Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.
― Gary Snyder
If you were to design a gateway to heaven, Spirit Pass would do: a deep granite bowl that scoops up a giant chunk of sky above a million-and-a-half acres of spruce-pine forest, silvery trout streams and crystalline lakes by the hundreds.
Spirit Pass (not its actual name) is surrounded by a chain of summits that stretch north and south along the Continental Divide for nearly a hundred miles. If more beautiful mountains exist, they must be found on another planet.
Unless you are a bird, the only way to reach Spirit Pass is on foot. The mountains are roadless and the climb far too steep for a horse. I first set foot there more than 30 years ago, and am always eager to return, as any sensible person would be.
Getting to Spirit Pass takes some doing, though. It’s 15 miles from pavement and nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. A pack with the necessities for such a trip will tip the scales at 40 pounds or so. A strong hiker can make it in a long day, but last month it took me two, because I am not so strong anymore.
My walks in the Rocky Mountains now span six decades–a fact that stuns me when I see it on the page. The prospect of giving up this joy is unthinkable. But time consumes mountains themselves, and will make short work of me.
Eventually the day will come when I can no longer make the trip to Spirit Pass. And on some other not-so-distant day, my life will dissolve into the mystery that waits for us all. In the meantime we each walk our trail. We make our choices–do our work, or don’t; face our responsibilities or flee; chase our dreams or watch them die. Maybe we find new dreams.
Mine haven’t changed much since my childhood in upstate New York, when I raided the library shelves of my elementary school for biographies of Jim Bridger, Daniel Boone and the other mountain men. Those visions of wandering the empty places and climbing the ridges to see the next valley have never really released their grip. Call it mountain fever.
I’ve met plenty of people, usually in the West, who are similarly afflicted. Many were coworkers in the Forest Service and the national parks. Young kids on the loose, mostly, working seasonal jobs, captured by the extravagant beauty that surrounded them, hungry for the next view, the next journey. A few became my closest friends.
Others are long-gone from my life. Kids like Paul, a skinny, bookish firefighter I came to know in 1997, my first year with the Forest Service. The day Paul and I met he was sitting on the roof of a shabby government trailer on the outskirts of Pinedale, WY, smoking a hand-rolled Drum and reading Jack Kerouac. Years later, I heard, he had become a wilderness ranger and married a woman who did the same work. I don’t know what became of them.
Sometimes I go online and find the tracks of other mountain people I’ve known. One has become a wilderness guide, another works for the American Avalanche Institute, a third is a nature photographer.
And then there was Eric, a cheerful twenty-something with boundless energy who showed up at the Blackrock ranger station during my last summer with the Forest Service in Wyoming.
Eric and his girlfriend and a third young guy were inseparable that season. At the end of the work week the trio would grab their backpacks and disappear, charging off toward somewhere new–someplace steep and challenging and beautiful.
They were together in the Grand Tetons years later, I learned, when gravity yanked Eric off the mountain, 500 feet down into the mystery. I had never really known those three. They were trail crew and I was a wilderness ranger. I moved on to another forest the year after they arrived.
But like all the lovers of high and windy places who have crossed my path, I think of them as kin, members of a tribe. We are moved by the same forces. When these bright souls appear in memory, they are always still young and eager. There is light in their eyes, and a mountain range rises in the distance.
Michael Wolcott’s email address is michaeljwolcott@gmail.com
