Lessons from the Colorado Trail

The warmth and smoothness of the whiskey was almost sensual as it slid down our throats. Leaning back against the big boulder in the middle of our campsite, its surface still holding a pleasant heat from the July sun, we watched as the western sky darkened to black and the stars emerged, piercing indifferently like a million possible futures.

“So, twenty-four years old, huh Matty?” Rhys said. “Sounds like a pretty good age.”

It was certainly off to a pretty good start. July 16, 2013, my 24th birthday, found me nestled in the heart of the Sawatch Range with a couple of friends, camping creekside between the Holy Cross and Mount Massive Wildernesses. Rhys was hiking the whole 500 miles of the Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango, a farewell to his home state before he left on a yearlong fellowship to teach English and Computer Science in China. Pete and I were along for a few segments of the ride. We'd all played ultimate frisbee together at Carleton College, that frisbee-crazed quirk of a school plopped down in the Southern Minnesota prairie. Now I, two years removed from the place, the youngest of three brothers, was rather relishing the chance to play sage elder for my just-graduated buddies.

As the flask of Jack passed back and forth, the conversation ranged on into the night, from romance to politics to life after Carleton. It was good, genuine talk, the kind that reminds you why your college friends often remain your best friends. And on one thing we all agreed: we were preposterously lucky to be where we were, doing what we were doing.

Wild beauty and human camaraderie: a recipe for happiness.

It's a feeling that wouldn't go away during my two weeks on the trail. The next evening we camped beneath Mt. Elbert then rose early enough to beat the bulk of the peakbaggers to the rooftop of Colorado, the lower 48's second-highest summit at 14,433 feet. We shared the climb with Laine, a CU student and fellow thru-hiker we'd met two days before. Later that afternoon we descended in a cooling drizzle through vast colonies of quaking aspen, the view to either side of the trail a wall of staggered cream-white trunks and dark brown eye-knots. Reaching a trailhead with fortuitous timing, we crammed into a Jeep with three soggy middle-aged Texans and hitched the couple miles into tiny Twin Lakes, Colorado, a one-road mountain town perched beneath massive peaks beside a pair of picturesque glacial lakes. We pitched our tent that night in the backyard behind the Twin Lakes General Store, falling asleep exhausted after a day which began with mountaintop grandeur and ended sharing beers and laughs with a couple other thru-hikers-turned-friends. (Trail time has a way of accelerating friendships: ask any casual observer which three out of our five had gone to college together and they wouldn't have had a clue).

It was this combination – equal parts wild beauty and human camaraderie – that made those two weeks so memorable. From rolling stretches of ridgeline tundra, where every quarter mile seems to yield an even more spectacular postcard vista, to cold coursing streams and meadows stuffed with the popping colors of asters, paintbrushes, columbines, lupines, etc., there was a heaping smorgasbord of natural splendor made all the lusher by a large dose of now-melted spring snowfall. But it was the unexpected human culture of the thing which set the Colorado Trail apart from my other experiences in the western backcountry. Between Laine (one semester away from graduation at CU), Cody (34-year old ex-rugby star who'd just thrown in the towel on a lucrative Wall Street career), and Doug and Denise (retired desert rats from Utah – she a park ranger, he an EMT), every thru-hiker we met seemed ready and willing with a fascinating story, a bad joke, a sage piece of advice. And whether we shared five days or five minutes together didn't really matter. Nobody cared too much about anything but the present.

The trail is waiting: get out there and find it.

Following his “experiment” at Walden Pond, Thoreau delivered perhaps his wisest conclusion of all with one repeated imperative: “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” After two weeks during which I turned on my cell phone two times, during which all the materials I needed to thrive weighed under thirty pounds and fit comfortably on my back, during which happiness had very little to do with technology and a whole lot to do with wilderness and unfiltered human connections, I can think of no better method for following the Concord hermit's advice in today's world than an extended backpacking trip.

I had no intention of hiking the Colorado Trail this summer until I saw Rhys at an ultimate tournament in May and we got to scheming. Three months later, I've returned to a still-uncertain future in society carrying barely a shred of anxiety after a couple of the most rejuvenating weeks of my life. The woods and the lakes and the hills are still out there, friends. If you're lucky enough to have the time and the resources, make it happen. Who knows, maybe you'll spend your next birthday sipping whiskey at 10,000 feet too.

New Chapter, New Routine

One of these times, she's going to hurt herself with these antics. In her unbridled excitement, she's going to forget to look ahead in between joyful barks and bounces in my direction. An oversize root, a misplaced rock, a snake – something – is not going to get out of her way.

I'm referring, of course, to Dorri, my parents' three-year old golden retriever, who served as my regular trail running companion during the nine months which I spent living back home in Amherst, Mass. It was a triply beneficial partnership: we both got the exercise and woods time we craved while my mom and dad were relieved of the stir-crazy, attention-hogging young golden she had too often resembled, instead coming home to find a dog mellowed by the exertion of charging through the hills of the Holyoke Range. Of course, our adventures would hardly have seemed routine based on the boundless delight she exuded at the start of each.

A week ago, however, Dorri and I took our last run up Rattlesnake Knob for a while, at least until I return home from Colorado for a few frantic days in August and prepare for my autumnal relocation to Madison, Wis. I almost offered to bring her along on my current adventure, but the truth is that I'm going to need some time alone during this journey, time without a 60-pound bundle of straw-colored vitality bouncing toward my face.

On top of Grays Peak with some old Ranger-types.

The trip is off to a fast start, to say the least. After stops in Ann Arbor, Mich. and Kansas City, the Silver Bullet and I pulled into Denver on Monday evening, just in time to help lay the cement down for the lower floor of my brother and sister-in-law's new house. Two hours later, I was zigzagging the little hatchback up the ruts and rocks of a Summit County backroad, headed for a late-night rendezvous with some old friends from my Ranger days at Philmont Scout Ranch. Yesterday, three days after waking up at sea level in Boston, I was fending off altitude sickness as we climbed Grays and Torreys Peaks, topping out at 14,270 feet of elevation. Not a bad way to start a vacation.

Yet as I enjoy my recovery day, I'm thinking not of friends or 14ers, but of trail runs with Dorri and the importance of routines. My life will be intentionally unfettered for the next month – and perhaps much longer, depending on the progress of the Great Madison Job Hunt. One of my primary goals for this chapter is to bring writing to the forefront, to make space for it on my list of crucial routines.

In the fall of 2011, I found myself starved for exercise as I began my first job out of college at an Outdoor Education Center in Texas. For the first extended period of my life, I was not playing an organized sport, and while I did plenty of walking in my new job and occasionally talked co-workers into a game of ultimate frisbee, the routine of strenuous aerobic activity was gone without a team's structure. I had battled for years with running on my own, never reaching the point where the question turned from if I was going to run that week to when. But as I felt my love handles growing flabbier in the East Texas heat, I finally got past the initial disruption which accompanies any change in personal habits. I started running a few miles around the adjacent neighborhood two, three, sometimes four times a week. Come April, I had completed my first half marathon. The routine was established and its strength gave me the same confidence as my legs'.

When I returned to Amherst last fall for my new job in sports information, I kept running, but gone was the regular exposure to nature my work in Texas had afforded. Between publishing game programs, writing press releases, and staffing 27 teams' worth of events, there was no time for hiking or rock climbing. I was lucky if I got out for a 20-minute walk to admire the beaver pond and the oak woods behind my parents' house. Through trail running with Dorri, however, I started killing two birds with one stone. While one's appreciation for a wild area's minutiae is inversely proportional to the speed at which one moves through it, running along the ridges and creek beds of my ancient hometown hills was a much-needed break from the high-strung personalities and landscaped fields of collegiate athletics. I had added a new layer to the routine of running, and it had become all the more rewarding.

So now it's time to bring to my writing that same discipline that got me off my butt and onto the trail. As I wind my way through the undetermined months ahead, with professional possibilities ranging everywhere from another full-time job in communications to substitute teaching and freelancing, I intend to pursue my personal written work with new vigilance. The results of those efforts may often appear here, and I am grateful already for all of your continued reading and support.

At this point, you'd be right to wonder just what I'll be writing about. I wish I knew too. There will probably be a few rants about sports and climate change as the baseball and wildfire seasons move on and I fend off the hypocrite's guilt of someone who hates fossil fuels but loves roadtrips and the bright lights of a summer night ballpark. There may be a crappy poem or two. There will certainly be stories and snapshots from the many adventures, outdoor and otherwise, which await.

And on that note, I'll take you back to Saturday, when this current western jaunt of mine began. After a proper Friday night sendoff with friends in Boston, the next evening found the Bullet and me crossing southern Ontario at 120 km/hr, windows halfway down as rushing air accompanied a Neil Young serenade (one of my favorite roadtrip traditions is listening to music from or about an area as I drive through it). Once we escaped the sprawl of the Niagara-to-Toronto corridor, rural beauty enveloped us as farms, rivers, and forest stretched to the north and south, a long and golden sunset dead ahead. As Neil sung of his Ontario roots in “Helpless,” I felt the pull of those rivers, the longing to follow them north until the oaks and maples hugging their banks gave way to a wall of conifers and the towns grew smaller and fewer.

This was my first trip across the province in several years. Barring long waits at the borders, it's a quicker route between home in Amherst and my brother in Ann Arbor than following I-90 around the bulge of Lake Erie. After one particularly brutal backup on the Blue Water Bridge into Michigan, however, I had opted for the American side during recent trips. Recalling the scenic calm of those provincial highway stretches, however, not to mention an unexpectedly good sandwich at Tim Horton's, I'd say the crossing is almost worth going out of one's way for.

Perhaps I can find a metaphor for writing in the allure of Canada. It starts with the monotony of the familiar, the tendency of schedules and sluggishness to prevent us from venturing into new places both mentally and physically. Yet Canada is there for the exploring, with vast tracts of wilderness to which we have no equal in the lower 48. If the mental barrier of unfamiliarity can be overcome, the potential for greater and more frequent writing is just as attainable.

If I am venturing into the Canada of my writer's path, then, I do so knowing that a few well-chosen routines must still accompany me. I will keep pulling on my running shoes, keep finding time for the wild, and will try to keep the words flowing like rivers in between.

Of course, if this new routine gets too, well, routine – if the threshold of boredom is approaching, it'll be time to adjust and rethink my critical habits. Alaska, anyone?

The Untethering

I’ve been known to make impulsive decisions before, especially when my car and the interstate system are involved. But since moving back to my hometown for a real-world job in Sports Information, the chances for adventure have been few and far between. When I’ve had a rare speck of free time, I’ve been more likely to spend it on the couch than the road.

Something about May in the northern states, however, breathes restlessness like the trees rushing almost visibly to leaf out during every warm day.

So I eagerly planned my escape. As soon as the Amherst College baseball team ended its season, I was headed for the Midwest and as many reunions as I could fit into a week or so. But as we all know, sports are wonderfully and miserably unpredictable. And when sports dictate your schedule, sometimes the rest of the world has to be put on hold.

 Baseball postseason was easily the highlight of my year.

And so I rode the wave with our guys through an unexpected conference title, a surprise shipment out of New England to NCAA Regionals in upstate New York, and a pair of Cinderella wins over two of the nation’s top teams. Along the way, I battled with iMovie, covered some magical games, and generally reminded myself why baseball is one of the greatest gifts humanity has ever given itself.

But that’s not the point, really. Despite my affection for our baseball team, I went into the postseason half-grumbling that their success might delay my personal date with Lady Adventure. But somewhere in the middle of it all, she came and found me ahead of schedule. Somewhere between the crumbling woodwork of a minor league press box in New Britain, Conn. and the raucous Friday night crowd at Curley’s Bar and Grill in Auburn, N.Y. I was actually having a hell of a time.

This was the first instance in which my job had brought me the kind of exhilarating new experiences that I had condemned it for denying me. Of course, it was still too little too late. A couple weeks of travel don’t make up for months of late nights and lost weekends, and I’ll be hanging up my SID spikes and heading west come July – more on that in a few paragraphs. Still, the chance to hit the road for work was a reminder that with an open mind, great adventures can surprise us in unexpected forms.

So when the Jeffs finally went down two wins shy of a trip to the College World Series, I was actually disappointed that I wouldn’t be covering them longer. I should have been mad that their deep run at the tournament had sidelined my plans to be in Wisconsin already, but instead, with a peaceful mind, I packed up the car after the last paragraph was written and drove through the night to salvage what I could of the trip. And when the opportunity arose to stay there for another week and cover the track and field team at nationals, I asked for the new assignment without hesitation.

I’ll be 23 for barely a month longer. Most of this year has been spent wishing I had more time to act my age, to make the kind of memories I knew my college friends were making together as active young adults in Boston and Seattle and Madison. So now that the athletic season is over and my work schedule dwindling, I’m starting to make up for lost time. Last weekend it was a concert-and-camping trip to New Hampshire that screamed to me between barefoot bluegrass and midnight barred owl conversations just how much I had missed my old hippie ways. Soon, I’ll be reviving that side in a much bigger way.

Summer on the Colorado Trail. What could be better?

Once my employment at Amherst ends on Friday, June 28, I’ll be b-lining it to the Rockies, reuniting with Denver friends and family for a few days, then leaving everything else behind but my backpack. My friend Rhys is hiking the entire 486 miles of the Colorado Trail this summer before spending a year in China, and I’ll be joining him for some sizable chunks of the journey. It’ll be a time for camaraderie and for silence, for perspective and regrouping, but mostly for fun in the mountains.

After that, question marks still abound. I’ll be moving to Madison in August, living with some great friends in a great city, and taking the rest as it comes. The job hunt is in full swing but seems less important than it probably should. Maybe one of these resume recipients will take the time to find out what a Sports Information Director really does and I’ll be back to a full-time grind. Maybe I’ll work part-time and focus more fully on applying to graduate school, an inevitable turn in my path whose approach I grow more excited for daily. Maybe I’ll say screw it after the fall and head west for the ski bum winter I’ve always craved.

What I do know is this: it’s time to let people and places take priority for a while. It’s been two years and two days since I graduated from Carleton and my whereabouts for the bulk of that time have been determined by jobs. For as long as I’m fortunate enough to have some cash in my pocket, that’s going to change.

I will be thankful long past my next chapter, however, for the way that this one is ending. This last month at Amherst – from the relationships I’ve strengthened to the fact that more people watched my NCAA baseball broadcasts than the college’s graduation live stream – it has shown me that no matter how frustrating a job, a place, a relationship might be on a daily basis, flexibility and a desire for new challenges can bring out the best in it.

Wherever you are, Adventure is there for the taking, my friends. You might just have to get creative about finding her.

And that’s a lesson that will last far longer than any team’s season.

More Than Madness: Why March Matters

Author's Note: since my last post in this blog, I've changed scenery, leaving Texas for a job in Sports Information at Amherst College. It's been a major lifestyle shift, one on which I hope to reflect and write more this summer, once my days are no longer filled with tennis recaps and hockey box scores. For now, I'm valuing the chance to write professionally, even if these entries have become few and far between. If you want to know what I'm really up to, just visit amherst.edu/athletics. Cheers!

There are many days when I’m more than ready to throw in the towel on sportswriting as a career – when the late nights writing tennis recaps and the weekends spent running from one event to the next seem like a big fat waste of time compared to the work I could be doing in, you know, helping save the planet or something. But then the month of March, specifically the NCAA basketball tournaments, come around and have to remind me of all of the reasons why I still love sports.

Harvard has us remembering that even the Ivies can get caught up in March.

Consider this: after the first round of the men’s Division I tournament (I refuse to call the Round of 64 the “Second Round”), the two biggest Cinderella stories are the nation’s oldest university (Harvard, est. 1636) and one of its youngest (Florida Gulf Coast, est. 1991). There must be some value in that storyline, some lesson about how you can never be too venerated and haughty, nor too inexperienced and headstrong, to get carried away with the emotions caused by a group of kids working hard together to do something nobody thought they could. As somewhat of a New Mexican at heart, my bracket and I howled in agony when the Crimson upset the Lobos, but once I saw this picture of the Harvard band, I couldn’t help but smile along with the rest of Massachusetts.

Speaking of Bay State smart guys, here’s the other great thing that happened in college basketball yesterday: the Amherst College men advanced to the D-III Final Four, and they did so by scoring more points against Cabrini College (last year’s national runner-up) than any D-I team put up in the first round. The Jeffs ran away with a 101-82 win, putting on an offensive clinic that’s hard to imagine coming from a bunch of liberal arts students. I’ve had the privilege of entering the three-pointers, blocks and dunks that these guys have produced all year into a stats computer as they’ve happened, and being around the team regularly has led to a couple of reflections. First, despite what the cookie-cutter NCAA.com commentators might say on the webcast, you can forget the nerdy stereotypes of D-III student-athletes from top schools. These young men are basketball players and cold-blooded winners, even if they don’t have the tattoos. Sports Illustrated legend Jack McCallum puts it far better than I in his column about the NESCAC’s Elite Three, so I’ll let him say the rest.

The second reflection is another one of those why-we-care-about-sports odes. Spike Lee wrote the line for He Got Game, “basketball is like poetry in motion.” You can say the same about a precision touchdown pass, a home run robbery or an ultimate player channeling his inner Usain Bolt, but we’ll stick with basketball since it’s March. There’s a pure aesthetic joy to watching an athlete do extraordinary things with the human body, one that transcends and mitigates the noise of sophomoric celebrations and off-the-deep-end media. Along with the irresistible drama of great games, “poetry in motion” should be enough to turn even the snootiest artiste’s eyes toward the television come tourney time, albeit with the mute button close at hand.

Finally – and this is honestly the biggest one for me – there’s regional pride at stake. Although conference realignment (a.k.a corporate greed) is threatening it at the D-I level, college sports (and even the pros, at their best) are deeply rooted in a sense of place. I won’t get all nature writer-y now, but it’s this connection that has made me realize that sports and environmentalism aren’t necessarily so far apart. This winter, I also had the privilege of periodically covering Amherst’s dynastic women’s basketball team, which reached its fifth straight Final Four last weekend. Even though the general student body hardly seemed to notice their incredible achievements (a rant for another day), the loyal group of family, friends and townies that doggedly supported this team all year made me proud to call myself an Amherst native for the first time in a long time. Inevitably, it brought me back to the Final Four Run of the Calipari/Camby UMass team in 1996, an historic time for our town which captured the hearts of more than just a six-year old me (I still have the shirt which a couple of walk-on benchwarmers signed at our elementary school pep rally, and one of my greater claims to fame is that Coach Cal read children’s books to me at the South Amherst library). Where am I going with this? Here’s where: sports, like few other things, have the power to connect us deeply with both the places from which we hail and the people with whom we cheer. In our partisan, often roots-less age, I see great potential for progress in that unity.

When people talk about how to fix our broken political system, my first answer is often, “make all of the congressmen and women go on a backpacking trip.” Maybe it would be just as powerful if every state with a team still playing made its senators and representatives sit down and watch the tourney together.

Hot, Hot West

A day after it sparked, I drove by the Waldo Canyon Fire that devastated the Colorado Springs area this summer. Returning from a family visit in Denver to my summer home at Philmont Scout Ranch in northern New Mexico, I watched from I-25 as a white mushroom cloud billowed into the still-blue sky, dwarfing the city at its feet like a beast out of science fiction. Some nervous motorists pulled off the highway to snap a picture or call a loved one. It felt like I was witnessing the opening battle of World War III.

Later in the summer, on my way back home to greener Massachusetts, I raced across the starved plains of Nebraska, a graveyard of withered cornstalks and dead prairie grass. Several times I crossed the North Platte River. At over 700 miles, it's one of the nation's 25 longest streams, twisting down from the mountains around the Colorado-Wyoming border to meet the Platte, Missouri, Mississippi, and on. But this summer, the North Platte was no more than a desolate gully, parched as the land around it. With a grim hypocrite’s smile, I drove on.

Before putting key into ignition, I had not put the two parts of these experiences together: 1) me driving my gasoline-powered car, and 2) an extreme weather event: one a raging wildfire tearing through suburban neighborhoods, the other a record heat wave withering the goods of America's breadbasket. I should have made the connection.

Cars and wildfires: a deadly connection.

This summer's horrific blazes and the searing drought that has caused them are the latest and greatest indicators that climate change is breathing down our necks and into our hometowns. In a recent article for Rolling Stone, longtime climate watchdog Bill McKibben puts things into startlingly clear perspective, using basic math to show just what a predicament our species has gotten itself and the rest of the planet into. I won't go into the specifics, but read the article and you'll reach the same conclusion I did: we need damn-near-impossibly big changes or else we're toast. Very burnt toast.

McKibben's solution is that we must create a serious, attention-grabbing villain out of the fossil fuel industry and its supporters. If this is WWIII: Earth vs. Man (and how can we not consider it a crisis of such proportion?), then the CEOs of ExxonMobil and Shell are carrying AKs on the front lines. We must cross the trenches and start firing from the “Earth” side if the conflict is to avoid Armageddon. 

Yet today, with temperatures once again rising into the nineties, I will drive my car, burning a fossil fuel, puking more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, heating up our one and only planet one more nauseating fraction. In fact, I'll need to stop at the pumps today too, where I'll swipe my debit card into the service of the menace.

I commit these acts of treason every day. But then again, who doesn't?

Can we live meaningful lives without cars? Surely we can. But with few doing it, it's hardly the easy choice, and sometimes it hardly even seems logical. We're so far from a gas-free culture, is there any point in me sacrificing for a ship nearly sunk? Maybe I should just buckle up and enjoy the ride. Hey, I vote democrat and drive a compact car that gets 40 miles per gallon – that makes me a good guy, right?

Indeed, cutting back my fuel consumption has proved a huge challenge this summer. I need to drive not only for my job, but in order to escape the sometimes stifling environment of that job. If I want to get away from the pubescent white males and headstrong white fathers that overpopulate the Boy Scouts of America, I need to drive. (Tangent: you'd think I could hike out somewhere into the vastness of our 556-square kilometer Philmont “wilderness” and escape, but you'd be surprised how ubiquitous those campers are. No matter where you go, eventually they will find you, solitude will be ruined, and in a barrage of thoughtless questions about water and bears and whether they're there yet, you'll be reminded of all that you're running from. Don't get me wrong, I love working at Philmont. Most days).

So we drive. We drive to the watering holes of Taos, to the fourteeners in Colorado, at least to the haven of the St. James Hotel four miles away, where we sulk with our beers and find comfort in company our own age.

Yup, driving has seemed pretty much essential to my mental health this summer, so I'm pleading the fifth and calling myself Benedict Arnold on this one. I'd like to think that within the next year I'll land in a city where I can largely stop driving. We'll see. What I can say is that I have made great progress in one responsible choice: meat consumption. (“According to Environmental Defense,” writes PETA, “if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off U.S. Roads”).

A few weeks into the season at Philmont, after one particularly grotesque dinner of mystery slop, I made the call that I wouldn't eat meat in the dining hall again and that I'd cut back in tastier environments as well. Aside from a few chicken salad lapses, I've held to it. Philmont has finally felt enough heat to start providing decent vegetarian options, making it far easier. So like most of us who are “serious” about being green, I'm making the relatively convenient changes, the ones that don't require too hard a step away from comfort. But can I be better? Can we? Not yet, it seems.

And once again, that other maddening question comes to mind: is it even really worth it? When is the cost of sacrifice too high in freedoms lost, pleasures denied, and wrinkles gained? Edward Abbey told a bunch of environmentalists, “It's not enough to fight for the land. It's even more important to enjoy it while you still can.” When do we listen to him and trade in our tedious preachings for a case of beer in the trunk and a weekend in the mountains? I've always tried to avoid puritanism, but I've never felt more like one of those stuffy uptight bastards than when I'm telling someone they shouldn't drive a truck or eat a cheeseburger.

Looks like Ed wanted to sell his gas-guzzler. Are you selling yours?

More Abbey comes to mind, that hater of all things puritan. What would Ed have done had he stuck around long enough to witness this climate crisis? A firm believer of the holiness of here and now, he wrote in “Science With a Human Face” that this sensory reality of taste and smell and feel is “what we know … all we can know … all that we could possibly need.” It's hard to imagine him giving up his steaks and bacon or that other most eco-friendly habit of his, chucking empty beer cans out the window as he roared down the highway (“It's not the beer cans that are ugly, it's the highway that is ugly”).

But you have to imagine he'd be as freaked out about it all as we are. In the same essay he wonders if “the only appropriate question now is whether or not technology will succeed in totally enslaving mankind before it succeeds in its corollary aim of destroying life.”

With our relationship to the planet direr than ever, we must ask ourselves if we are racing toward the former (enslavement) in order to slow down the latter (death, in this case, of our species).

Abbey believed that science was beautiful but useless without love (technology, on the other hand, coming from greed). So as we keep fighting the good fight, let's not forget why we're ultimately doing it. That even if it means we compromise those same ethics we push, every now and then we need to drive off to a trailhead or a campground or across the country so that we can reaffirm that love of life and land which sustains us.

Put another way, those impossibly bright and wild stars will always be worth the gas we burn getting out of the city to see them. And they'll remind us, once again, that after all of our love and hate for it, this planet is just a tiny blue-green speck revolving around one of those fiery pinpricks in the night. And we? We are but wisps of smoke on the hot summer breeze.

Et tu, Canada?: A Tipping Point

Yesterday, my friend Todd and I drove from New York to Chicago. We're on our way back to Carleton College for our first alumni weekend with our ultimate frisbee team in which we are the alums. Preparing myself to attempt the role of sage graduate rather than the familiar party animal reversion that some of my ex-teammates will surely perform, it still came as a bit of a surprise when amidst my excitement for reunion, yesterday turned out to be a sobering day.

As we neared Chicago in the late afternoon, traffic predictably thickened until we found ourselves mired in the nastiest sludge of interstate snarl come 6:30. We were listening to Chicago band Wilco's beautiful, at-times apocalyptic album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. After finally making it to Todd's parents' house in Oak Park, I flipped open my laptop before bed and, performing the ritual Facebook check, found a link to James Hansen's New York Times op-ed entitled “Game Over for the Climate.” Cue the apocalyptic music.

In the piece, Hansen mourns the recent news that Canada plans to exploit its huge tar sands reserves for oil. Dirty, dirty oil, the extraction of which will release irrevocable masses of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The raised level of heat-trapping gases, Hansen writes, “would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.”

Boom. Apocalypse. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And why isn't this front page news? Oh right, sorry, that's the long-term outlook. Who cares about the long-term these days? But wait, Hansen, continues (and here's where things really get dour), “over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

What? You mean this global warming crap might actually affect me in my lifetime?

Yeah, people, it will, and it already has. Last year's historic, devastating drought in Texas was probably no coincidence. As Hansen, a director at NASA, notes, Earth is at the point of its extended orbit cycle where temperatures should be cooling. They're not. It barely snowed back home in Massachusetts this winter, and the only real storm was an out-of-the-blue Halloween behemoth that wrought millions in damage to the region. Random, extreme weather punctuating abnormal warmth. That's what's already starting, folks.

After reading Hansen's warning, the truth of it all became clearer than ever: climate change is not a right vs. left problem, it is a right vs. wrong problem. And right now, nearly all of us are still making far too many wrong choices about it.

I, for one, love to drive my car. I have recently chosen to drive from Texas to Massachusetts to Minnesota to New Mexico to start my summer (getting 36-40 miles per gallon in my car and staying with friends, it's actually cheaper than flying). But is the true, not-just-monetary cost of this decision really less? Nearly every car ad these days (at least in blue states) touts fuel efficiency. That's neat, but what do 35 mpgs vs. 25 really matter when we're talking about heavy flooding and incalculable economic loss?

No, we need to cut back on cars altogether. Concentrating our fossil fuel consumption to public transit is part of it. Walking or riding a bike whenever possible is another. But more than that, we need to change our locational habits in order to cut back our car love. Pay the extra money for a house or apartment within walking distance of work. Get the fuck out of the suburbs and the ridiculous sprawl cities like Houston where everyone drives everywhere. It's not a matter of preference anymore, it's a matter of survival.

Of course, our reliance on the internal combustion engine is just one of this hydra's many heads. The way we heat our homes, the way we dispose of waste, the very food we eat – it all needs to change. We can't pick and choose when to be green like a shopper going back and forth between the organic and candy aisles.

Hansen's piece turns its focus to policy as a necessary change. It's true, our lawmakers and executives need to make those hard, unpopular choices that will ultimately improve the lives of their constituents. That's what government is for. But if we are to save our species from the tidal waves of disturbance that are coming faster than ever, we can't wait for the law to force us, because let's face it, with our broken political system, we may still be waiting when Brooklyn sits under five feet of water.

It comes down to ethics. Aldo Leopold, more than sixty years ago, described “The Land Ethic,” stating, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Few people have listened to Leopold, whose early, pre-global warming concerns were land management, not fossil fuels. Now we have no choice. We must adopt a shared environmental ethic, one that pervades every decision we make. Cold turkey. No going back to the candy aisle. I may have to sacrifice the liberating joy of those long roadtrips.

One of my favorite motivational quotes for outdoor adventures is an anonymous one that goes, “there's no growth in the comfort zone and no comfort in the growth zone.”

When it comes to the climate, we've reached the point where we can substitute “survival” for “growth.”

It's a sobering prospect, yes. But it doesn't mean life will stop being life. We can laugh, cry, and fall in love without consuming fossil fuels. I'll still have fun at alumni weekend. And I might just choke down a few veggie burgers while I'm at it.

A Renewing Reunion

Monday, March 12, Day Two at Taos, arrives crisp and clear, exactly the kind of morning that prompted some heart-happy mountain person to turn “bluebird” into an adjective. Yesterday was a behemoth of sunburned exhaustion and my body initially rebels at any thought of rolling off the air mattress and doing it again. But the mind, filled with dizzying ski dreams for the last eight hours, easily wins this battle. Coffee, ibuprofen, and eggs with red chile soon have me something close to refreshed, and as we wind up the cold canyon road to the Ski Valley, I'm irrepressibly giddy with anticipation.

Once we get off the lift, however, reality is more painful than peachy. Right off the bat, Sam – my partner in crime for the week – and his uncle Bill drag my sore and sunburned ass up into Taos' renowned hike-only terrain. The lift stops three-quarters of the way up, and if you want the mountain's steepest, most unique skiing, you must work for it. You must take your skis off, throw them over your shoulder, and trudge.

I've been skiing for about as long as I can remember, but this is something entirely new. From a tyke harnessed to my uncle on the hills of upstate New York to a middle school daredevil in Vermont to a mediocre high school racer, skiing had always been about the downhill. The speed, the rush, the risk.

During my college years, I spent summers as a backpacking guide in this same New Mexico high country, learning, as John Muir advised, to “climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” Contact with nature became a central, necessary part of my life, but skiing – done much less frequently now – was an entirely separate endeavor, a vestige of my younger self. I was becoming more Thoreauvian than thrill-seeking. My giant slalom Dynastars sat rusty-edged in the garage at home.

So even when Sam and I realized we shared the same Spring Break and agreed to spend it skiing, I could not have predicted this. I'm slogging up through bristlecone pine, yesterday's pain searing through my legs with each small ski-booted step, a world away from those have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too days of chairlift rides and bombing down the groomers at Okemo. Feeling like a shaggy, lumbering moose, I still manage to smile through gritted teeth as Sam gingerly waltzes ahead, deer-like in his lightweight backcountry boots.

The first climb is of course the worst, and we've soon surfaced onto the Kachina ridgeline. Yesterday morning was cloudy post-snow, but today we're greeted with the true Rocky Mountain wake-up call: brightest blue sky, snow-dappled peaks, deep evergreen groves stretched out in a visual smorgasbord that is really quite impossible to appreciate all at once. I look north and there are the Spanish Peaks of Southern Colorado, huge and timeless, present in a high-definition clarity of blue, gray, and white. Rising in the east is Wheeler Peak, New Mexico's tallest, towering over the Ski Valley like the steadiest of guardians. I stood on its 13,161-foot summit on the morning of my 21st birthday, but there's no room for nostalgia in my brain right now – the present is, quite literally, too breathtaking.

Yet past experience and emotions are inevitably a part of my time with this landscape, and when Philmont's own Baldy Mountain emerges through the Wheeler saddle, an irrepressible sense of homecoming arrives with it. Unlike yesterday, the entire ridge leading up to Kachina Peak is open for skiers and as we hike on, I hardly notice the lancing pain in my shins or the claymore-like skis digging into my shoulder. Sam has told me that for him skiing out here is as much about the ascent as the descent. It's a new concept for me, but it's suddenly ringing true. As we climb on, my buddy is still way ahead of me; now it's not just the altitude's physical effects, but its spiritual ones too that are causing me to tarry.

It's hard, maybe impossible, to put accurate words to the feelings I experience above treeline, but the ones that keep coming to mind are perspective and awe. Whatever creative force led to these mighty mountains pushing their way skyward and to my insignificant speck of a self being here, with intricate retinas and pupils capable of witnessing them; whatever master catalyst sparked the long, winding chain of events that led to such a moment – I have never felt more connected to that power than when I'm in a high place like this one. Daily concerns wash away in the presence of grand, overwhelming peace, and I feel miniscule yet mighty, fleeting yet full with praise.

Cosmic romances pouring through my mind, I hardly remember that I'm actually here to ski. But as we stop partway up the ridge at the precipice to one of the treacherous “K-chutes,” a whole new kind of flood enters my brain: it's time for my first real big mountain skiing. Below me is a ten-foot, nearly vertical drop preceding several hundred feet of descent that seem nearly as steep, then the frosting as the chute mellows into a beautiful powder field that extends down to the resort's topmost groomers.

I watch as Sam and Bill expertly drop in and link their first carving, poetic turns. There's a second of hesitation as I realize that in my decade and a half of skiing I've never done anything as bad-ass as this. I flash through memories of middle school wipe-outs, of a hellbent ninth-grader waiting for the start of my JV run down the icy, rutted course, then smile slightly as the old “fuck it” mentality takes over. I push my poles hard into the ground, plunge my body forward and drop into the vicious slope.

***

There will be many more hours of skiing on this trip. I'll immerse myself in beautiful, challenging glades, stopping to lean against an aspen in breathless satisfaction every now and then. We'll hike above treeline a few more times for shorter, still-exhilarating drops off the ridge. Later in the week, we'll spend two days exploring crusty, snow-starved Crested Butte Mountain with a couple of my Philmont buddies. The peaks of Colorado will tower before us, even more jagged and indomitable than New Mexico's, but none of the many highs will quite match that second morning at Taos. Simply put, it was one of the most vital shots of time I can remember, a barrage of physical, mental, and spiritual stimuli to which I can find no previous comparison. Because as sublime as that slow climb up the ridge was, the experience was only partial until the blurred rush of the descent: the joy of carving a hard turn in the soft snow then plummeting down into the next one, feeling the body find its synergistic balance in the struggle to control itself against the force of the mountain. On the top of the ridge, I stood speechless in the midst of vast and ancient beauty. At the bottom, my heart pounded with the thrill of having, for a few minutes, tapped into that indifferent yet generous power.

Just that morning, not to mention the rest of the trip, was enough to reignite my love for skiing with the kind of flames it had once possessed, back when my buddies and I would watch ski movies all night then sweat all day building a little jump in one of our backyards. But now there was an added layer to my boyhood hobby. This was a new, more mature skiing, a pleaser of both my contemplative and adrenaline-seeking sides. A wholly unexplored world had suddenly opened its doors, a world as broad, imposing, and irresistible as the Rockies themselves. All of a sudden I wanted Alta, Jackson Hole, Whistler. Alaska, for God's sake, and not just the resorts, but the backcountry too. I wanted miles and miles of snowy ridgelines to traverse and endless chutes and faces and powder lines. I wanted the sweaty trudge as much as the heart-stopping drop-in, for it was all part of this bold, uplifting adventure. I had thrown my old Dynastars in the car expecting a reunion with that familiar friend named Skiing, only to find him changed tenfold for the greater, beckoning me with fat new powder skis to demo and arms opened wider than ever.

It must have been a similar welcome that John Muir heard at the top of that Douglas Spruce as he swayed like a dandelion in the heart of a Yosemite squall. He put it simply and best: “the mountains are calling and I must go.”

So what was I to do, having heard that call louder than ever? When Muir discovered the Sierras, he stayed for good. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think once or twice about doing the same after this trip. But the world is changed. It's not 1868 and I'm not John Muir. Student loans, car payments, and a strange budding loyalty to this little place in Texas have sent me eastward after a week that contained a month's worth of adventure. And you know what? As sad as it was to leave the mountains in the rearview, I was okay with it. Okay with pausing my ski dreams after just an appetizer, okay with those snow-dusted peaks returning to their role as distant attraction. Because the truth is the best times are the fleeting ones, the ones you can't have whenever you want. We so often forget the beauty of something when it becomes everyday. Perhaps it's best to restrain oneself from some pleasures in order to preserve their purity. The mountains will still be there this summer. And next winter. And whenever I find a full-time job closer to them that's as fulfilling as this one. Until then, I'll smile at the thought of that perfect bluebird morning.

The Silver Bullet in its natural habitat. Crested Butte, CO.