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Sites of Insight

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

Contents

Introduction............................................................................................viiWestern Wind (Glacier Gorge)-REG SANER..................................................................1Chatelaine (Leadville)-KRISTEN IVERSEN..................................................................18Little Bethlehem (San Luis)-FRED BACA...................................................................31Mists of the Huerfano-THOMAS J. NOEL....................................................................37Walking in Yampa-KATE KRAUTKRAMER.......................................................................44Pawnee Buttes-MERRILL GILFILLAN.........................................................................59The Bear (Nederland)-JANE WODENING......................................................................63Meditacin en Dos Ojos: Garca Lake at Cumbres Pass-REYES GARCA........................................69Gore Canyon-NICK SUTCLIFFE..............................................................................87Their Place, My Place (Ward)-ALEXANDER DRUMMOND.........................................................102Pastoral Emergence (Mount Evans)-ALEXANDER BLACKBURN....................................................114Written on a Piece of Butcher Paper: El Rancho, Antonito-MARK IRWIN.....................................129Where Form Meets Flux: Soft Eyes and Boulder's Four Cardinal Directions-JAMES LOUGH.....................138The Road Through San Luis-SANGEETA REDDY................................................................158Into the Rawahs-SUEELLEN CAMPBELL AND JOHN CALDERAZZO...................................................172Blanca Peak-CHRISTIE SMITH..............................................................................178Lumpy Ridge: Buson in the Rockies-AMY ENGLAND...........................................................189Belmar Park: Where the Sidewalk Ends-ANITA HARKESS......................................................199About the Contributors..................................................................................217Index...................................................................................................223

Chapter One

It's snowing sideways. My skis leave a trail, blown over in minutes. Good.

"Let me get this straight," says the mind's other side. "You like mountains best in December and January? When there's nothing up here but sudden weather and snow?"

"Yes."

"And another thing. Why so keen on skiing alone? The obvious motive is fear, isn't it? Alone, you're afraid, a little. You know you are. Admit it. Isn't that the attraction?"

The mind's other side has that twentieth-century quirk of supposing base motives are truest.

No use replying that a taste for the out-of-doors isn't always juvenile. Against one's own brain, what defense comes to more than a shrug?

"Seems to me," says that brain, "what you're really fond of is bad news."

"You mean the truth? Really, isn't that what we're here for?" No end to self-skepticism. Out of its duet for one have evolved the power and tediousness of our species, so my in-progress last word to myself on skiing up here alone is only part confession: Colorado's backcountry in winter is tricky indeed. No secret. But when we look honestly at this world, maybe the greatest risks take place inside us.

Last week, near timberline, I skied into a high country made of exactly its own black islands of towering fir, exactly its own snow cornices curled fantastically over thick ledges, exactly its own snowfall of fat flakes. Because the gray sky was stalled, as close to motionless as Colorado wilderness ever comes, its snow floated down almost vertically. Rare. No wind, just air leaning slightly, gentler than breath. Against dark firs, each flake descended apart from the others, a tuft of clumped crystals, a once-and-for-all of intricate stillness made visible.

Any "This, Here, Now" so entirely taken with being exactly itself can't help arresting a lone skier, just as any mind that arrives there takes one look and stops mumbling. Stops cluttering itself with thoughts. Hasn't a name, isn't anyone. Becomes what it hears: snow falling through the very mountain silence it ripens.

But today, as I ski Glacier Gorge, weather tries to tear off my head. Failing that, wind settles for my knit cap, hurling its burgundy wool like a limp blossom into a naked clump of dwarf willow. Fetching headgear from willow twigs while wearing skis seven feet long will improve anyone's sense of being the unknown Marx Brother. By the time I get my cap back, snow blown into my hair has already clotted, complementing the crisp feel of January's edge at the rim of my nostrils. Oh well. I'm out for whatever. Today, whatever is wind, wind, wind.

Owing to chill factors, mountain wind can seem triple-sinewed, hyperactive, fanatic. Isn't it this minute dilapidating the mountains themselves? Even without ice for an ally, it could do the entire job, and has, on summits ground down to prairie before these mountains first lifted. A chip or sliver here, a grain there. Wind and rain have all the time there is. In the central Sahara are mountains that wind has brought down to the humility of floor tiles. Their so-called "mosaic" remnants stretch as if hand-fitted-like wind's anagrams, or a code without messages-level to every horizon. Given air's origins, that seems ironic. When stone invented atmosphere, how could it have guessed the strongest force on our planet would one day turn out to be air.

That same air whose weathers now intend to level the Rockies? Oh, yes. And shall. Nothing can stop it. Meanwhile, our part of North America may not contain upthrusts more naked than these granite faces forming headwalls in Glacier Gorge, whose hierophantic jut rises ahead of me: the cliffs of Longs Peak, of Pagoda, The Spearhead. Against them our life spans have no chance at all, just as their own slab-sided ramparts, against wind, have none. This, too, is where gods live. Minor deities, it may be; forces dumbly, humbly immortal. But godlike in one thing at least: unable to lie.

Near Mills Lake, tiny white mushrooms of snow pique my curiosity. Some coyote or fox must have trotted past, compacting the snow just enough. Now wind undermines those tracks till each paw pad stands pedestaled, two inches above the surrounding crust. Amusing. I've heard of wind blowing bark off the trees, blowing chickens into the sea-white chickens, in the Hebrides, as it happens-but never of this. Yet the likeness between these ice mushrooms and pedestaled stones in New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona bespeaks inanimate nature's versatile monotony: two or three ideas, varied perhaps less than a dozen ways.

The altered state is one. Mills Lake is now a long pool of fluid gone rigid. Over its milky, wind-polished ice there's a skinny line of ski-packed snow that, like the paw prints, has managed to stick. All the rest, blown clear. I choose the lake's locked edge, its snow so wind-packed you could quarry or saw it-a crust my metal edges barely incise.

Wind, wind, wind. "Restless" doesn't touch it. The sky, however, has cleared except for rags of fast cloud that quickly veil the sun, quickly strip it naked.

That day, wind slowed Ruth Magnussen till it killed her. I was a...