Out Here by Carolyn Highland

Out Here by Carolyn Highland

Author:Carolyn Highland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771604505
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2020-07-30T21:23:54+00:00


In the Thick of It

We had been hiking for seven hours in the Tetons and I was done. I’d left my trail runners in a friend’s car and each step in my clunky old hiking boots tore at the back of my heels. We’d hiked out of our backcountry campsite at Surprise Lake from the night before, gotten in the car, driven to the Paintbrush Canyon trailhead and begun hiking again, wading with our giant backpacks through day hikers in jeans at Leigh Lake to get into the woods. The scenery changed every couple of miles as we ascended, thick forest shifting to boulder fields and finally opening up into a wide bowl flecked with patches of stale snow still clinging on.

Sometimes hiking you feel strong, energized by your muscles working to get you where you want to go, revitalized by the fresh air and scenery around you, and other times you feel like you want to find the nearest flat spot of ground and curl up and sleep. So much of it is in your head, so much of how you feel and how you experience the time passing can be linked to the thoughts passing through your brain, and today I was tired, I was fed up and I was ready to be done. My feet hurt, my legs ached and my pack felt like it was crushing me little by little. I was in one of the most beautiful places in the country, but destination desire had set in and all I wanted to be doing was sitting in camp, eating dinner straight out the pot.

These moments happen often, moments where the one thing that feels most difficult to do, to go on, to keep moving, is the only thing we can do. Moments when our feet hurt and the load on our back is heavy and our attitudes suck and we are still miles from our destination. It’s easy to let the negativity build, to enter a mental state of misery and defeat. All we can see is how far away the destination is and how many steps we have left to take.

We were nearing the back of the bowl when my cousin Julie and I started to make stupid, naive comments to each other about how high the walls were and wondered where the trail was going to go next. Our campsite for the next evening was in the canyon over, so there had to be a notch somewhere, right? A col? Anything that was lower than the towering rock walls looming above us. But as we continued to ascend through slushy snowfields, it soon became clear the only way this could go was up and over.

I saw it first, the switchback that cut across the steep narrow scree field in between two peaks. I laughed and Julie looked up. I just pointed at it, at where we would have to go, and we both stopped. The run out was thousands of feet of loose scree peppered with stretches of thin snow.



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