Still following ghost trails
I’m in love with a place that is as transient as it is sublime. So transient, in fact, that I’ve never actually found it.
For the past few weeks, I have been engaging in EMDR sessions with my therapist. “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing” involves moving your eyes a specific way while you process traumatic memories. In some ways, the method mimics a dream state, prompting your brain to connect memories and emotions. I’ve started small with traumas that are relatively simple and close to the surface: The first, being hit from behind by the side-view mirror of a truck in October 2021, which has caused me to feel uneasy about riding my bike on roads. And the second, falling on my face and injuring my sternum in November 2022, which has made me a more fearful trail runner. Certainly, timidness while cycling and running is not my worst problem. EMDR sessions are intense even when dredging up shallow traumas. I’m still working up the courage to wade into the deep end.
At the beginning and end of each session, my therapist urges me to revisit a place that brings me peace and tranquility. When she asked me to visualize this place and describe it to her, I said without hesitation, “Happy River Gorge, Alaska, on the Iditarod Trail in 2018.” I expanded on the scene: “It was nighttime, late and very cold. Probably 20 below zero. The full moon was rising behind me. It cast my shadow in stunning detail onto the trail. When I hiked down onto the river ice, the entire gorge was drenched in silver light. The steep canyon walls, the distant white peaks, the glittering snow … it was so beautiful. I can’t even describe it. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”
My therapist seemed skeptical that a memory that involved being alone in a dark wilderness at 20 below zero could possibly be my tranquil place, but she let me roll with it. I blissfully absorbed this scene for several seconds before tumbling toward another bend in the Iditarod Trail. This time, I was alone on the sea ice outside Shaktoolik in 2015. The wind was blowing at hurricane force and I was intensely frightened.
I relayed the unwanted diversion to my therapist, who was probably thinking “Told you so” but only said, “That’s interesting.” From there, we continued to the scene of the truck accident, with its glass shards glittering on the pavement in the late afternoon sunlight. Come to think of it, the shattered glass reminds me of moonlit snow.
This is something I’ve been thinking about this week — how most of my favorite moments straddle a fine line between beauty and terror. As do my favorite places: Mountains, tundra, deserts, distant icy gorges in Alaska. I have been reading a book about grief, which brought up the problem of choosing a final resting place — a decision most of us think we’ve made but rarely voice it. I also haven’t voiced this decision, but reading a paragraph about final resting places sparked another sudden thought without hesitation: “On Lone Peak, with Dad.”
And then, in the second moment: “But I’m terrified of Lone Peak.”
Beat and I spent much of the past week in the shadow of Lone Peak, a dramatic spire in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. We were visiting my mom and sister for Thanksgiving. Free time was limited by the holiday and work. A couple of storms created volatile snow conditions in the mountains. So we stuck to the “front country” for our outings. I went for a few blissfully simple trail runs (rocks are few and far between in Wasatch foothills; the smooth trails are quite luxurious.) Beat, on the other hand, only likes to march up and down strenuously steep slopes. So we frequently ended up on a soaring ridge that eventually leads to Lone Peak. Unless you have at least 12 hours, an ice ax and crampons, an avalanche beacon, a few climbing skills, and a lot of mountaineering gumption, Lone Peak is not accessible in the winter. But the trail also leads to a 9,300-foot hump with incredible views, Enniss Peak.
This is the view from Enniss Peak, gazing upon His Majesty, Lone Peak — so close and yet so far away. Beat climbed to the summit on Tuesday night and urged me to go there before my work shift on Wednesday. I traced Beat’s postholes up 4,500 feet of altitude. It was a bluebird morning and I reached the summit in just under 3 hours — my best time is 2:03, but then again, autumn heat and dry dirt make for an entirely different experience. I waved hello to my dad, whose ashes we scattered from that jagged high point just over a year ago.
Black Friday brought several more inches of powder to obscure the trail Beat and I so dutifully packed earlier in the week. We met up with friends Danni and Raj for old-fashioned slogging up the relentlessly steep route. After two hours we only made it to the paraglider launch site, a mere 2,500 feet up the trail. It felt like an entirely different mountain, and I was worked.
Beat convinced me to return on Saturday, when I was already exhausted by the machinations of the week and dreading the Sunday drive back to Colorado. We knew our previously broken trail only ascended half of the distance to the summit. Beyond there, the snow was likely to be feet deep and untracked. Stubborn clouds obscured the sun. A brisk wind blew from the north. Just past the paraglider launch site, we encountered two bow hunters who were tending a smoky fire that they started right in the middle of the trail. They told us they needed the warmth to fight this dangerous chill. We told them we were aiming for Enniss Peak and they shook their heads.
“There are big drifts, lots of wind,” one said in a warning tone.
After that, we were breaking fresh tracks in the biting wind. I hadn’t brought enough layers and continuously flexed my fingers and toes to keep the blood flowing. A thick fog streamed across the mountain. It moved with the wind — sometimes so opaque that I couldn’t see Beat even though he was only a few yards ahead. The featureless white-on-white chaos made me feel like I was spinning in outer space. Then, seconds later, sunlight would almost break through the clouds, enough to reveal a stark contrast of light and shadow. The wind was so loud that I couldn’t hear Beat even when we stood right next to each other.
“Isn’t this awesome?” Beat shouted.
My initial thought was, “This is just boring old Enniss Peak.”
And then, “But this time, it’s trying to kill us.”
And then, with a rush of exhilaration from acknowledging that I am a soft human body braced against a powerful force, “It really is beautiful like this. Maybe the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”
In 2008, I wrote this passage about the Iditarod Trail for my book, "Ghost Trails:"
The trail was soft and deep now, but eventually, the cold would sink in. The trail would set up and harden, only to be blanketed by fresh layers of snow. The racing dog teams would come through and stamp it out again, followed by recreational snowmobiles tracking it out until the warm air of spring left the surface rotten and unusable. Then summer would take the rest of the snowpack with it, leaving only open tundra and narrow passages through the alder where the trail wound through a canyon below Rainy Pass. In a few short months, there would be no sign of the winter trail or anybody who followed it. The Iditarod Trail was a ghost itself. But that night, beneath the moonless twilight of the Northern Lights, the Iditarod Trail was more of a ghost than any trail I had followed before. Not in the way it frightened me or battered me, but in the way it haunted me, even as I lay beside it like it was some distant part of my past and an inevitable part of my future.
These ghost trails still haunt me — trails I have followed many times to many summits of beauty and terror, and yet I’ve never found their end. During my most recent EMDR session, I described the incredible sensation of aliveness I felt on Enniss Peak — along a trail I hiked four times in a single week only to find a wildly different experience every time. I visualized the place I thought I was describing, only to skip to a faded moment nearly two years past. As this moment returned to sharpness, I saw in the blowing snow my friend Betsy, braced against a 75-mph ground blizzard near Mitchell Lake in January 2022. I toppled over into a mound of snow, unable to hold myself against the wind. When I scrambled to my feet, I saw she was grinning in spite of the blast that just hit us like a freight train.
“That was incredible,” she shouted. I felt frightened, yet she was in awe. She told me she had never experienced such raw power — nature’s reminder about how small and fragile life really is.
In a text exchange, I mentioned this memory to her. “I was in the throes of grief about my father and you helped carry me through a profound disorientation,” I wrote. “Thank you. That was a great day.”
Betsy told me she had also revisited that day a few times this week. She is at home recovering from brain surgery. Through an exhausting and intense procedure, doctors were only able to remove a small percentage of the tumor. Now she must wait another week to recover before she learns about the next steps in her treatment, which will doubtlessly also be intense and exhausting.
“I remember feeling safe with you that day,” she wrote. “For me, the power of the wind that day was thrilling and not fearful. I am wondering if that is my main emotion for now … I’m too in awe by the sheer power of it all.”
I remembered what Besty told me on that day in January 2022, after we had retreated into the relative protection of the forest. I breathed a long exhalation of relief, the first release of all of the tension in my body that had been building for months … six months, in fact. We brushed the spindrift off our coats, we hugged, and I cried.
“Sometimes your grief surrounds you, and sometimes you disappear into it, but you just have to keep going,” she told me.
That truth applies to so many aspects of life. Grief. Illness. Loss. Unrelenting demands. Ghost trails with no end. The fight to stay alive.
And in this, I thought of a Rilke poem, one I think Betsy would also love: “Go to the Limits of Your Longing:”
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
I'm sure it's partly within my own mind, but I'm repeatedly wanting to define this writing as your best. Well it certainly is One of your best. My emotions are wakened. Seeing the mountain with the sheer cliffs is beautiful. However because of you it also dark and brooding. Thanks for what you write. You are a World Class writer of Fact and Emotion which is an overlooked portion of Fact.
I love your the beauty and terror descriptions. Somehow they often are intertwined together. The entire read kept making me recall how some people describe God with both terror and beauty as they worship Him. I thought the comparison was interesting, maybe terror and beauty is part of all worship (something we revere and are devoted to). Not speaking in the religious sense, but more like David Foster Wallace's (an atheist) description of how we all worship in his "This is Water" speech.
Beautiful descriptions an post as always.