September 12, 2023 - A Love Letter To Hiking In Mountains

I have a large format poster on my wall. It's a photo taken at Ouray 100 in 2022 of me and my pacer heading down some single track at 12,000 feet just after crossing over Hayden Pass. The Red Mountains dominate the poster in the background, while my pacer and I appear to be tiny humans in a massive landscape in the foreground. When the work day is challenging or frustrating or boring, I look over my monitors and spend a moment falling into that mountain landscape.

I've wondered why the mountains call to me so. I've wondered why the San Juans do so in a particularly powerful way. It's no answer, but when I ask myself the question I always return to the same memory. Well, a series of memories really that have all become one. The memory is from childhood, me traveling with my family to Switzerland. We'd turn on the TV in our Swiss hotel room in the evening and every single time there would be a channel playing a show with some mountaineers working their way up some local mountain. Since we often traveled to the Interlaken/Grindelwald area, in my memory they are always making their way up the Aletsch glacier toward the Jungfraujoch. I always imagined they would also be climbing the north face of the Eiger at some point, though that making absolutely no sense now that I understanding both hiking in mountains and the geography better. But this is the memory, a group of four or five mountaineers roped together climbing up steep mountains always in a snow storm. Then me and my family would be up in those same mountains the next day, though we would have arrived there by train instead of foot. But the memory persists, deeply.

When I'm training or racing for a big mountain ultra like Ouray 100, that memory is often bouncing around in my head. I see myself as one of those four or five roped together people hiking up that glacier. The circumstances are a bit different, of course. It's not bona fide alpine mountaineering I'm doing. But by and large, it feels like the same thing. And connecting my movement and motion with that memory fills me with joy, with fulfillment, with nostalgia, with connection.  

Hiking in the mountains is a connection to my childhood, a connection to nature, a connection to those I'm with and those I meet on the trail, a connection to risk and danger. Hiking in the mountains is life giving while occasionally including life taking moments.