One night in the woods - #96

This post has a lot of photos, so I recommend opening it in a browser window to see them all.

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Out the south-facing windows of this cabin, you can see what the locals call Waterfall Basin. It’s the source of our tiny town’s water supply and a backcountry skiing playground. When we first moved here, it’s where we took our first hike, our first foray into getting a lay of the land and acquainting ourselves with our new terrain. We noted each fork in the trail, each game trail, all the types of flora and fauna we expected and didn’t, springs, dry creeks, every tailings field and mining path to it, and every ridge we wanted to climb to the other side of. We were making a map so if we ever needed it, it would live inside us. 

When I was 27, throwing eyes across the bar, it never occurred to me to ask a potential suitor what their relationship with their terrain was. I never yelled over a gin and tonic, do you know if you live in a liquefaction zone? I never texted anyone to map out their favorite escape routes from the city or called them to discuss their feelings on invasive species, let alone asking if they considered themselves to be one. I was gentler, asking if they liked hiking or camping, not how many cumulative hours they’d spent attempting to identify tracks and scat. 

When it did work out, we did go hiking and camping, but it was in the approach that I found connection. Where does this trail go? How do we get up to that bench? Let’s turn down this road. Here, I have a scat book in my bag. 

The language of romance. 

And so, in our valley of few, Ben and I spent our first couple years mapping and learning. It’ll take us a decade more to know everything we want to: every tree and every flower, every rock formation and every mine, but after two years of obsessive mapping, we decided to take one night to simply appreciate it. We took the same hike we did that first week, once again with Cooper in tow, up to the bench to sleep in this wild place we call home.

The route there is straightforward. First, you cross the creek bridge into the wilderness. The bridges are built and maintained by locals, doing their best to keep the Forest Service busy elsewhere. 

The trail begins as an old mining road, still wide enough to accommodate a small truck, if there was any place a truck could get across the creek anymore. You’re climbing into the valley, through the spruce and aspen, up the rocky path used for skinning in the winter. We started at 6pm, letting the last of the sun chase us into the forest knowing last light wouldn’t come for several more hours.

The valley itself is full of elkweed and corn lily, with elbow-high flowers peppered in.

The valley trail is soft underfoot, the sound of hollows underneath as you wade through the pines. You can hear water, birds, the jangle of Cooper’s tags, and little else.

At the end of the valley, the trail turns southeast, climbing up the eastern wall of the basin along a steep path of loose rock, tucked amongst the tall shrubs. Above it lies the brief traverse through the field of wildflowers.

This section is the trickiest for Cooper – the trail is mainly cobbles and his small paws sometimes struggle to find their placement. Here, we’re nearing 11,000 feet. Our camp sits in the pine forest bench in the distance.

The traverse ends with a trail along the sloped cliff onto the bench itself, the last bit of the ascent to the bowl.

Up in the bowl, the wildflowers blanket the valley, lining the edges of the creek running back toward home. We arrived as the moon did, and we watched it creep along the ridge line, so closely it was as if it was running along it.

Cooper did what he’s done at every campsite since I’ve known him: he found water, and then he found the tent.

The boy knows what he wants.

We made cocoa and drank Mezcal. We followed the water in the dark. We watched the stars and the planets and the moon as they moved across the tight sky of the bowl. And the three of us fell asleep on the ground with our house resting soundly in the valley far, far below.

Our tent.

Some 1500 feet higher in an alpine cove, my hear rate is lower. The tent smells of pine and sweet earth. Without the comforts of the world below, the sound of the dog’s breathing is the only passage of time. I am in a place I have watched from my home in binoculars, a place I have hiked past and run past, a place where I am small and I can feel the couloirs and chutes looking down on me through the trees.

It feels like I am only ever in constant motion in this wilderness: running and riding, hiking and skiing, and the reveries are fast and fleeting, skipping rocks through time. To truly know it, I think you have to lay on the ground. Give yourself up to the stillness in order to be reminded of the vastness. That for all your exploration and mapping, it will change and has changed in ways we can never fully comprehend.

Is that how I should’ve picked up guys at bars?

We slept late, finding dawn well on her way in the morning.

The dawn light.

For Coop’s sake, we made quick work of it. We wanted to get down into the lower valley before the sun crested onto the traverse. He doesn’t do well in the heat these days. But he took his medicine in tent at night and by the tiny camp stove boiling our water this morning. He slept curled next to me in my sleeping bag, and he licked my face awake this morning. In the expanse of the wilderness, he is right there in my heart.

A girl and her dog.

That my map is now all trails and scree fields instead of roads and sidewalks isn’t lost on me. It was after Sunday’s panic attack that Ben suggested this, a night on the ground with the stars and our dog. He knew that I needed to step outside of myself, out of the arena of availability to close myself off to let myself go.

As the sun gave herself away, we crept through the wildflowers. We weaved back down the loose path, back into the trees, back along the soft ground, back whence we came.

One night to find my lungs full of air again. One night to look forward to the ones to come.

Home by 10, breakfast by 11.