photo credit: Anna Sees Photography
Colorado’s winter likes to dance with its spring long after most of us are ready for the song to end. The lingering snow, however, provides us with the extension of winter pleasures, such as spring skiing and muddy snowmen.
I had never been backcountry skiing before but was thrilled at the invitation to join my best friend for three days in the snow-sloped mountains south of home. My heart rose at the thought of exploring somewhere new, a mountain valley I had not yet experienced.
2022 was a hard year. Perhaps one of my hardest. My mountains had been within myself. I have felt the need this year to touch the physical. To give my senses space to frolic and the knowledge that in this grand big world…I am really quite small. I needed to know that I could still climb, pursue, and overcome within the unknown. That the unknown was not a consuming force to be feared but something to be offered upon the altar to the One who formed me.
It’s a delightful thing to know nothing about something with a friend who knows everything about it. There is a childlike joy in being a beginner. The nerves, the giddiness, the space to laugh and the freedom of mind that comes with not being the one in leadership. There is a nurturing of soul in arriving reliant.
I’ve been downhill skiing since I was seven. But those skis were heavy. These backcountry skis were light. Your “dragonfly wings,” my friend smiled. The boots were flexible, with space for warmth and movement. We wrestled and stretched the long, furry skins onto the bottoms of the skis—our passports to higher elevations.
Strapping our packs onto our backs, we shed as many layers as we could without turning into frozen statues. We were off! Sliding up the smooth snow-trail. Upward; inward.
We glided into a purposeful rhythm, swishing up the trail like salmon swimming upstream. Beginning as a group, we soon stretched apart—each finding his or her own page of the forest trail to quietly, musingly read and explore. The sound of my breath seemed almost to be coming from another. I was alone with my skis and skins, but the forest softly kept me company— curving and dancing about the edges of the trail. The sunlight dripped through in bright, full droplets, dappling the snow that spun up in tiny, fairy tornadoes at a single puff of alpine wind.
My heartbeat awoke and became warm within my chest. My lips spread into a smile.
There is something deeply comforting and healing about walking—or skiing—alone through the wilderness. No phone. No radio. Just you, yourself, your avalanche kit, the majesty of mountains, and the sound of your Creator’s step alongside your own. Your friends ahead of you on the trail, somewhere out of sight. Your friends behind you on the trail, somewhere out of hearing.
Alone. Yet not alone.
Isn’t that each of us?
I think we often feel that we must have constant distraction. We tell ourselves that we deserve this distraction of society, sound, constant movement and numbing sedation from our circumstances, from our past, from what looms ahead, from the pain, or the seemingly impossible. We forget that permanent distraction is a cheap trade for our permanent selves.
We’ve forgotten how to be alone with our hearts, how to hold out our perceived emptiness and allow it to be filled with the rushing of quiet life and the depth of God’s pursuing love.
We’ve forgotten that the trail we’re on isn’t one of confusion…but of hope.
We don’t know what’s around the bend. But we do know what’s at the end.
We’re not the first to skin up, and we won’t be the last to ski down.
We are accompanied, even as we glide in and out of sight.
It’s in those moments of solitude that we are offered a gift. The gift of evocative and lucid presence, of being startled back into the vision and design our Creator molded us for.
I pushed across the little bridge above the playful brook, bubbling into rainbowed icicles below me and braced for the last sloping hill. Laughter and the sound of children in snow beckoned. The cabin sat happily as I crested the hilltop, the meadow spread gracefully before me—a vein of pure white stretching up into the mountains.
Snow untouched. White. New. Perfectly placed. Perfectly purposed.
As we are.
“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I send it.” - Isaiah 55:10-11
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Beautiful writing.