The High Rocky Mountains
of Colorado, Wyoming,
Utah, Montana, Alberta,
and Saskatchewan.

 

 

 
… winter mountains enlarge the needle’s eye of our tiny brains and their labyrinthine trivialities. Thanks to the rude unity of winter’s fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, we feel our insignificance expand like a strange prestige – which makes being alive a kind of magic, easy as being not quite real. Small wonder that wherever terrain permits, primitives go around filling their habits with mountain gods.                                                           Reg Saner

 

 

Whenever we venture into the mountains, it is much like a small pilgrimage. The journey is not straight and easy - the roads and trails to the peaks wind, twist, switchback, and go up, up, and up. The air becomes thin as it becomes clear. Perspective is always the goal, to see out and far, at the same level with the distant peaks. But humility is always the realization we gain when going to the mountain top – now, and as it has always been. Perhaps it is only in seeing out and far that we can begin to see within again.

 

 

 
Vistas of distant ranges from the highest peaks can silence the monkey chatter in the most restless minds …

 

 

 The high Rockies are
 young, rocky, unstable,
 and wide, wide open …

 

 
I’m here now perhaps because as a Midwestern boy I’d have loved it but couldn’t. Had no idea. By just hiking here I amaze him.                                                                                                  Reg Saner

 

 
We admire wild places because their forests and mountains meet us as exactly what THEY meant to be, blessedly forlorn, among many strange ways in which the world keeps its promise. Reg Saner

 

 

 

 

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there.

There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread.

You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, an single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence.

Annie Dillard

 

 
Moraines are now meadows with willows and meandering streams, carved out between the peaks by glaciers during the last Ice Age …