In the sunlight in the center of a ring of trees Lev sat cross-legged, his head bent above his hands.

I discovered that nearly every day the snow was slightly different along the trail at Jackson Creek. I became fascinated by sintering. When a snowflake falls from the sky and lands on the earth, it immediately begins, or perhaps continues, a transformation as it forms bonds at temperatures below zero (this is not a melting process) with its neighbouring snowflakes or crystals to create the fabric of a snowpack. Sintering is a joining. It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other. [...] Sintering is slow deformation.