Writing for Grey's Lake
The trees wave, the clouds pass.
Virginia Woolf - The Waves
The wind blew with personal animus, a bitter gale heavied with pebble snow and nothing to break its spite. I turned around to see my dad stopped, ten feet behind, his jacket flapping with fevered pitch as snow accumulated in the crevices of his pack. His look was worn but amused as he caught his breath on this steep sage hill. We certainly didn't expect the weather to be this bad, although our odds were never great from the start. Our break was short. It was much too cold to stand still for long.
He called me out of the blue, a couple months earlier. 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 kept pushing it off. As we’ve aged, our paths have continued to diverge, common ground fading along with the frequency needed to maintain it. So now, with the prime summer months past and winter quickly on its way, we decided this was as good a chance as any.
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 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 inundated 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 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 8,300 feet, a brittle inhale from the altitude, yet warm in the midday sun. The route we were to follow was a circuitous trail around rocky peaks, dropping and climbing with manic intensity before reaching the subalpine Grey's Lake.
Not long into the hike, we dropped lower and lower until reaching the bottom of a shallow draw, a cloistered copse of aspens and a gum-dry riverbed. It's an odd kind of 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 gained elevation, the views unfurled to the north, three thousand feet below and stretching far beyond the town of Wells. The wind had a constant, unsettled motion, outlining the contours of the aspen draws with the sound of traffic on an overpass. From afar, the neighboring ridgeline looked bare, the thousands of low sage blurring into a formless, uniform texture.
In this one glance of land and 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 the clouds move overhead and feel the change in wind directly upon your face is to begin to understand the intimacies of the Earth.
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 temperatures combined with poor soil ensure 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, imagining how much the world has changed while this single tree has continued to grow.
It is 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.
Down in the next valley, as the trail disappeared into knotted runs of sage and dense, shrubby aspen, it became a slow-moving struggle. We didn’t talk much, other than to coordinate our route, weaving together and apart while looking for any semblance of game trail or old boot track along 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, we saw our destination, Grey’s Lake. The lake was nestled at the base of fractured cliff faces as the valley below stretched out in magnificent color, a lava flow of fluorescent yellows and umber orange. Further to the west lay the desert floor; beyond, distant mountain bands were sandwiched between dark blue storm clouds and the raw white of day’s end.
As daylight fell, the wind picked up. We tucked our tents against a low-strung tree line to block the easterly gusts. But the wind was temperamental, blowing from two directions at once, for a moment furious and sustained, and then dying down to a quiet whisper scarcely tickling the leaves.
We sat and ate by the fire, set in a small pit at the base of a six-foot tombstone slab that reflected heat outwards and prevented 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 were hinted at, but lightly, like a hesitating waiter around a rude table. At first I hungered for more, some kind of deeper insight into who my dad actually was and how he had influenced the man I had become. I was curious about how I should be living and aging, from someone with thirty years of wisdom beyond my own.
But then I realized that's not really what mattered. I was longing for an imagined scenario, while what I had at that moment, as we sat by the fire in unfamiliar mountains surrounded by the richness of night, was the closeness I was actually hoping for.
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. It's so easy to live as if there is an inexhaustible supply of memorable moments within our grasp. But under that wide, arcing sky, I wondered how many more chances I'd really have to experience such brilliance next to someone I loved.
I awoke to a dense morning light, 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 leaves caught frozen in ice. Low clouds were within touching distance, crowding down heavy onto the treeline just above camp. I walked a ways through fog and cloud, with the feeling of being on a treadmill and nothing else moving alongside me. A rain was falling, so soft and silent that only the stir of aspen leaves betrayed its presence.
Leaving camp, route finding came easier, with yesterday’s struggle and dead ends still fresh in our minds. For a moment we were back in a chest-high tangle of trees, their leaves of broken brown driven by streaming clouds as heavy as wildfire smoke. But we got through quicker, our eyes on the trail as it headed ever upwards.
After crossing another high ridgeline through skimming snow, we were back at the first aspen grove from the day before, the downed trees now a comforting windbreak. For a moment things were calm, with only a light rustling up high as the wind struggled to penetrate the layers of wood and leaf. We took the opportunity to brew some coffee for a little warmth and a break from our heavy packs. But then, with a palpable certainty, the temperature fell and the weather began to sharpen. Before we had the chance to finish our coffee, the snow was falling heavy, no longer thin pellets but wide, wet flakes that accumulated quickly on our downed bags.
We pulled up our hoods and stuffed our gloves with hand warmers for the final climb back. The way up was a constant press of noise, the wind a hungry whirl of stinging snow and cold, searching for any gap of exposed skin. Each step was a sideways lean, like a sailor drunk on too long out at sea to notice the cant of his figure.
My dad followed behind, short 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, untroubled mind. Repeat to yourself: soon you'll be back, soon you'll be warm.
As the slope began to curve level, the pines around us rocked like palms on a Florida coast. Visibility dropped as the world filled with white, the snow flurries thick enough to cut on a plate. Another step forward. Another look back.
And then, with a feeling of inevitable relief, we were to the car. Our plans for another night camping at another lake were abandoned as quickly as the memory of the previous day’s warm sunshine had left us.
We headed back down to town, hungry and looking for a place to warm up. Wells could only offer a furnitureless Dunkin Donuts, half truck stop, half casino, rundown by any measure. So we continued on to Wendover for pizza and a beer, sharing pictures and talking of the hike as if it 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.
In the end, all I’ll come to remember is that we did it together.
Thanks to Blake Engel for notes on the first draft of this.