Writing for Grey's Lake
The trees wave, the clouds pass.
Virginia Woolf - The Waves
The wind blew with personal animus, a bitter, frightful gale, heavied with pebble snow and nothing to break its spite. I turned around to my dad, ten feet behind, his jacket flapping with fevered pitch and snow accumulating in the crevices of his pack. His look was worn but amused as he stopped to catch his breath on our climb up the sage hill. We certainly didn't expect the weather to be this bad, although our odds were never great from the start. Our break didn't last long. It was much too cold to stand still for long, and the car was still a couple miles away.
He called me out of the blue, a couple months before. I want to come out he said. We need to go backpacking this year. We had discussed the idea in passing many times, but a country of distance between us and life's tendency to fill free time meant we had continually pushed it off. But now, with the prime summer months past and winter already beginning to lay its hold across the state, he decided we couldn't wait any longer.
So after a week of poring over topo maps and trail reports we eventually settled on a figure eight loop in the rocky deserts of the San Rafael Swell, promising lower altitude and bearable winter temperatures. My dad scheduled his flights and for the next month I didn't think much more about it.
When he arrived, our first conversation was about the weather. A tropical storm off the Pacific coast was bringing heavy rain and potential flash floods to much of the southwest. Not the best news before heading to canyon country. So at a local bar over beers and blaring trivia, we went back to the maps. With all of Utah and Idaho inudated with rain, our only option was to look west.
The border of Utah and Nevada contains a morse code of dotted sky islands: rugged and isolated mountain ranges rising sharply from the surrounding desert floor. They offer vast views, with few trails and even fewer people. The higher altitude was a concern, and rain was still probable, but it seemed like our only shot if we still wanted to go backpacking over the weekend.
The next day we drove west, with the morning hours passing quickly before a brief stop in Wells, Nevada. The trailhead, ten miles or so out of town, sat at 8300 feet, with air crisp from the altitude, a dry, brittle inhale, but warm with the midday sun. The route we were to follow was a circuitous trail ending at a subalpine lake. Along the way it drops and climbs with manic intensity as it winds around the central rocky peaks.
Not long into the hike, we dropped lower and lower, until we reached the bottom of a shallow draw, a cloistered copse of fall yellow aspens and a gum-dry riverbed. It's an odd kind of aspen grove, with as many trees blown down as standing, testament to the intensity of weather we had yet to encounter. The ground was a checkerboard of curling yellow leaves on top of earthy down, a study of slow seasonal decay.
Aspens in wind, fluttering and rustling, make a sound like steady rain on a thin metal roof. But so far, the horizon was holding clear. Ahead of us stretched a long climb, up through fields of sage to distant bands of dark pine. As we gain elevation, the views unfurl to the north, three thousand feet below and stretching far beyond the town of Wells. The wind flows like a distant river with the sound of highway traffic on an overpass, outlining the contours of the aspen draws, hungry, unsettled, always in motion. From afar, the neighboring ridgeline looks naked and bare, the thousands of low sage blurring into a formless, uniform texture.
In this one glance of desert sky, I imagine you could learn as much about the nature of weather as one who goes to school for that kind of thing. To watch clouds move overhead, and feel the change in wind directly upon your face, is to begin to understand the intimacies of earth's breath. Abstracted screens of data can't compare to the raw physical reality of a place. Deep immersion, with direct contact and little to distract, is the only way to truly learn.
We topped out on a wide, low-swept saddle. Segregated among small rocky outcrops stood my favorite tree, the bristlecone pine. Bristlecones prefer harsh, high landscapes, and the cold temperature combined with poor soil ensures their growth is slow and gnarled. But this austerity is what allows them to have such a long lifespan, a thousand years and more, taking on twisted shapes that impart a unique sense of personality to each tree. It's a special experience to stand next to something so old and still living. To think of how much the world has changed while this single tree has continued to grow is to invite an unmooring of perspectives.
It's only out here, isolated and distant, that you realize how much of our lives are governed by ideas. Ideas of success, of progress, of expectations and desires for more. We give power to these ideas, and then the ideas become stories we tell ourselves, stories we pursue unrelentingly as they bind and twist our lives. But it's these trees, bitterly constrained but purely formed, that offer a reminder: you have the power to choose the forces that shape your life.
Once you leave popular outdoor areas, it's best to resign yourself to a bit of bushwhacking. When the terrain allows for it, bushwhacking is a kind of choose-your-own adventure game, a free-flowing movement following the natural dispositions of the landscape. We weren't so lucky. Down in the next valley, as the trail disappeared into knotted runs of sage and dense, shrubby aspen, it became a messy, slow moving battle. We didn't talk much, other than to coordinate on our route as we wove together and apart, looking for any semblance of game trail or old boot track that aligned with our map heading. But the weather was still good, and the day stretched out, an invitation to take our time and enjoy the surroundings.
After ascending one more sloping ridge, through tall-standing limber pine, ghostly pale alongside patches of snow, our destination, Grey's Lake, finally presented itself. The valley stretched out in magnificent color, a lava flow of fluorescent yellows and umber orange. Off to the west lay the desert floor, with distant mountain bands sandwiched between dark blue storm clouds and the raw white of day's end.
As daylight fell the wind picked up. We set our tents against a low strung tree line to block the east-borne gusts. But the wind was a temperamental mistress, blowing from two directions at once, for a moment furious, and sustained, and then suddenly subdued into a quiet whisper tickling through the leaves. It felt almost like a conversation with a force of character far beyond our capacity of recognition.
We sat and ate by the fire, a small pit at the base of a six-foot tombstone slab, reflecting heat outwards and preventing embers from flying astray. Our conversation was about work, gear, and youtube videos. We talked about everything, but mostly nothing. Stories of our shared past are hinted at, but lightly, like a hesitating waiter around a rude table. At first I hungered for more, some kind of deeper insight into my sense of identity, how my dad had influenced me, who he actually was. I was curious about aging, and on how to accept a narrowing of vision and opportunity. Ultimately, what I wanted was some flash of insight into how I should be living, from someone with the wisdom of thirty years my senior.
But then I realized that's not really what matters. That's just a longing for an imagined scenario, and what I had at that moment, sitting by the fire with my dad, was the thing. This feeling, of being in unfamiliar mountains, alone, together, surrounded by the richness of night, is what I'll remember. So we sat, quietly, while the fire burned.
At some point, once the fire ran low, we stepped out from under the trees. Above us, the Milky Way leaned in a narrow band, north to south, faint but unmistakably present. More stars revealed themselves by the minute, as the residual glow of the long-down sun faded from the horizon and our eyes acclimated to the thin of darkness.
How many times will you have the chance to stand under the Milky Way with someone you love? What about a full moon, or the first break of sunrise? We live as if there is an inexhaustible supply of memorable moments within our grasp, never stopping to consider that our number is counted. All we have promised is what is right in front of us, so it's worth enjoying before there's nothing left to come behind.
The morning light lay dense and flat, a weighted blanket of milky white subduing the valley to silence. There was no wind, no bird call. The trees stood still, dusky silhouettes like a leaf caught in frozen ice. The clouds were within touching distance, crowding down heavy onto the tree line just above camp. I walked a ways, but with the landscape hidden in fog and cloud it felt as if I was on a treadmill and nothing else was moving with me. A rain was falling, so soft and silent that only the fluttering of aspen leaves betray its arrival.
The way back was faster, our route finding clearer with the perspective of height and an afternoon of experience. For a moment we were back in a chest-high tangle of aspen, their leaves of wrinkled orange and burst brown moving from streaming clouds as heavy as wildfire smoke. But we got through, quicker, our eyes on the trail headed ever upwards.
At 9000 feet, in the flat-bottomed V between two ridges, a hard-balled snow began to pelt down, driven from the northwest. Our route continued even higher, onto exposed ground where the snow became sharp as beach sand blowing against the skin. The wind made it difficult to walk, our packs now like weighted ballasts spinning and threatening to topple. There was nowhere to hide from the driving force, and even when we turned away it beat furiously against our hoods.
Back at the first aspen grove, downed trees now a comforting windbreak, provided a moment of respite to brew some coffee before the final climb. For a moment things were mostly quiet, a light rustling up high as the wind struggled to penetrate the layers of wood and leaf. But then, with a palatable certainty, the temperature fell and the weather began to sharpen. Before we had the chance to drink half our cups, the snow was falling heavy, no longer thin pellets but wide, wet flakes that accumulated quickly on our downed bags.
We pulled our hoods tight and and stuffed our gloves hand warmers for the final climb back. The way up was a constant press of noise, the wind carrying stinging snow and cold in a hungry whirl, searching for any gap of exposed skin. Each step was a sideways lean, like a sailor drunk of too long out at sea to notice the cant of their figure.
My dad followed behind, hard of breath and slowing. We laughed, astonished and sobered by the world we found ourselves in. The miles seemed endless, and our stops became more frequent. The only thing to do was retreat inward, to a reserved mind, untroubled below the frenzied, external surface. Repeat to yourself: soon you'll be back, soon you'll be warm.
At the break of the ridge, the pines around us rocked like palms on a Florida coast, bending against updrafted snow. The flurries were thick enough to cut, but you could hardly hope to catch them with how fast they were blowing by. Another step forward. Another look back.
And then, with a feeling of inevitable relief, we were back at the car. Our plans for another day and another lake were abandoned as quickly as the memory of the warm sunshine from the day before had left us.
We head back down to town, hungry and looking for a place to warm up. Wells could only offer a furniture-less Dunkin Donuts, half truck stop, half casino, full rundown by any measure. Then we were on to Wendover for pizza and a beer, sharing pictures and talking of the hike as if was already a distant memory. How quickly the things we're doing crystallize into something we've done. In some ways timeless, and also, already forgotten.
What will I remember, looking back? What will stay alive in my mind? I doubt I'll recall any specific details or topics of conversation. No. All I'll remember is having done it together, and maybe, in the end, that's all that mattered anyways.