Day, the Twenty Fifth

Thou Shall Be Free as Mountain Winds

A few years ago, I found myself near the summit of Mount Pierce in a white out. I was with my wife and a friend. We were prepared for the weather, but I was disoriented. It felt like we were going down, down, toward where I thought the trail out and back off the exposed summit was, but something was wrong. There was brush. Nothing was packed down.

I stopped and the team stopped behind me. I don’t know exactly what caused me to stop. A feeling? From up above me and to the right I glimpsed two hikers in yellow jackets through a break in the blowing snow.

Two jackets. About one second. That was the trail. I’d missed it by maybe 30 yards, mistaking a downward drainage for the path. I led the team back up to where I had sighted those jackets and we reclaimed the trail.

My team was prepared and we were all experienced. And yet, had I not glimpsed those yellow jackets… well, I’ve found it best, even years later, to not think about what the rest of the day may have been like and how it could have ended.

Mt. Pierce before losing the trail.

Two days ago, search and rescue teams in the White Mountains, after a three day search, recovered the body of Emily Sotelo from just below the summit of Mount Lafayette. The day they found her body was her birthday. She would have been 20.

I’m not inclined to add to the enormous body of writing that has already been dedicated to this this event, a gripping story in its own right that has made international news. I didn’t know Emily. She seemed nice, passionate. She was working on her 4,000 footers. Her mom dropped her off and watched her walk into the darkness. My own daughter, who climbed the 52 With a View with me, is 20. My youngest daughter has begun to hike.

Yet, grief like this can blow a hole in your chest that never fills back up. Her family and friends have a long road ahead of them.

I mention all this today because despite the fact that I find transformation and peace in the woods, I’ve also spent a long time learning that the relationship between myself and the outdoors is not reciprocal. And that’s ok.

The great adventure writer and personal idol of mine, Peter Matthiessen wrote that “The secret of the mountain is that the mountains exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,” they are meaning, the mountains are.”

The mountains are. Nature does not want to kill you any more than it wants to present itself as our salvation. Nature is. Emily did not die doing the thing she loved. The mountains did not claim her. God didn’t send angels in yellow jackets for me all those years ago.

The mountains are. I write often about the universe in poetic terms because that’s how I’m able to understand my place in the cosmos, and maybe at the same time, not go insane thinking about it. But there’s value in taking a breather now and then, of stepping away from awe and miracles, and accepting the earth and the air and the wind on more solid footing.

It IS dangerous and wonderful and deadly and spectacular out there, but it’s that because of us, not because of it. Emily’s story is not a lesson. She’s not a memory hike. There were many before her and there will be many after her.

I wish I had better news. I wish I could find solace somehow in her story. I wish I could end this reflection with a deeper message of hope.

But I married my wife at the summit of Mount Lafayette and I understand that, to me, that mountain is rarefied air, our alter, a holy place. To me.

To Emily’s family, that mountain will now be something else, something painful. We bring ourselves to these places. They are what we desire, or don’t. They are because we are.

The mountains… well, they just are. And I’m here to tell you, most of the time you see the yellow jackets. But sometimes, sometimes you don’t.