I’d just returned to Park City after a dreamy month-long trip to Paris. Few things snap you back to the reality of American life faster than a Fresh Market grocery run. Pushing my jangly cart out to the car, I looked up — and what I saw took my breath away.
There it was, just beyond a Ford Escape and a rusted-out pickup truck, past the stop sign and fluorescent lights of the parking lot and rising up over the angular rooftops of a mini strip mall: the most spectacular sunset sky, rosy-pink and smoky-purple clouds drifting across an azure canvas, framed by the undulating curves of the mountaintops. I snapped a mental picture, and swore to myself I will never, ever take this view for granted.
Hey, Paris may have its French Renaissance, its Belle Époque. But here in Park City, we’ll always have the Wasatch Back.
As my dog Riley and I walked to the UPS store yesterday past the half-disassembled ice rink at City Park, by the rusty goal posts of Jack Sutton Field, dodging RadRunners on the Rail Trail, I thought: What is it about the mountains? Why do they make us feel so goddam alive?
With all due respect to the ocean people — you can have your Coppertone-scented sandy beaches and roaring surf. For me, it’s always been about the mountains even though I’ve often felt a love-hate relationship with them.
Yes, they are my muse, my mirror, my medicine, but they’re also my menace. They giveth me breath and they taketh my breath away in every sense of the phrase. They exact a toll from my body that’s paid back a thousandfold to my soul. And when I make it to the top of any given one of them, you better believe that half-eaten Peanut Butter Banana Clif Bar melting in my pocket will taste more delicious than any Parisian croissant.
Of course, I could tell you about my ski trips to the French Alps — the frozen majesty of Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix, or skiing the glacier in the shadow of Mont Blanc with a surly mountain guide named Bertrand. Or the time I slowly ascended the steep switchbacks of the Pyrenees on my way to conquer the Col de Marie-Blanque on a bike trip with 10 French strangers who barely spoke a word of English.
But my love of the mountains actually began much earlier than that — back East, in the mountains of New York state.
“You call those mountains?!” a friend of a friend from Colorado once exclaimed when I told her how much I loved the Adirondacks.
Yes, bitch, I do, and let me explain why.
My first haute experience was climbing Whiteface Mountain, if you can call ascending via a pedestrian tunnel and riding the final 275 feet in an open-air elevator “climbing.” Since I was about 4 years old at the time, I’d say it counts.
Then there was Bristol Mountain in western New York, where I learned to ski: five miles of slopes and trails, a vertical drop of 1,200 feet and a summit elevation of — get out your supplemental oxygen — 2,200 feet. I still remember a sign posted on one of the chairlift towers that enthusiastically proclaimed it to be “The highest vertical from here to the Rockies!” Clearly an ad slogan that worked, as every season drew throngs of flatlanders from as far away as Sandusky and Altoona.
From there, it was all about the Allegheny Mountains. When I was 16, my parents let me go away on a weekend camping trip with three other girls. We barely had our learners permits but for some reason, my mother and father believed in me. After all, I’d been to summer camp and had once slept under the stars in a farmer’s field with the Girl Scouts. In their eyes, I was the elite escalator-alpinist of the family, and it was just a matter of time before I’d be hiking into the wilds of New York’s Southern Tier with my state-of-the-art, aluminum-framed Day-Glo-orange backpack from JC Penney.
As an adult, my then-husband and I, along with five other couples, spent over a decade making an annual fall pilgrimmage to an old Adirondack great camp on Saranac Lake. Yes, it was the site of marathon binge drinking, but those binges inspired some serious penance the next day. It became our tradition to exorcise our hangovers by climbing one of the Adirondack high peaks: Ampersand Mountain.
The climb starts off as a deceptively simple walk. You smugly stroll along a wooded path, rolling your eyes at the descending groups of parents with toddlers and the occasional old lady with a pocketbook, until you start to wonder if this is a mountain at all. Which is precisely when you begin to clamber over huge boulders in a dried-up stream. Eventually you find yourself desperately clinging to tree roots and hoisting yourself up an exposed, steep slab of slick rock just before finally standing at the top, claiming your rightful place as queen of the world and quoting Shakespeare. Oh, Ampersand! Though she may be but little, she is fierce!
No matter where we find it, we ignore the mountain’s utter indifference, its stillness, its unrelenting ascendance from the earth cowering at its feet. We understand its jagged determination to simply be. The mountain doesn’t need us to love it. It doesn’t care if we cry at the summit or curse its name on a hungover climb up. It just is.
Maybe that’s what draws us in. Something older, quieter and stronger than we’ll ever be. Something that keeps showing up, even when we don’t. Something that reminds us of who we are, or who we can become.
All I know is that even now, as I stand outside the UPS Store and catch a glimpse of the snow-covered peaks in the distance, I’m still in awe.
Riley and I turn onto the sidewalk, past the swoosh of traffic on Deer Valley Drive, with no great summit in sight, just the familiar pull of the ridgeline above. Breathless, grateful and fully alive.