She attacked the mountain like she wanted to beat something out of it. She was relentless. Her sea-level lungs huffed and she sniffed back the runny snot that the cold morning air had given her. She ignored all warnings to be careful on icy patches. She scrambled over scree on all fours and scaled boulders in leaps. She wanted something. There was something that this mountain was going to give her and she wanted it. The parking lot… the entire city of Boulder fell away at our feet and got smaller and more distant by the minute. The slope was steep, but nothing compared to the impossible angle of the Flatirons jutting up just beyond our fingertips as we turned on the hairpin and continued climbing. Her 40-something body was firing like pistons – up, up, up. The other three of us were finally able stop her; finally able to make her acknowledge how truly perilous the next icy bit of trail was in our sneakers with a steep and rocky drop off waiting to punish the first misstep. She didn’t want to turn around. She argued. She tried a few shaky steps forward. Finally, she turned around, utterly defeated. She looked down. She grabbed an exposed tree root with one hand and a large rock with the other. She looked up at me. … She found it.

All at once her entire world shrunk down to the immediate vicinity of her body. With this step she’ll live. With that step she might not. All of the things she had been battling that seemed too big and too dangerous to overcome those past few weeks were very far away and very, very small indeed. She’d not need to worry about any of that if her next step faltered. That mountain was bigger, more immediate, more perilous… more magnificent, more powerful, more humbling. She wasn’t afraid. She was released. She welcomed the necessity to fully concentrate on every tiny movement of her body. She scanned the path below her, calculating, strategizing her next steps.

When we got back down onto flat, forgiving terrain, she said, “I love it here. If I lived here I’d do this all the time.”
I nodded and gave her a smile, “It’s good for the soul.”