Soon after Marc and I returned from our trip to Colorado this summer, I read the journal I had kept on our vacation eighteen years ago. We had visited the same mountains, the same trails, the same parks, and I was eager to compare the two experiences. I knew that the area had changed in the intervening years. Many more people had moved out to the Front Range, bringing new construction, businesses, and traffic congestion. Yet the familiar landscape of jagged mountains rising over a mirror-smooth lake was just exactly as I remembered it. Through all of that change and continuity, what I most wanted to find in the old journal was how my own way of viewing the place had shifted.
The short answer is a lot. I saw common threads between my current and former selves. On both trips, I wrote excitedly about red foxes, mountain jays, and landscapes. However, there were other glimpses of my past self that I almost couldn’t recognize. “Marc!” I said to my husband as I read the old journal. “We were crazy!”
On our first trip to Colorado, in 2005, we had driven out in mid-May, a time of year when spring is warming the valleys but has not yet reached the high mountains. Each morning, we started hiking at an elevation where snow clung to the trail in patches that were easily avoided. As our trail ascended into the mountains, though, wading through the snow became inevitable. The sun and spring air had warmed it just enough to turn its surface slushy, so that it didn’t hold our weight. We sunk in up to our knees with each step, except at higher elevations, where we sunk thigh-deep. It was quite a workout! Marc’s hiking boots leaked, too. By Day Two, he had learned to slip plastic grocery bags over his socks, and on we marched.
This is not the part that I found crazy. Hiking through thigh-deep snow might be miserable, but it’s the kind of miserable that invigorates two twenty-five-year-olds out to prove their valor—and it’s also relatively safe. As I kept reading, though, I came to a section of the journal where I described traversing a large, snow-covered boulder field. We had apparently hopped from one slippery, slushy rock to the next, never really knowing if the next footstep would sink us into a crevasse. We had just enough sense of the danger that Marc carried a walking stick, which he used to poke at ground that looked questionable. Worse, this was not a one-way trip: we had to return across the boulder field when we descended. We could easily have broken a leg—a neck!—on this escapade, but apparently that threat didn’t seem real to us at the time. We were determined to hike high up into the mountains, and nothing was going to stop us.
“What were we thinking?” I asked Marc. “Were we thinking?”
In 2023, we seemed like different people. Although our trip came in late June, the highest elevations still had snow. Marc and I could have pushed across it to reach the peaks, but we didn’t want to. It just didn’t seem exciting or important. I suppose we had already proved whatever we needed to prove to ourselves eighteen years ago and had moved on. In 2005, we had rushed up the trails in our fever to reach the mountain heights. In 2023, we poked along and dawdled at times, so that I could photograph birds, butterflies, and wildflowers, or so that our dog, Luke, could paddle around in a stream, piling sticks along the bank like a beaver. How we laughed to watch him!
Luke was a big reason for our changed priorities. The need to keep him safe lowered our threshold for danger; no feat of strength was worth putting him at risk. We also wanted to make sure that he enjoyed himself. Luke loves swimming more than anything else, so we stopped at every creek, lake, and pond to throw sticks for him. At almost fourteen years old, he’s an incredible hiker, but he needed breaks once in a while, too. If he seemed tired, we would find a comfortable place in the shade and let the beauty of the mountains wash over us.
On one such stop, I heard a delicate, silvery song. Complex warbles and trills spilled enchantingly from the gloom of the nearby forest. I couldn’t see the musician, but I knew it was a hermit thrush, a small, speckled bird that is related to our familiar robins. The thrush sang for thirty minutes before flying away. I was captivated, speechless, and grateful.
How many such songs did I miss in my twenties, in my rush to climb up the mountain? How many flowers did I hurry past? How many streams did I simply hop over? What was I thinking? Was I thinking? I suppose it’s too late to worry about that. What’s important are all the songs on the trail ahead.
