Until I moved to Midway from Park City 20 years ago, I never encountered a marmot.
These elusive wild animals didn’t occupy the out-buildings where we lived in historic old town. Only a random skunk, some trespassing pot-guts and a feral cat or two stirred in the abandoned old mining shed out back. Native to the Rocky Mountains, western United States and Canada, marmots or rock chucks didn’t appear on lower Woodside.
A weathered old barn sitting in my back yard in Midway held a different story. Shy families of yellow-bellied marmots, Marmota flaviventris, (flavus meaning yellow, ventus, belly), took up residence every spring and summer. New individuals and colonies rotated through season after season. Their russet golden fur, thick and lustrous like that of a beaver, attracted my attention. So did their playful and amusing antics. Dodging in and out an scurrying between a rusty horse trailer and the barn they periodically stopped to check my whereabouts. If I ventured too close they released a sweet, high pitched “peep peep,” sometimes called a pig whistle, before darting off.
These wood gnawing marmots chewed ladders, ancient boards and the antique furniture stored in my barn. I wrongly assumed this destructive pastime was the reason the wild rodents hung around all summer.
Between early morning forages for clover, wildflowers, seeds or protein rich dandelion leaves and afternoon breaks sunning on piles of chunky limestone (pot rock), they dug holes–––big holes. Hollows large enough to accommodate 4- pound to 12-pound marmots tunneling somewhere underground.
In early autumn when they vanished and their entertaining presence and destructive habits disappeared, I gave them little thought until spring.
One year my 100-year-old barn started leaning dangerously eastward. Built directly on dirt, it was rotting from the ground up. I decided to dismantle it board by weathered board and build a modern barn on a sturdy foundation. The backhoes arrived and began digging.
To our surprise, beneath the barn ‘s footprint there was now an exposed cavern, nearly 12 feet deep and 20 feet wide. This animal-style architecture was a vast network of tunnels and rooms layered throughout soil and pot rock. It reminded me of the ancient Greek Acropolis. My resident marmots had been digging and building for years. By chance, we discovered their winter burrow for hibernation.
This morning as I write in my new barn planted firmly on solid ground, wild marmots are hibernating below my feet in a nearby winter burrow. They won’t see today’s rising sun reflected on the snowy flanks of Mt. Timpanogos.
Instead, they only breathe a few breaths per minute. Their barely perceptible heartbeat continues ever so slowly as the temperature of their huddled bodies plunges in synch with winter’s chill. They don’t have to forage for food, fear predators or reproduce until spring.
Knowing they are safely housed in darkened silence for another six months is somehow comforting.
Maybe real hibernators, like North America’s yellow-bellied marmots, know something about self-preservation that we don’t. In concert with our darkest days and pending winter solstice, the metabolic escape of hibernation seems profound.
Fortunately or not, we don’t sleep away our winters. Sometime we might envy the meditative qualities of hibernation: silence, pause and safety that offer solace in a darkened world to people desperate for survival and a restful state of peace.
Leslie Miller is the co-editor of “Reimagining A Place for the Wild” and a former, long-time resident of Park City who now lives in Midway.