Exploring an endangered season

The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold
By Gretel Ehrlich
Pantheon, 200 pp., $21.95

Winter, that most maligned of seasons, cursed for its association with chattering teeth, skidding cars, and diminishing daylight, undergoes a full-scale image makeover in Gretel Ehrlich's ''The Future of Ice." The book follows Ehrlich as she travels to frigid climes around the globe and documents the experience of living in extreme cold. Shadowing this account is the specter of global warming. It's no accident that Ehrlich defines her book as both an ''ode" and a ''lament." Each tribute to winter's beauty is tinged by Ehrlich's sense that the season is history.

Ehrlich's work has long explored her reverence for the natural world. ''The Solace of Open Spaces" (1986) reveals her transformation from city mouse to country mouse as she ditches urban amenities for a life in wintry Wyoming. ''A Match to the Heart" (1995) charts her recovery from a near-fatal lightning strike. ''This Cold Heaven" (2001) pays tribute to Greenland's unforgiving terrain and hardscrabble Inuit residents. The book chronicles Ehrlich's extensive travels to Greenland, where she encountered both the season of perpetual dark and the season of round-the-clock daylight.

No stranger to extreme circumstances, Ehrlich set out to immerse herself in the winter experience for six months. In ''The Future of Ice" she takes readers from the southern Andes to Wyoming to a 1,000-mile sailing trip to the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen. Along the way she reflects on time spent in other forbidding settings like Fairbanks, Alaska, where in 1989 the temperature plunged to 82 degrees below zero, prompting tires to turn square and a friend's retina to pop out.

The book gets off to a slow start. The opening pages feature lots of breathy imagery exalting winter in all its glory. Throughout the book Ehrlich tends to imbue every last physical detail with profound spiritual significance. It's a habit that often yields lovely prose and illuminating observations, but in these opening pages, more often than not, it results in overblown declarations like this: ''Winter is refuge and deathbed, monastery and ivory tower, cave and ghost. It's where we learn to hiss." And there are times where Ehrlich's need to turn everything into a metaphor feels strained, as when she turns a tree in Chile into a political symbol: ''Looking up I see parts of broken tree branches hanging: a cross, a pair of legs, a torso. Are these the dead and disappeared of Argentina, the bodies of dead friends?"

About 30 pages in, the writing begins to feel more grounded and concrete. Ehrlich begins her winter pilgrimage with a hike through the southern Andes, home to more glacier ice than any other place in the world besides the North and South poles. At one point Ehrlich comes across Ventisquero Grey, a glacier stretching 6 miles across. It's an awesome sight, particularly since glaciers are on the wane. ''A glacier is an archivist and historian," she writes. ''It saves everything no matter how small or big, including pollen, dust, heavy metals, bugs, bones, and minerals. It registers every fluctuation of weather. . . . When we lose a glacier -- and we are losing most of them -- we lose history, an eye into the past; we lose stories of how living beings evolved, how weather vacillated, why plants and animals died."

The dwindling glacier population is a recurring image in ''The Future of Ice." Global warming is the villain here, and Ehrlich has no patience for those who would minimize its consequences. She points to the evidence that already exists: the sighting of a palm tree in the Swiss Alps; the accelerated onset of spring; the sudden toxicity of the Arctic, whose cold climate is an ideal cradle for the pollution wafting in from the industrialized world.

''The Future of Ice" is no fevered call to action; rather, it reads as an elegy for what has already been lost. Ehrlich's occasional allusions to current events fall flat, and the book assumes the tone of a civics lesson when she lectures readers about the need to balance economic concerns with environmental demands. But when she focuses on the landscape itself the book takes off.

The section on Wyoming strikes the most personal tone. Ehrlich generally doesn't spend more than three months in one place and reveals how much she relishes periods of relative isolation. ''I like a strong binge of socializing," she writes, ''followed by a few months of monastic quiet." Even the stretches of solitude are relieved by the companionship of animals -- principally Ehrlich's dogs, but also the assorted moose, elk, and coyotes who populate her neck of Wyoming.

The most powerful section of the book centers on Ehrlich's sailing trip through the Arctic. Ehrlich evokes the Arctic's austere beauty; just as eloquently she explores how economic ventures have compromised the once-pristine region.

The same kind of mushy prose that launches ''The Future of Ice" also concludes it, with Ehrlich rhapsodizing about how ''the winter world is the one where the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire." But in between, by and large, is a tough and unflinching look at a season whose days may be numbered.

Amy Kroin's reviews have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other publications.