Only Good Choices: The Wind River High Route

Boulder
July 20^th

(This is the third and final installment of Andrew’s summer 2025 adventure series. If you’re just joining, be sure to check out Sierra Solstice Snowstorm Surprise and Sparkling Trad Scrambles.)

After nearly two weeks alone in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, I stumbled out of the wilderness and flagged down a passing truck. My legs were discolored with deep gashes and bruises. My shorts were so tattered I risked being relegated to a sex offender registry. My shirt was stained with blood that wasn’t mine, and macaroni and cheese that was.

“Only good choices,” I thought.

I had just spent 11 days on the Wind River High Route. The first eight days were the hardest backpacking trip of my life. I hiked 100-plus miles across glaciers and ridges, almost all off-trail, almost all above 10,000 feet, scrambling over passes, staring at maps, scrimping on food. My backpack was the heaviest it’d ever been. I carried it over the roughest terrain I’d ever hiked. My shoes were brand-new at the start and sandals after a week. I didn’t see other people for days at a time. I flavored my coffee with spruce tips and fried fresh trout on titanium. The wildflowers and butterflies came in every color I’d ever seen; the granite, in some I hadn’t.

I’ve wanted to hike it for years. A few months ago S. told me he was doing a math thing in Jackson Hole and did I want to climb with him afterwards in the Tetons? If I was going to be in Wyoming anyway, well, why not catch two fish with one fly? I didn’t intend to go on a big adventure road trip this summer, but that’s how things have worked out: a month of living in my car running in Tahoe, climbing in Bishop and the Tetons, hiking in the Winds, and now, writing from B.’s porch in the shadow of the Flatirons as the undergrads party down the street. Only good choices.

The High Route. The main reason I wanted to hike it was intimacy.

I’ve been trying to do more off-trail hiking the last few years, for explicitly that reason. Hiking on a trail my default is to go as fast as possible. The environment disappears and I might as well be doing laps on the track. Nature? What nature?? It’s not that I don’t want the athletic experience; I do; what I want is the synthesis of movement and environment. I don’t want to be sitting still among the wildflowers; I also don’t want to be on a treadmill. I want intimacy with my body and intimacy with nature, together. Both/and.

The Winds! No one knows about them. (Maybe I need to kill you now?) They’re east of the Tetons, southeast of Yellowstone, and overshadowed by both. They look like lost cousins of Patagonian peaks, but from the highways all you see are the Great Plains, bumpier. They’re not a National Park or a National Anything. From the highway the trailheads are 15 miles back on beat-up forest roads; even from the trailheads, it’s a solid day and a half of hiking before rock and snow. But once you get there, every valley is a Yosemite! El Caps as far as the eye can see! An El Dorado of Half Domes! Silver granite, turquoise lakes, bright-white glaciers, fuzzy elk, and golden trout.

Andrew Skurka, the legendary backpacker, put together the Wind River High Route a decade ago. It meanders northwest along the crest, starting at the southernmost 13’er and ending at the northernmost, criss-crossing the Continental Divide, peak into basin upto pass into basin, repeat. For $25 you get a digital download of 13 11x17 USGS topos (very lightly annotated), a written guide to the route (terse), and datasheets from when he fastpacked it in 2015. His hike clocked in at 100 miles, with 60,000 feet of vertical change.

Short segments of the route were on-trail. Most of it was off. Sometimes I got lucky and got to walk across hard-packed grassy tundra. Other times the tundra was wet and spongy. It’s alpine, so navigation is mostly point-and-shoot. Only once did I get lost, only once did I pull out my compass, and only once—these were three coincident events—did I have to navigate off-trail through a forest. There were two upsides: needless climbing and a herd of elk.

There were steep slabs of granite. They looked scary, but with a decade of experience moving on rock and total faith in friction between rubber and granite, that’s where I felt safest. There was endless talus. Big blocks of granite, sloppily arranged, a stonemason’s nightmare. Spiderwebs strung between every block, surveilled by huge black spiders. Talus looks friendlier than slab but in fact is way worse. You have to think about every single step. Nothing is ever flat. Stuff is loose, unpredictably. The rocks might shift and you might break an ankle. Every step is a dice roll. d6? d20? You don’t even know that. For the first eight days, every time I had to travel across talus I got more and more anxious.

Snowfields were scarier. They look friendly. I ski on those! Children sled on those! But no. Not friendly. They’re cliffs in disguise. Slip once and slide hundreds of feet. Accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second times the sine, straight into a trampoline of jagged rocks. If it’s too icy, you’ll slide. If it’s too slushy, you’ll slide. If the snow is just right in one part, that doesn’t mean it won’t turn to ice in ten feet.

Sometimes the snowfields terminated in icy lakes. I thought about what I’d do if I slid. Would I be able to get my backpack off in the icy water? Would I be able to swim out in the shock? What would I do next, soaked in ice water, with nothing other than shorts and shoes and a t-shirt, miles from the nearest trail?

It was a more pleasant scenario to think about than what would happen if I slid into talus.

The blood on my shirt was mostly because I forgot to sharpen my knife before I left. Sorry, trout. But there was plenty of my own blood elsewhere. Think of how beat-up and bruised your body gets after doing a hard climb. Multiply that by ten hours a day by eleven days. Scars and scabs everywhere. The balls of my ankles were raw the entire time. All four (sides) of them I managed to scrape every day. I contemplated cutting up my extra pair of socks and tying them into ankle guards. Long linear rips tore down both buttcheeks of my shorts. I patched them with duct tape. On the third day I ripped off almost all the skin from the back of my right calf. Don’t ask how it happened; this is a family email and it was possibly the single scariest thing that’s ever happened to me in the mountains. On my last night I fainted. The entire outside of my left hip is covered in a psychedelic blue bruise sprinkled with scabs from where I hit the rocks. Only the second time I’ve ever fainted, under almost the exact same circumstances. The first time it happened, ER doctor cousin T. said, “Oh yeah, fainting while peeing, totally normal, dehydration and altitude and weed, vagus nerve parasympathetic blah blah blah, happens all the time.”

Democracy in Wyoming. I started my hike on July 4th in Lander. I left late ‘cause I wanted to see the parade.

It started with a bunch of floats sponsored by veterans organizations driving old military vehicles. Quickly it got more complex. There were multiple floats sponsored by Native American tribes. Some of them were dancing and singing and beating drums down the street, in traditional clothing. “We’re part of the American project, too.” There was a float from a pro-life birthing center and a float from the local chapter of PFLAG. One float was just two old ladies walking down the street, one with a sign reading, “DEFEND DEMOCRACY” and the other, “RULE OF LAW.” That was the most political any of the floats got. Lots of flatbeds hauled by trucks; lots of old school busses. All the floats were throwing candy at the crowds; kids were running out into the street to pick it up. Floats sponsored by high-fertility families: Grandma and Grandpa and their many kids and grandkids. People driving their classic cars. Flatbed trailers each for the Lander Valley High classes of ‘85, ‘05 (yay), and ‘15. (Where’s ‘95’s school spirit?) NOLS had an old school bus, with a bunch of staffers on top: the one in the front in a whitewater kayak, others dangling off the side in climbing harnesses, the person in the back with a fly rod casting a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup at all the cheering kids. A small aircraft being towed by a tug from the local airport. Federal agencies—the USFS, the BLM, the BIA. Church groups. A float that was a replica of an old-timey Western saloon—a piano player, a dressed-up bartender, and a whore (!) sitting on a barrel wearing a skimpy dress and black lingerie. (That float was sponsored by the civic association of South Pass City, a mining-town-turned-historic-site in the mountains an hour away.) An entire Scottish band, kilts and bagpipes and drummers, made up of teenagers. Various youth sports teams. An old folks’ home. The Special Olympics. An old pickup truck driving in reverse—except, no, when it passed, the driver was facing forwards—the whole interior of the cab had been flipped around. And finally: the fire department spraying everyone down at one end of Main Street, and then driving down with lights and sirens to end the parade

The night before I hung out at the Lander Bar: a brewery, a grill, and a marginally fancier restaurant, spread across two brick buildings connected by a huge picnic-table-populated patio, taking up half a block on Main Street. A band was playing on a small covered stage. There were outdoorsy NOLS-instructor types (NOLS is headquartered in Lander); there were tourists who haven’t yet discovered Ozempic; there were rural Wyoming types with tattoos and drawls who probably don’t vote in the same primaries as the NOLS instructors; there were families with kids. Everyone comes to the Lander Bar!!! I talked with some cool CDT hikers and with a Catholic drywall installer holding his one-year-old son, Caspian (after the C.S. Lewis character). This should be our polity. Obama’s Beer Summit, successfully executed. Optimism for the semiquincentennial.

One night a porcupine came into my tent. New tent, fantastic purchase, totally in love, but it’s more of a tarp with an open bottom. When I shined my headlamp at him, three feet from my face, he was chewing the plastic frame of my backpack. He gave me a sheepish look and waddled out. Five minutes later he was back. After a few more cycles of this I realized I needed to be an Old West sheriff and run him out of town. We went for a walk, with me shining my headlamp at him, him waddling ten feet ahead, until we were a quarter mile away. That was 11 pm. It kept him away until 3 am. Then we had to go for another walk. That was enough to make it to sunrise.

“Are you Andrew?,” one of the boys asked as I was having coffee outside my tent, 6:30 in the morning. It was my third-to-last day on the trail, I’d seen almost no one, and I’d assumed that this early in the season I was the only person hiking the High Route. I was sipping on Trader Joe’s instant and admiring the dawn light on Knife Point Glacier. But no, this threesome had apparently been just a few hours behind me the entire previous week. We ended up flipper-floppering the last few days: they woke up before me and hiked past me as I was getting up; I hiked later than them and set up camp beyond them.

Back in Lander we met up for a two-hour dinner to discuss our experiences. I had assumed they were in their early 20s, but nope, two of them had just graduated high school, and the third had just finished his first year at UVA. They were from the Shenandoah Valley and the High Route was the center of a month-long roadtrip out west. None of them had ever done a backpacking trip longer than a long weekend—let alone an off-trail, technical, alpine, eleven-day through-hike. I was deeply impressed. They had all seemed perfectly competent when we interacted on the trail—inexperienced, but capable—and it sounds like they had a rougher time than me, coming close to bailing multiple times and basically running out of food, but they made it. What was I doing when I was 18? Equally ill-planned bike tours, I guess. (But there were always gas stations and debit cards and payphones to make up for my bad decisions.)

We all summited Wind River Peak on our third day. Wind River Peak (13.2K’) is the spiritual start of the High Route—the route is bookended and midpointed by 13’ers—though because of the Winds’ isolation, it was 20 miles in. When I summited I met a depressed NOLS EMT instructor on his day off (who had summited from a much closer trailhead). He was still there when I left; apparently, when the boys summited a few hours later, he was still there, and he told them about me. A few days later I ran into some llamapacking fly fishers; the boys ran into them a few hours later. They were tracking me, but I had no idea they existed.

Hiking off-trail is slow. Navigation takes time. (Obviously I had no GPS or nav technology on the trail… good gracious.) Even when you know where you’re going, the terrain, most likely, isn’t flat walkable ground. How do you actually move? How do you move over rough talus, spongy tundra, steep snowfield? How do you plan ahead on multiple scales: how do I move over the next ten feet, and how does that relate to how I want to move over the next quarter mile, and how does that relate to where I want to end up at dinner time? Half a mile per hour is a good clip. You pay more attention to the landscape, not only because you’re moving more slowly, but because you have to negotiate with the landscape and figure out how it’s going to let you move through it. That’s intimacy. You have to be the one to submit to the landscape, rather than the landscape submitting to saws and mattocks.

I like the ambiguity. When you’re on trail, there’s certainty. Off-trail, there’s not. Trails tell you how to get from point A to point B; when you’re off-trail, you have to figure that out yourself. Are you doing it the right way? The best way? Wrong question! I like the intuition and improvisation; I like the discovery and discernment.

I like the truer conception of authority that hiking off-trail reveals. On-trail, you’re following some human’s instructions. Off-trail, you’re not. That doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. You can’t do whatever you want. You’re subject, as always, to nature’s authority. You can’t defy gravity (literally or figuratively). You’re constrained by authority; it’s just that you’re not constrained by human authority.

The personalities I’ve clashed with the last few years have become predictable: the people obsessed with optimizing and always being #1 Best (this cafe has 4.97 stars on Yelp, but this cafe has 4.98 stars!); the rule-followers obsessed with getting the Right Answer (and avoiding the Wrong Answer); the people who need to know everything beforehand and can’t leave anything to chance or uncertainty (“I’m a Planner!”). They’re horrified they might do something wrong, or do something that’s not the Best. These are not people who would like hiking off-trail. They’re paralyzed when they don’t have a boss or a dad to tell them what to do.

(The fact that I have let these personalities drive me so crazy shows my own weaknesses.)

I think about people with totalitarian mindsets who see authority as vested in human beings (i.e., themselves, personally) and not subject to anything higher. Cops, math teachers, movie portrayals of Catholic nuns. Do what I say, and don’t talk back! Follow the trail, and don’t question where it’s going! I think about Ithaca, and about growing up with hippies who rejected every type of authority. Follow your bliss! Even if it leads straight over the edge! They were wrong, too. It’s not authority that’s bad; it’s false authority. True authority exists, but it’s not human. How do we figure out how to follow it? How do we figure out what it wants from us?

On the ninth day, shortly before 1 pm, I arrived at a saddle overlooking a glacial valley.

The entire trip had been full of ups and downs, literally and figuratively, but the previous day had, figuratively, been mostly downs. I crossed a pass in the morning and the evening; the basin between had been a brutal slog across jagged rocks and steep snowfields. No plants or animals; just rock, snow, and ice. Nothing flat. Snowfields too steep to cross. I had to detour hundreds of feet above them and gingerly footwork across wet slabby cliffs. Slow and stressful. Finally I came to the pass out of the basin—shorter and less steep than I thought! hooray!—and summited it—only to see that I had misread the map and there was yet another lake to get around. Three more hours. Another haunted-corn-maze of slabs and snowfields and talus. Hate talus. The actual pass was awful. Halfway up I got hit by a storm. (I took shelter under a nearby slab for an hour.) I cleared the pass, far later than I expected to, and spent the night a couple hundred feet below, feeling the rocks through the thin foam of my sleeping pad.

This day, the ninth day of my trek, was through what Skurka described as “the finest” landscape of the route. High standard of comparison. I wanted to savor it and go slow, but I was stressed about running out of time and food. Standing at the saddle, I looked out. Helen Glacier was at the head of the valley, Blaurock Pass to its right, and below both a turquoise meltwater stream branching between gravel and tundra. “You’ll think you were in the Brooks Range of Alaska!,” was Skurka’s description.

I thought for a few moments. Then I made a choice.

I descended into the valley. The milky meltstream was wide and shallow; barefoot, I sank in the silt halfway to my knees. I walked across a broad flat field, grassy and covered in a color wheel of wildflowers. A “Sound of Music setting,” as Skurka annotated it on the map. Butterflies danced through the air.

After an hour I came to the base of the pass. 2,000 feet of climbing above me. Then I felt it.

“HERE WE GOOOOOOO!!!”

For the next eight hours, I never sat down. I only took a few breaks, very short, and I stayed standing. Otherwise I never stopped moving.

Skurka describes the climb to the pass as 1,000 feet of steep tundra followed by 1,000 feet of talus. That sounds right. I don’t remember most of the tundra. I charged up it. There wasn’t an obvious route up, and there wasn’t an obvious route not up. Skurka’s terse notes, and the low-resolution topographic map, implied a choose-your-own-adventure: go up, whichever route you like, it’ll all go. Nothing too steep; nothing too trivial. Just go up!

I hit the rocks. The rocks. Oh my gosh, I’ve never seen more beautiful rocks. Granite in every color: gray, green, pink, orange, red, white. It glittered. Mica in every square millimeter. It was like my and S.’s descent of Grand Teton, but during the day, and a million times better. Quartz crystals. Quartz veins. Quartz BLOCKS!!! The quartz wasn’t just clear; it was tinted all the same colors as the granite. Occasionally there were FOSSILS. What was sedimentary rock doing here? What sort of rock party is this? There was GOLD, or at least, rocks of shimmering gold. There were stretches where the rocks were iridescent. Each rock an abalone shell. I took some pictures, but even in the moment I knew I couldn’t capture what I could see.

Wyoming! Wyoming! Who knew?!?

The bowl up to the pass undulated. “False summit after false summit” would be one description, but that doesn’t feel fair, because that has negative valence, and this was fun. It always looked like I was about to get to a summit. Almost done with this challenge—and as soon as I finish it, I’ll get another! I was never sure if I was going in the right direction, because I could rarely see the actual summit, but I trusted things would work out. Besides, I was having fun!

At one point, crawling up talus, I paused. The next ten feet—what should I do? Left? Right? Center? Unclear. They all looked pretty good. Neither in the macro sense (getting up to the pass) nor the micro sense (the next dozen feet) did there seem to be an obvious choice. Gritty granite pressed against my palms. Hmm. “Only good choices,” I thought.

I scrambled right. The rocks were beautiful and solid. I moved fluidly up them, feeling them through the thin soles of my minimalist shoes.

“Only good choices!!!”

That became my mantra for the rest of the trip. Only good choices! I like it. It can be a description of future states: an expression of optimism despite uncertainty. It can be a command to our present selves: an imperative for proper behavior.

Only good choices.

I climbed a short steep use trail to a false summit. There were clusters of purple flowers on one side and yellow flowers on the other; the sun was glinting through clouds to my upper-left, diffracting into diagonal rays across my visual field. Stairway to heaven. Like I was in Tibet, ascending to the monastery. “Stop it!!!!,” I laughed. “You’re overdoing it! This is too much! It’s a cliché!!!”

On the side of the bowl, the dark granite cliffs were criss-crossed with veins of lighter rock. Various thicknesses, various directions, intersecting in a random lattice. If I stared I could see them swirl and recombine, forming petroglyphs hundreds of feet tall.

I looked out at the mountains. “Are you Gannett Peak? Is that who you are??” Later, when I realized I had misidentified Wyoming’s highest peak, with its distinctive horizontal snowfield below the summit: “Oh, you’re Gannett Peak!!!” Back to the original suspect: “Then who are you??”

I got lost in time. It would feel like an eternity had passed, I’d look at my watch, and only five minutes would have gone by. In reality the full climb took two and a half hours. That’s what I would have expected it to take, but it felt simultaneously like it passed in an instant and that I got to enjoy it forever.

Eventually I realized I had overshot the pass and was several hundred vertical feet above it, up to the side. Too focused on the fun! I was disappointed: I wanted to keep going up!

Scrambling back down to the pass I passed a snowfield, half-melted. The rocks underneath were wet and dirty and covered with what looked like matted-down cobwebs. A layer of white lint. I laughed. What a mess.

The summit itself was a bomb scene. None of the beautiful granite from the climb. The rocks were sandstone, fractured, mostly orange and beige, stained with black everywhere, as if they had been burnt. It looked like a forest fire had come through. Or an explosion. In another context it might have been a frightening visual (genuinely, I can’t understate how much it looked like the geological equivalent of a forest fire aftermath), but I just laughed. Five minutes ago we were in a glittering world of golden rocks, and now we’re in a post-apocalyptic nightmare? Hah. Okay then, if that’s what you want!

I stayed at the pass a few minutes. It was 5 pm. I wandered across the saddle, staring excitedly and intensely at the valley on one side, then at the valley on the other side, then at each of the two ridges.

“I want to keep going up!!!,” I said, looking at the ridges. Piles of talus each. “I want to go up you! But I have to go down. Only good choices.”

Descending off the saddle, the charred bomb-scene-forest-fire color scheme of the summit rocks faded into a drab brown-and-olive-green palette. World War II movie. Weird. Not the aesthetics I was expecting, but it’s not up to me. Gotta like the lichen!

Skurka’s topo was as terse for the descent as for the ascent. Just go down, any route will work. It was steep and loose, but I didn’t care. I felt stable! The previous morning’s descent from Douglas Pass had been a nightmare of steep, loose, chossy talus. I had slid and fallen multiple times. A literal bloodbath for my legs. This was steep and loose, too, but I felt great! Only good choices!

There was a use trail, but I tried to avoid it. “I don’t want dirt! I want rocks! I want rocks!” Total turnaround from the previous eight days. Now I was actively trying to move on talus.

The descent was so steep it looked like I was always about to go off a cliff. But I trusted Skurka’s description that it would work out. I thought of the word I’ve heard the kids use over the last year when they’re trying to convince each other of a tricky approach to a proof: “Trust! Trust!”

(Alternatively I suppose it could be: “Faith! Faith!”)

It always worked out! There was always a path. At one point I got funneled into a narrow chute with a snowfield that seemed like it was going to cliff out into a waterfall. “Only good choices?,” I asked, skeptically. I hopped up onto the ridge on one side. OK, this is much better. But, from the looks of it, the chute would have worked out as well!

I kept descending. All of a sudden it came into view: the valley! The moraine! The valley we were descending to was at the very end of the “Glacier Trail,” a 25-mile trail that ends at the terminal moraine of Dinwoody Glacier. It’s the approach people take when they climb Gannett Peak. The High Route tangents the terminus of the Glacier Trail, right where it splinters into a cobweb of use trails through the moraine. I could see the bottom of the valley; I could see the moraine and the meltwater creek. I couldn’t see how to get there—it looked like I’d be going off a cliff—and that it’d be hours away—but I could see it. It looked like a photo from Machu Picchu, with impossibly steep mountains flanking a valley. I didn’t care how long it would take me to get down! I was having so much fun! No rush!

My body felt amazing. On the entire climb and descent, it felt—not invisible, exactly, nor all-powerful—but in that direction. For the previous eight days I had been brutalized by the trail: my knees and ankles were aching; my muscles were sore and weak from fatigue and famine. No more. Now it felt like I was exerting no more physical effort than walking to the store. I felt fast, not sluggish. It was the easiest thing in the world. It was like I had been doing yoga regularly; I was tapering off an intense training regimen; I was in absolute peak physical fitness. My movement was fluid and graceful and strong; it was effortless. Scrambling 2,000 feet of talus to a 13,000-foot pass with a heavy backpack—this is the absolute most fun thing in the world that I could be doing right now. It’s not even the slightest bit hard and is just pure fun.

To my left I saw what was marked on the map as Heap Steep Glacier. I felt conflicted about the name: the rhyme is nice, it’s pretty steep, but I can also imagine the linguistic caricature. The glacier itself I was unconflictedly sad about. It was down to bare ice—summer having barely begun—naked and dying, without its insulating layers—clinging to the side of a bowl. Like all the glaciers I saw in the Winds, it was simultaneously huge and also visibly shrunken. Huge and intimidating, retreating up behind a huger mess of hastily-abandoned boulders.

I kept descending. I did a short section of easy-fifth-class downclimbing. I could have gotten around it, but it was fun. The talus turned to tundra. By 8 pm I had made it to the base of the pass. There were nice campsites. But I wanted to keep going. I didn’t want to stop moving.

I started rock-hopping up the glacial debris. I jumped from boulder to boulder. I meandered up the moraine towards Skurka’s next waypoint. The meltwater creek was rushing nearby. I was pretty certain there was a use trail on the other side of the creek. But I didn’t want to cross the creek and walk on the trail; I wanted this; this; I wanted to be rock-hopping across the moraine. Nothing seemed like it could be more fun. I couldn’t feel the 35 pounds strapped to my back; I couldn’t feel my bare-soled trail runners (marketed as minimalist and truer the longer I trekked in them). I just wanted to rock-hop across boulders as long as I could.

The talus spiderwebs were everywhere. Linear rainbows lit up between boulders.

On the far side of the creek, according to Skurka’s topos, were established campsites, packed down, close to the runoff, with glacier views.

“I wanna keep hiking! I wanna keep hiking!!!”

But. It was 9 pm. This was the farthest I could go without heading up onto the glacier and having no good campsites for miles. Only good choices.

Further up the moraine I’d be able to hop across the creek; this far down, it was deep and violent, rushing between boulders. I came to a small snowfield bridging it. “Only good choices?,” I asked, skeptically. I poked it with my poles. It felt OK. I stepped out onto it. Firm and solid. “Only good choices!!!” I said, cheerfully and gratefully.

I found a site and made camp. According to the topo maps, last revised 1991, I was on top of Dinwoody Glacier. Field-checking in 2025 I was in a broad basin of boulders, talus, and gravel. The glacier had retreated up to the sides and split into separate squadrons, three or four of them.

I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want dinner. But I knew I should have something. Only good choices! I collected glacier milk, heated it, and added instant miso.

I still didn’t want to sit down. For the next hour I walked around the basin, sipping my cup of miso, staring at the rocks and the glaciers and the sky. I didn’t want it to end.

The meltwater was burbling beneath the boulders. The stars were twinkling. Only good choices.

This entire trip was special, but the ninth day’s especially so. I made a good choice.

I keep thinking about mountain passes, in distinction from mountain summits. Summits seem like an accomplishment. They’re singular and stand out. Passes are more nuanced. In one direction they’re a summit. In the other direction, they’re a valley. Both/and. They’re an accomplishment, and they’re a reminder that there’s more to be done.

I think about authority and trails and myself. I’m anti-authoritarian. That’s a good thing. That’s something I like about myself. Yet I’m also someone who desperately craves approval from those in authority. Contradiction! Maybe it’s for the obvious armchair psychologist reasons; maybe it’s for reasons that are more Dostoevskian. (“Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”)

Passes divide. You climb a mountain, and you descend down to where you started. You climb a pass, and you move from one world into the next.

The last two days of the High Route were climax and comedown. Glacier day: five miles across Gannett and Grasshopper Glaciers, endless snow, steep and flat, bare ice here and there, an itty-bitty crevasse to pee into, terrifying 100-foot towers calving into iceberg lakes.

The Continental Divide: not a sharp divide, but a flat barren plateau at 12,000 feet, a liminal DMZ, ten miles of talus and tundra, roof-of-the-world vibes, bighorn sheep for border guards.

And then: a dozen miles descending down a gently sloping plateau, endless dry tundra, and a final descent off the side rewinding the ecosystem: spruce forest, then lodgepole pine and aspen, then sagebrush. Back to the Great Plains.

On the cliffs above the trailhead were actual petroglyphs.

I hitchhiked back to Lander and spent the next few days there in the afterglow.

NOLS is headquartered in Lander; there’s a small state college; there’s also—in an overlap from a very different part of my life—a startup conservative Catholic liberal arts/Great Books college. (Maybe they need math faculty?!?) The city lets you camp for free in the park. The dirt lot between trees and the river is sardine'd with Sprinters, Subarus, and trucks. Climbers and outdoorsy folk, all cozy. Camp 4 with cars. I sat in the camp chair I borrowed from the Dead Houses and made tea on my tailgate. I hung out at the bar and had chokecherry shakes. I went running.

I didn’t feel ready to go back to the Bay.

I texted B. and impulsively drove to Boulder. His housemates greeted me with beers and fried tofu. We went thrifting for new pants; we visited B.’s lab; I scrambled one of the Flatirons. Last night the undergrads down the street started their party long after I had gone to bed. Eventually they started doing loud karaoke outdoors. I rolled over in my sleeping bag on B.’s front lawn and looked at my watch: 3 am. I wasn’t annoyed; it was cute. They were having fun. Only good choices.

L.’s dad’s memorial service is Thursday in San Francisco, so that puts a hard stop on summer 2025. Tuesday and Wednesday it’s 1200 miles home on I-80. Maybe I can hit a sixth and final hot springs on the way.