Maroon Bells Four Pass Loop 2015

Maroon Bells - Four Pass Loop

August 20, 2015

I'm writing this on Marli's back, sitting on top of a fallen tree, looking out over the campsite.  Between the spruce, fir, and pine trees I have a panorama view of Snowmass Lake surrounded by giant grey peaks of loose rock and sporadic vegetation.  The peace and quiet is welcome and needed.  The creek, the wind, the occasional clank of a neighboring camper's ultralight cooking pans.  It soothes my mercurial mind and leaves it able to reflect and absorb the simplicity and grandeur of this beauty.

 Are we the only animal that recognizes beauty?  Does the mountain goat perched steadily on a cliffside look out over its domain and exhale a sigh of reverence for the vast expanse of untouched rock and tree that is home?  Or is she content with the instinctual drive to feed and reproduce on the extreme terrain on which she was born?  The fiery sunsets go unnoticed.  The first rays of light just the signal of another day to survive.  If so, why are we different?  Why do still blue lakes inspire poetry?  Why do we push and challenge ourselves to find the most remote, untouched pockets of sacred wildness to just sit and be?  Do we sense that this is where we came from?  That our souls need it to survive?  To center and release ourselves from the pressures of being something other than wild?  And maybe that's why we recognize it as beautiful, because it exists despite the world we've created around us.  It doesn't need us to acknowledge the beauty because it doesn't need us at all.  And that is beautiful.

August 21, 2015
Hiked from Snowmass Lake, over Trail Rider Pass, to just below Frigid-Air Pass.  Camped near the base of a glorious cascading waterfall with a perfect view.

 No matter where you are in the world, if you can see the bright stars in the sky, it can make you feel something.  Whether you're sick, sad, cruel, or insignificant, you feel.  I may be all of those things at this moment, in the loneliest, happiest, most maddening way.  But at least I can feel.  I feel something wondrous and erotic and sanctimoniously independent when I look at those stars.