Summit sunrises

It’s admittedly a cliché to rhapsodize about watching the sun rise from the top of a mountain. But there’s something about it. Something to do with the hours of plodding slowly upward while the world shrinks to what lies in the beam of your headlamp. Step, lock. Step, lock. Step, lock. Pressure breath. Another one. Step, lock. Maybe it was hours, or maybe it was only minutes? Time takes on a surreal elasticity.

After all that time in the headlamp tunnel, looking around and suddenly realizing that the summit is not only visible, revealed by dawn’s early light, but also within reach unleashes a wave of euphoria that’s difficult to describe. Seeing those first rays touch a hard-earned summit - just as you reach it, no less - is meaningful in ways I’ll be contemplating for some time.

And when that summit landscape is bigger and more beautiful than you had imagined? That’s just gravy.

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Technicolor

It's odd how vivid the contours of the world become sometimes. Not just the theoretical contours of a topo map that become real and physical underfoot, though that's true as well. I mean the parts of a trip, of a day, that weren’t part of your mental sketches of that experience but that happen in technicolor and stay with you for weeks or months or years afterward: the conversation about electrical engineering and invasive fish species you had with someone after when you asked to share a picnic table, the pungent Danish gingerbread shared between strangers on the trail, or the kind donation of a nearly full fuel canister from someone you’ve only just met (after you found that the local store was sold out).

Is it just the contrast with the quotidian, with interactions so familiar that they blur into a background? Or is there something about being in a place you love and doing a thing that makes you feel spectacularly alive that unexpectedly makes everything else, even things on the periphery, more vivid as well? 

When the silence is the solitude

Even when you're miles away from the nearest car, it seems like there's always a bird, the low hum of a beehive, a breath of wind, the whispered roar of a jet miles overhead. But up here, when the wind died and the finches flew away: nothing. The sudden stillness wasn’t a surprise - the silence, while striking, was expected. What surprised me was the rush of solitude. I hadn’t seen or spoken to another human since the previous afternoon, so I was well aware of being alone. But it was then, in that total silence, that the solitude was most tangible. 

Sit with that empty space

You go out in the wilderness and prepare to think important, productive thoughts about what you want to be when you grow up and the kind of mark you're leaving on the world. And sometimes instead of thinking all those thoughts, you sit for hours and let your mind rest, empty except for the wind and the stream and the raucous chatter of Clark's nutcrackers. And that's okay.

Sometimes you have to sit with that empty space, become familiar with it, before you can fill it.