On the second weekend of January years ago, I went chukar hunting with two friends from Chester and a couple of bird hunters from Santa Rosa. We met at Jerry’s diner in Susanville at 5 a.m., and after a quick breakfast we left to go hunting. It was very cold that morning and the Honey Lake Valley was socked in with an inversion layer of frozen fog. Poor conditions for hunting because of the low visibility, and the ice crystals falling from the sky would make it miserable. We knew blue skies waited for us 1,000 ft above the valley, so we kept driving north.
Leaving the highway on the dirt roads that always get worse as you climb higher, we could see blue sky and the snow-covered mountains we wanted to hunt in the distance. The sagebrush, rabbit brush and cheatgrass were almost unrecognizable because of the ice crystals covering them. Some of the vegetation looked like it was hairy or fuzzy, while other plants looked like they were covered with shards of glass. Finishing our long drive, we parked near an irrigation pond at the bottom of a canyon, and we could see the mountain tops clearly. I had my dogs, my friends from Chester had their dogs and one of the hunters from Santa Rosa brought his two dogs. A bunch of dogs and men riled up like little boys going on an adventure down by the railroad tracks. With our gear and the dogs ready, we planned our hike up the canyon. I climbed up the West slope of the canyon, and the other four men covered the East slope.
Hiking 500 feet above our trucks, we finally reached the saddle of the mountain. The wind started blowing from the North and brought in what looked like high clouds. It didn’t make sense, the blue sky, wind, and an eerie fog blowing over the mountain top like it does across a moor in Scotland. On top of the mountain, we joined together and looked at each other laughing at the ice crystals that had formed on our beards. As we hiked across the mountain top, I heard my friend from Chester yell “Pogonip, look at the dog’s feet!” We looked at our dog’s feet and noticed they were solid white 6 inches up their legs.
All of us accepted that we should get off the mountain quickly or our dog’s legs would freeze. But each of us pointed in a different direction to get back to our trucks. The visibility was terrible, you could only see 100ft in the freezing fog. My friends from Chester decided to walk back down the bottom of the canyon. The hunters from Santa Rosa wanted to head East into Nevada, but we persuaded them not to. I don’t trust topography, so I decided to follow my footsteps in the snow back down the same way I came up. Downhill the freezing fog had lifted, and I could see blue sky. The dog’s feet were fine, and they even gave me a point over a small covey of chukar before arriving downhill at my truck.
The word pogonip is from the Shoshone language. It means ice fog or white death. Some of us heard the word pogonip for the first time that day. But we all learned how fast the weather could change. And that an inversion layer of ice fog from Smoke Creek Playa and Shinn Valley, riding the North wind, could have been deadly.