“There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there’s light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space … then there’s a race — between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up. Sometimes, you can make your own space.” — Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (Discworld series, 1992)

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A local snowshoe walk (central New Hampshire) on a day in mid-January 2019 that reached 19F for a high, from a low of -11F.

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Featured image: fallen hemlock tree bough
This is one in a series of posts revisiting field trips taken from January to June 2019, as described here.