Because we've had a sockdolager of a winter - long, windy, often bitterly cold, perhaps unprecedentedly snowy - most of us are feeling a little cabin feverish. Our North Dakota spring is finally showing signs of shaking off slumber and trying to get in sync with the "official" spring season, which began 23 days ago (March 20).

Have you noticed how deeply the returning light has cut into the long dark winter night of the northern Great Plains? If I had a fatted calf, I'd sacrifice it now to the returning light. Theodore Roosevelt's "season of iron desolation" is at last ending - although at this point, it would not surprise us much if nature threw one or two more cheap shots at us as we lean on our knees fighting for air.

The Christian meaning of Easter is the more profound for its echo of festivals of return, renewal and "resurrection" that predate Judaism by untold millennia.

Time for first sightings of the pasqueflower (the crocus) and the erotic dance of the prairie chicken.

I love the light. I love the annual return of light. But can we please slow down the locomotive of the summer equinox (June 21, 12:45 a.m. CDT) this year and linger in late spring just a little? Some of the best moments of the North Dakota year come on the evenings of the next month when we find ourselves commenting, out loud, in shirtsleeves, a little chilly but not quite willing to fetch a jacket, on how late it is light, how the sunsets are creeping up toward 9 p.m., how the day seems willfully to be holding out against the darkness.

Because the winter has been so formidable, I have felt pretty disconnected from the landscape of our homeland. For months it has been hard to get out, hard to get around, hard to stay out very long. Last Tuesday, to my mind, was the first truly magnificent day of 2009: 50-some degrees, a spring breeze this side of wind, open skies, wild decibels of light. It would have taken shackles to keep me indoors.

My friend Leon and I have been talking about a project involving buttes (of all things) for more than a year. On Tuesday, when cabin fever and spring fever converged, we dropped everything and flew over southwestern North Dakota in his single-engine airplane. He's a pilot, an artist and a lover of North Dakota's back country.

We flew from the Mandan municipal airport to magnificent Marmarth and back again, at 3,000 feet, zipping from butte to butte as in some absurd connect the dot project. We circled the bigger, more dramatic buttes to photograph them from every possible angle.

Our headset conversation, aside from a sliver of air traffic compliance, and "Could you circle that one again?" was like a Chatty Cathy on steroids, hepped up on the glory of North Dakota. "Wow." "That is an incredibly beautiful butte." "Can you believe the quality of light today?" "I don't think I have ever seen the countryside look so gorgeous." "Oh my goodness, would you mind zipping over to that one?" "Look at the way the snow brings that butte face into relief?"

Our madcap itinerary took us from Crown Butte (2,321 feet high) to the Schollaert Hills (near Almont) to Heart Butte (2,509 - never more beautiful) to Pearl Butte (2,828, south of Lefor) to East and West Rainy Buttes (North Dakota's most classical buttes, 3,356 and 3,347) to White Butte (at 3,506, the summit of North Dakota). Then to Black Butte (3,465), Pretty Butte (stunning, in spite of its inadequate name, at 3,182), and of course, the butte of buttes, the mother of all buttes, the butte that changes the course of the Little Missouri River …

Bullion Butte.

If there were only one butte, it would have to be Bullion (3,336). We circled it until we were dizzy. We were effectively too close to do it justice with photography, so huge is its footprint, so wide its reach, so complex its system of feeder and tributary buttes. We gazed in ecstasy at the sharp Teepee Buttes that are a part of its massive south face. We buzzed my favorite North Dakota resort, the Logging Camp Ranch, nestled into North Dakota's sole pine forest. We flew in awestruck silence over the endless elongated tight looping oxbows of the Little Missouri River as it searches for a way to get around Bullion Butte and resume its northerly journey to the mainstem Missouri near Halliday. We saw - and grappled, up close and personal - with the geology of the alluvial plain of the Rocky Mountains.

It just felt fabulous to be alive on such a day in such a place.

We noted a score of places we intend to visit by car, by four-wheel drive, on foot. Always in part, at least, on foot. Because of the long Laura Ingalls Wilder winter, I plan to make this the most intensely active summer of my life - at least since, when the world was all before me at the age of 8, I built forts and played sandlot ball with my boyhood pals, eons ago in Dickinson. I plan to picnic on public access buttes, to lie in the grass of flattop buttes and gaze indolently into the sky, to "loaf and invite my soul," as the poet Walt Whitman phrased it.

We formulated a handful of observations from 3,000 feet.

North Dakota is anything but flat, especially west and south of the Missouri River. It is, in fact, a jumble of rolling broken land, a maze of complex contours, punctuated by spectacular box buttes. Thus far the human footprint on the land is relatively modest. The plains landscape is not what it once was, but there is a seemingly infinite array of country all spread out in every direction. The ribbons of scoria, blacktop and concrete roads are a slender gossamer, the farmsteads and villages and industrial structures are widely diffused, and - frankly - not very intrusive.

There are a dozen unnamed buttes for every one with a sobriquet.

There is still a lot of snow to melt. This is going to be one of the greenest summers ever, and the grass will flourish until we cry in joy.

The Heart River is a really beautiful stream, much underrated as plains rivers go.

But the Little Missouri is the sinuous signature of God.

Happy Easter.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at BSC, and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@aol.com.)