Life Hikes
The destination was Lake Blanche, a beautiful glacial lake located up Big Cottonwood Canyon. It was the twenty seventh of September and the first snow of the year was beginning to fall. I had been at work all morning, sneaking outside whenever possible to catch a few flakes on the tip of my tongue but it wasn’t enough. I had to be in that snow.
Immediately after work I hopped in the house and headed for hills. Locating my trail head I began the trek at half past five, a risky start time for a supposedly five hour round trip hike. “Darkness be damned, its snowing up there and I want to be in it.” I thought to myself as I gathered the few items that would join me on the journey. Hat, Jacket, full snack pocket, camera, phone, knife, check. Headlamp or flashlight? Na. I’ll make it.
I knew I had to hike fast if I wanted to reach Blanche before dark. Even after half an hour up the hill, I was debating going back down and saving the hike for the following morning. It was cold, wet, raining and I still had approximately 2 hours till the top. I decided to go for it and ditched the heavy cotton shirt I had underneath my jacket, saving it from sweat, and keeping it warm for when I reached the top. Racing the rain to freezing temperatures I made it to the snowy lake at seven sharp. Plenty of light left I thought.
Once at the top, I put on my fresh layer, dried out my jacket the best I could and started to look around. The clouds were so thick I could barely make out that I had even made it. I didn’t see the water until I was on the shore line and you could forget about any sight of the opposing peak. After walking around a few minutes with my tongue out again , I remembered my time constraint and began back down.
Even though the light was fading quickly through the dense cloud cover that now shadowed the canyon, the snowfall and the serenity continued to delay my progress toward the car. Stopping to take pictures too frequently in the romantically apocalyptic lighting, I realized that it would be pitch black long before I finished my decent. I was armed with the knowledge of two facts.
- One – There was only the single trail down the canyon so as long as I didn’t stray from it, I should be fine.
- Two – I had no flashlight, so I had better be quick on my feet.
The journey down was a doozie to say the least. Not twenty minutes after my realization, it was dark enough under the canopy of the fading aspens that I had to Marcel Marcel my way through the denser wooded parts of the trail. Placing hands to feet and the ground ahead as I stumbled down. I dared not look at my phone to check the time, fearing the brightly lit screen would completely ruin the night vision my eyes were only faintly becoming adjusted to.
Stumbling and bumbling down the path, I would catch a shadowy glimpse of the canyon road here and there but it never seemed to be getting much closer. I continued to take the invisible path one step at a time, making sure that one foot was secure before placing the other. Back and forth between open patches and thickets, my woodland Marcel skills were starting to come along quite nicely. I passed through some dense areas looking like a crab, and others like an awkward kangaroo that was trying to walk with its disproportionately long arms. Sadly, there was no one else on this mountain after dark, so there were no witnesses of my contribution to the ministry of silly walks.
Time seemed to stop completely as darkness enveloped even the open areas and my mind began to develop fear. Not a logically fueled fear of getting lost, or stumbling my way into a broken bone mind you. A completely illogical fear (like most fear) of being attacked by a mountain lion. I was so paranoid about one of these ferocious felines stalking me through the darkness, I was carrying an open blade in my uphill hand between bouts of Marceling and silly walks. I hadn’t even seen a mountain lion in Big Cottonwood before! Then sanity would kick back in and I would carefully close the knife and go back to walking on all fours, knowing damn well that no respectable predator would be out hunting in this weather.
Eventually the blackness grew too thick, and my eyes could no longer adjust to the absence of light in the valley. I finally pulled out the phone, checked the time that I had been dying to look at for years now, and saw that it was twelve minutes past nine, two long hours after I had begun my initial decent and thirty minutes longer than it took me to climb up.
Coming down the canyon in the damp, paranoid, and magical night air had me thinking a lot about the bigger picture. Mother Nature is good like that. Life is that trail in the dark. You don’t always know where your next step will land, if it will be on solid ground, or when your journey will come to an end, if ever. There are times of joy and pain, delusion and confusion, fear and hope, and cursing the world with delight. But the most important part is to just keep taking that next step forward in the direction you want to be. One small (seemingly insignificant) step, stacked on another, on another, on another will always get you to where you want to be as long as you don’t wander off the trail and get lost in the woods along the way.