The Distance We Travel

Mountains are the backdrop of our life in the west. Particular mountains are like old friends, creating touchstones filled with memory and thought. Their presence work to remind and challenge us throughout life. This is why I return to place time and again and am rewarded by memories and new experiences weaving themselves together in the eternal moment. 

This day was an exceptional revisiting of mountain friends while learning about new ones. I was climbing Lookout Mountain in the eastern San Juan's on a late summer day. It was silent and the air was still as I came up through the Elk scented and shadowy woods to the rocky cliff below the table top. The sun was warm clear of the trees, even hot at times as I clambered onto the flat land lofted into the air like a floating island out of Avatar. The brilliance of place manifests itself in these parklands at the summits of peaks and ridges. Everything about you is impacted by the uniqueness of where you are. The world is as if just born, laid at your feet to see for the first time.

 

                               Lookout Mountain from the west

San Antonio Mountain could clearly be seen far to the east, past the valleys and treed hills all around. This magnificent roll of ground had long thrilled us as kids as we journeyed from Albuquerque to the San Juans for camping and fishing. For this hill marked the gateway into Colorado from the south and the Land of Enchantment from the north. High on the Taos Plateau it can be seen from great distances and had often been a comfort to see from window seats far overhead on many plane flights across the country. A touchstone indeed over the years.

The gentle roll of San Antonio Mountain in the distance

Once the eastern view had been taken in, I turned to gaze out to the west. The most inaccessible spiky Grenadiers of the western Weminuche wilderness punched into the sky. A smile emerged as I also saw La Ventana now mostly called by its English name, The Window and the Pyramid. Like San Antonio mountain, the Window and the Pyramid were backdrops to my life as a boy. So many years ago at the age of perhaps 15, I had climbed the Pyramid, as a pilgrimage into the sacred Weminuche.  

The boy, the Window and the Pyramid, circa 1974

A cool breeze began, whispering up from the valleys below that now had deep and long shadows crossing them in the late afternoon. I rubbed my neck and looked over at San Antonio Mountain and then again gazed at the Pyramid. It turns out that both of these mountains are just over 48 miles from the top of Lookout Mountain. A far distance on foot in such a turbulent landscape but close to view from here. Which really is farther to go I wondered to myself. The miles between the landmarks? Or the years since first seeing and climbing these mountains? Sighing and turning, I began my descent, the cooling air in my face.

Rio Grande Pyramid along the distant horizon