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At a half-hour before dawn, the outside temperature stands at 6 below zero. The snowy front yard is a wind-sculpted garden of ice fins. Drinking coffee in the dark living room, I thank the Big Whatever for the blessed absence of any reason to leave the house. These days when it's cold, I embrace my Inner Wuss.

It has not always been so. From my teens through my late 30s, I was a winter backpacker and mountaineer, forever hurling myself against frigid weather, seeking out discomfort as if it were some sort of blood-building tonic. Throughout my 40s, I worked as a dog musher, trail builder, wilderness ranger, and all-purpose field hand. Those seasons of fun came at a price: my body hurts now, all the time.

The many repetitive tasks that outdoor jobs require - shoveling and hauling, lifting and lowering, tying and untying - have predictable effects on human tissue. There's a reason those old ranchers are all bent over. In winter, especially, the body remembers.

As Montana writer Hal Herring has noted, the career of a rock climber (or other fun hog) is far less likely to end in a spectacular fall than with the slow, inevitable attrition of the joints. No matter how gung-ho we might be, we will eventually wear out.

Chronic pain and physical loss - the expectable progressions of aging - have preoccupied me for at least 10 years. Until around age 40, my body was pretty much bombproof, allowing me to run myself ragged and joyous over rough ground. One October day in the Adirondacks, while in my 20s, I recall charging down a steep rock chute, leaping boulder to boulder in my lug-soled leather boots, wearing a 50-pound pack, as if exempt from the effects of gravity. What this might do to my knees, hips and spine did not occur to me then.

Now I am very interested in how the body wears out. Like most people whose lives are lived outdoors, I dread losing mobility.

To avoid that fate, I have changed my ways - no longer do I hump big loads or work bare-handed when the wind-chill is 60 below zero. Chronic pain becomes a teacher: you learn to treat your body with more care.

For me, that means staying in when it's really cold. I become a slow-moving winter beast, hunched over a steaming cup, breathing warm air thick with the promise of flavor and caffeine. A beast, satisfied and grateful not to be called upon to go outside in the cold.

I can sip the coffee and remember those mushing winters with pleasure. Somebody else is out there in the frozen dawn now, serving 300 pounds of ground chicken and kibble to 180 crazed huskies. Somebody else's hands are numbing in the wind.

There's no need to throw my body into high gear right away. Instead, I sit in the living room in the warm darkness and let the coffee sacrament unfold. I begin checking my body to see what works and what doesn't today. What old pains linger? What new ones have appeared?

Today the list includes the usual complaints: neck pain (chronic and increasingly severe, from a surfing wreck three years ago in Central America); stabbing pain in both arthritic hands (from mushing, building trail, fighting fire, packing mules, being stubborn); and sciatica (chronic, from torn hamstring nine years ago). A couple other minor irritations make themselves known.

I consider the real limits of my middle-aged body, and stumble upon a semantic question: is it "early" arthritis, if you're 52? Or is it just arthritis? I mull over the question and begin my daily stretching routine.

The stretching feels great. The coffee is as good as coffee was when I was 19, camped in a whiteout on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. But here, on the living room floor, my fascination with snow, ice, and the hardness of winter is an abstract thing.

These days, in the heart of February, I have desert dreams. When I think of a road trip, I always look south, and my body thanks me.

Michael Wolcott is a Flagstaff writer who has the C.V. you would expect of a nature mystic with poetical leanings and an old Toyota truck. His e-mail address is angelpass12455@hotmail.com.