks needling moisture-laden cloud formations, the inevitable resulted. No mere cloudbursts here, but a relentlessly steady rain. Grey skies, grey atmosphere. Swirling fog patches obscuring the mountainsides. There would be no clearing opportunity, that much was clear.

Last night's heavy rain that had lifted to grey overcast by mid-day elsewhere in the Waterville Valley translated to aquarium conditions at the Notch. Forget a hike there, alas. We proposed, nature unheedingly disposed. Nothing, however, lost in the transaction. The spectacular landscapes and breathtaking views simply enhanced in another way, seen through a different lens, one that, oddly, magnified rather than detracted.

We drove, of necessity, back to where we had left a lighter sky of hovering, not yet provoked, rain. Purple lupines, pink and mauve phlox, and white daisies poked their bold colours through the dull light. A dun-hued hawk flew across the face of the forest. Yellow, and bright orange hawkweed interspersed with yarrow insisted on notice.

On the trail our boots squelched through the sodden leaf mass. Lichen glowed silvery on beech trunks and branches. Beds of extravagant mosses luxuriate in this incessant damp they thrive in. Grey-green mosses like miniature ferns pack the trunk of a venerable maple, its heavily ridged bark a foil for the brilliantly-positioned moss-ferns.

A thunderstorm of raging waters descends the mountainside in the rioting creek, stridently draining the mountain of fresh-fallen rain, night after night. The creek drains the heights, sending an unending volley of cascading water down slopes, slapping and hurtling on boulders, sending spray up, frothing the surface, assertively tumbling, roaring its celebration of life's unending cycle.

We hike uphill, boots slipping on drenched tree roots, pale yellow shale bits scattering as we slip upward. A white-throat sings a paean to the day, its long trill of exuberant joy infusing our sensibilities with a deeper insight of all we survey, with a quiet sense of privilege to be there in this place, at this time. Every green living thing glistens and gleams, colours intensified, from the glare-white of birch trunks, to the emerald of ferns.