Pink on the mountains as the sun falls behind the ridge and casts a shadow with a line inching upwards in gray as it sets. I climbed that peak and could picture myself on the top in a picture I lost of me sitting there smiling. Never saw so many people hiking up my favorite trail, hundreds. Masking up, waving. All of us trying to get away from each other. Getting frustrated and angry with those young, cocky guys charging down the trail not yielding to me on the uphill. All of them former versions of myself. Collecting water down at the same spot with my gravity bag and having to stop a few times to catch my breath on the walk back to camp. All those times I camped here at this same spot, sometimes in snow, with friends, with Dawn, with Lily, often on my own. How the wind can kick up and how quiet it gets, so far away and remote. The peace that comes with nature, it doesn’t think or do, it just is. And I can take a cue, and try that too.

Categories: prose, travel, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, identity, Memoir, pacific northwest, William Pearse writer