Sometimes—okay, let’s be honest, usually—when I try to plan something, I get stuck. It’s because I’m terrible at planning things. When there are more than three things to juggle in my head I start dropping them, and adding time just makes everything worse. Getting the ideas out of my head and onto paper helps—sometimes. But sometimes I just stop planning and start doing, with the (naive, optimistic) assumption that I’ll figure things out as I go along. Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Like it didn’t today, when I got up very early on a Sunday morning to walk around a snowy forest and count squirrels. See, I’ve been having this problem planning the sampling methods for my upcoming field season. I need to know how many birds and small mammals live in a given patch of forest. Normally you do that by walking a series of lines or stopping at a bunch of points and recording both all of the animals you see and how far away from you they are. Then you use THE POWER OF MATH to turn the number of animals you saw into an estimate of how many animals there are.

Easy, right? Well, maybe not in my case. But that, as they say, is another story for another time. Frustrated with my planning efforts, I decided to simply go out in the forest and survey some random points. Maybe just doing trying the method would help me figure out what works and what doesn’t. So I rolled out of bed early, dressed warm, packed a lunch, and took off.

The great thing about living in North Van is that if you just walk uphill you’ll reach the forest before too long. As I hiked through the snowy neighborhood, slipping a little on patches of icy pavement, I was encouraged by the amount of activity I saw. Not human activity—all the humans were still in bed—but bird activity. There were crows having a heated dispute over whatever it is crows dispute over, a flicker banging energetically on someone’s chimney, even varied thrushes singing as if it were spring. I paused at the end of the street, where the trail began, and sipped coffee from my thermos. This is great, I thought. I’ll get some practice with distance sampling and collect lots of pilot data, to boot.

The moment I crossed the power line cut into the forest, everything fell silent. Under the trees the morning sunlight had yet to penetrate, and the air was filled with the blue-white color of snow and shadow. On the lower trails hikers and even mountain bikers has compressed the patchy snow into ragged clumps of dirty ice, which were slick and treacherous underfoot. As I climbed higher, aiming toward survey points I’d picked out the night before, the snow became thicker and less trampled, until I finally reached a trail where no one had yet to walk. I followed that for a while, and then left the trail altogether. With ever meter of ascent there was more snow, until even the branches of the trees were dusted with it. It was beautiful, brilliant—and completely silent.

I hiked up the mountain for half an hour, and never heard or saw anything larger than a chickadee. Halfway to my first point I stopped to catch my breath in a little clearing. The sun was higher now, the golden light pouring down between the trees and lighting up the dark boughs. Snow melting off the upper branches fell constantly in little clumps, creating the illusion of movement all around me. I had underestimated the strength of winter’s grip on the forest: there was nothing here.

After a while, the sweat began to go cold beneath my down jacket. I turned and followed my own footprints through the snow, back down the mountain. I passed through the brushy gap cut for the power lines, and immediately saw a pair of spotted towhees working methodically through the sleeping huckleberries. Half a dozen crows flew overhead, on their way to wherever it is crows go. I felt like Molly from The Last Unicorn. “Where have you been?” I wanted to cry. “Damn you, where have you been?”

There’s no point in yelling at birds. They had been off the mountain and out of the forest, where it was warmer and less snowy and there was food and hot showers. Not a bad idea, actually. I went home and had a very, very hot shower and decided the morning hadn’t been a total loss. I’d seen some interesting prints in the snow. I’d had a nice hike in the forest. And I got to tell a good story about it.