It could be as many have said, a homing impulse, our inner being longing for that freedom and adventure that the wild offered us. When we tamed ourselves, it seems, we lost something.
Yesterday a few friend and I made the difficult hike to a place called Sky Pond, a small body of water that sits at 11,000 feet above sea level. To the left is a mountain known affectionately as Sharkstooth Mountain, which me and one of my friends decided to attempt to climb. We made it a little over 12,000 feet, and it was the hardest thing physically, mentally, and I would even venture to say emotionally that I've ever done.
I've never been so tired, or felt so helpless to the overwhelming forces of the wild.
Ultimately I was on my feet for 9 hours, 13 miles, and climbed over 5,500 ft of elevation gain.
A few things go through the mind when you reach a certain point of physical exhaustion, and I attempted to remember them to record for my own personal memory.
1.) Countless times I considered seriously stopping by a body of water and attempting to call in a rescue party, this may sound dramatic, but again, the level of physical and mental pain cannot be adequately described.
2.) I thought of many things; women I find beautiful, inspirational phrases, people who have gone through unimaginable hardships and horrors like Everest expeditions without oxygen or survivors of prison camps.
3.) I realized when I stopped I became dizzy and nauseous, so I would not stop walking. Sometimes I would even try to describe the sound of my own footsteps to myself to take my mind off of the pain.
4.) Lastly, and perhaps the hardest thing, was that the beautiful mountains that move the deepest parts of my psyche to bursts of inspiration and movement, became these taunting beasts that towered over me. Their overwhelming beauty transformed into monsters hiding in the immensity of their own shadow as the sun began to set and further darkened the already ambiguous trails. I tried to catch this, and remind myself that this was a tainted view. I told myself that the mountains have not changed, only my perspective, and if I keep moving, eventually I would look back on them with romantic awe once again.
There are some things I have come to accept I will never fully comprehend. The love of the wild to me comes from an innate attraction to the mysterious that seems to have been a side effect of consciousness. But still, something is left that can't be touched. Within the mysterious lies the truth, everything, and the only thing I believe we can do is explore and discover more and more about the world in which we live and in essence, ourselves.
I'm reminded again how lucky I am simply to be alive, to be able to see and appreciate beauty although I may not completely understand it, and how small everyone and everything truly is.
Sitting on top of a mountain I feel an intense sensation of gratitude. As one writer put it, "all the world's treasures seem like nothing."
“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows”--Ralph Waldo Emerson
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| View of sky Pond, to the left just barely in the picture stands Sharkstooth Mt. |
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| View of Lake of glass from Sharkstooth Mountain. It's difficult to tell, but I am 1,000 feet above that lake, which is actually quite large. |
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| From a nameless mountain just outside of Boulder, CO. |
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| The city of Boulder from Mount Sanidas |
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| Behind Mount Sanidas |
