The question was a fairly simple one, and yet I struggled to give my wife an answer.

It was early morning on a Monday, just past 8 am. I was in the middle of packing for an April snowshoe trip to Crater Lake and my wife wanted to know why I would want to spend six days alone in a place still buried under ten feet of snow. 

“Is it for the pictures,” she asked, “Or is there some other reason?”

Like I said: a simple question. The answer, however,  was much more complicated.

I was going for the pictures, of course. Weather permitting, I hoped to get some dark sky shots of the Milky Way rising  over Wizard Island. Also, Crater Lake sunrises could be spectacular this time of year. If got lucky with the light, and framed the shot just right, I might just come back with something worth posting to this website. But of course these were not the only reasons I wanted to go, and I think my wife and I both knew it.

To buy myself some time before answering,  I removed some things from the main compartment of my pack, and then slowly pushed them back down again. Rhonda waited patiently, her eyes now focussed on the idle movement of my hands. 

“No, tell me,” she said with a little more emphasis than before. “Why do you want to do this? Won’t you be cold, uncomfortable?”

Both of these things would be true, of course. Snow was forecast for the end of the week, and the daily high temperatures would likely hover just above freezing. I would also be alone. There was  little to no cellphone coverage within the park,  which meant that I would not be able to call her, nor she, me. We could still exchange short texts through my GPS device, but for all intents and purposes, I would be cut off from all meaningful communication.

To be clear, this was not at all the sort of adventure my wife would have enjoyed. Rhonda could appreciate a beautiful sunrise just as much as I could, but her idea of ‘roughing it’ was settling for a three star hotel instead of the four star property one block over. She did not like being too cold, or too hot (I sometimes thought of her as my silver-haired Goldilocks), and she also detested sleeping on the ground. Rhonda did not begrudge me my occasional forays into the wilderness, but she struggled to understand how I could find enjoyment under such harsh conditions.

How then to explain?

I have always enjoyed the outdoors. It is where I feel most at home. As a child I would go on short backpacking trips with my mother and my uncle, just a night or two at first, and then longer as I grew older. When I was 14, my mother took nine months off from her job to hike the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail. I was terribly jealous of her, and then overjoyed when my cousin and I were allowed to join her for a hundred mile stretch through Southwest Washington. It rained nearly the entire time we were on the trail, and the swarms of mosquitos were thicker than I had ever seen.  And yet,  despite these discomforts, those ten days are among the happiest memories from my youth.

Later, after I had learned to drive, I began taking backpacking trips with my friends, and then solo. In my early twenties I spent an entire week wandering alone through the high alpine meadows of Olympic National Park. I have never been a particularly religious person, but surrounded by such beauty I could not help but feel the presence of something greater than myself. This is where I was truly meant to be, I thought, and in that moment I  believed  this feeling would go on forever.

But then everything changed.

At some point, life happens to all of us, I suppose. And so it was with me. I began devoting more time to my job, working nights and weekends. I got married, bought a house, had children. Suddenly, there were bills to pay, projects to be completed, birthday parties to attend. Before I knew it, fifteen years had passed and I could no longer remember the last time I had ventured out into the forest. And that feeling of connecting with something greater? It was now just a distant memory.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I do not regret the choices I have made, not a single one of them. I love my wife and my children, and feel very lucky to have lived the life I have lived. I would not trade those years of struggle for anything.

And yet, as my children approached adulthood, and our financial situation eased, I began to feel as if something was missing from my life. We were living in Bend, Oregon by then, with half a dozen snow-capped peaks visible from nearly every place in town. I can very distinctly remember looking up at those mountains one day and thinking that I might like to climb one if I could, maybe even two.

This was a ridiculous thought, of course. Not only had I never climbed a mountain, but I was also fifty-two years old , fifty pounds overweight and got winded just walking to the bathroom. I drank too much, ate to much, and spent far too little time actually moving my body. And yet this crazy thought persisted.

Okay, so maybe I couldn’t climb a mountain, I realized. But I could go hiking, couldn’t I? 

Suddenly inspired,  I rummaged through the attic of our garage until I found my old backpack, along with some slightly mildewed camping gear. There were even some leftover freeze-dried meals, the oldest only a few years expired. 

Excited by the prospect of recapturing my long-forgotten youth, I immediately began planning a short backpacking trip. I asked my family if they would like to join me and (unsurprisingly) received three definite no’s and one very unenthusiastic maybe. Disappointed by this reaction, but not yet defeated, I wheedled and cajoled (and probably even used a bit of bribery) to turn that one maybe into a reluctant yes. Three weeks later, my son and I set out on what would become my favorite weekend outing in seventeen years of fatherhood.

On paper it was to be a relatively easy hike: three and a half miles in with a little over a thousand feet of elevation gain. My son’s pack weighed in at just under twenty pounds, mine nearly twice that. After only a half a mile I was already feeling the effects of my much too sedentary lifestyle. My knees ached, my feet hurt and my legs felt as if they might give out at any minute. But I persisted. 

By the time we reached our campsite I was utterly spent. It was all I could do to boil the water to rehydrate our  slightly expired camping meals. I expected my normally finicky eater of a son to complain about the food. I also expected him to be surly, as he often was at that age. But something magical had happened during the course of our hike. Instead of complaining, he smiled at me that day and then told me how happy he was to be there. “It’s so beautiful here,” he said. “And so quiet. I didn’t know it could be like this.”

The next day we took a short day hike up to a small, wooded lake, and when we returned we went for a refreshing swim in the larger lake next to our campsite. Afterwards, my son retrieved the book he had brought with him and for the next hour stood in the shallows of that lake soaking in the sun and reading his book.  I took a picture of him standing there, and when I look back at this picture now the thing I notice most about it is how at peace he looks. Later that evening we roasted marshmallows over our camp stove and made ourselves s’mores. My body still ached, but in that moment I was as happy as I have ever been. That was  ten years ago.

As of this writing I am sixty-two years old and growing older with each passing day. I do not know how much time I have left to me, nor do I know what percentage of that remaining time I will be in good health. What I do know is that I want to live these remaining years to the fullest extent possible. I want to feel as I did that day in Olympic National Park, or as I did on that trip with my son.  I want to feel the transcendence that comes when fully immersed in nature. I want to climb mountains, traverse glaciers, and hike down into steep canyons shaded by towering cliffs. I want to stand on the caldera rim, camera in hand as the sun slowly rises over a line of distant mountains.

I know that many of these things will be hard, some impossible, but with each passing year they will grow even more difficult. If I am going to do them, I need to do them now.

In the years since that first hike with my son I have lost fifty pounds, I have quit drinking and have made it a goal to get out into the wilderness as often as I possibly can. I know that many of the trips I have planned will be difficult, and I will often be cold and uncomfortable, but I am okay with that. 

Closing up my backpack, I took a deep breath and then sat down across from the woman I loved. Rhonda looked at me expectantly, waiting. She had asked why I wanted to go and I needed to give her an answer that would explain this obsession I had.  I wanted to share with her that feeling of transcendence, and perhaps this is why I had taken up photography. It was not just pretty pictures I was trying to capture, but something deeper, something I could show to others. So yes, I was going for the pictures but the true reason was much bigger than that, bigger than all of us really.

“I want to go because the mountains are where I feel most at peace ,” I told her, and as soon as I spoke these words, I felt the power of their truth. It was not just the silence I longed for, or the solitude, or even the immense beauty that I found when venturing into the wilderness. It wasn’t even the memory of those previous visits. Rather, it was all of these things  combined. Natural landscapes touched me in a way that no human built cityscape ever could. I felt at home in the wilderness. 

I don’t remember all that I said that day, but I do know that I spoke from the heart, and when I was done my wife thought for a moment, and then slowly nodded her head.

“It’s alright,” she said, and then laughed.  “I think I understand.”