Life has been like a stir fry lately. Lots of ingredients, high heat, and you have to keep everything moving or it will all go to heck. Have you ever watched one of those really accomplished cooks who can flip over the entire contents of the pan with a simple flick of the wrist? It seem so easy.
Now, (and we arrive at the point of all of this) imagine being able to stop time whilst those ingredients are all up in the air. Imagine a brief interlude. Breathing space.
I went up to do one of the Monarch Crest descents with a handful of friends, the hectic pace of life giving way to camaraderie and laughter. It was late season. I had pretty much given up on the idea of hitting this particular piece of Colorado this year but it all came together in the late innings.
The ride broke down into two distinct parts. The high alpine climb and the descent down the creek amidst the turning aspens.
It felt quite nearly wintry up top. There were even a few errant snowflakes wandering down form the sky.
Fall colors down below.
There is a vastness of the high country that a picture can never capture. The expansiveness of the views and the minutae of the plant life up there swirl together and pick at your sense of scale. In our day to day life we saunter confidently through our lifes, barely noticing how everything in our man made worls makes such perfect geometric sense. Doorknobs just so, hallways a comfortable width, and so on. Perhaps some piece of the wonderment we feel up here comes from being removed from the habitrails of our normal life. Maybe there is a little piece of our brains that has to turn on and process.
Up on the crest we crossed the Colorado Trail and continued along the ridgeline towards the Greens Creek trail.
