Solitude

Dropping down a steep narrow chute I come to a remote lake the color of a tropical sea. Suspended minerals reflect the light to create its alluring color. I stoop and take a drink of its rich water. I’m in a micro-canyon filled with lodgepole pine and I cannot see much beyond this. There is no trail, but I have a general direction to follow. Horizons are comforting to see, a guide post to follow. When that’s hidden, when moving is measured in dozens of feet, it can feel unnerving to make a decision. Yet within that lies a freedom from convention. Feral is the one who goes alone. I choose a short canyon to weave my way up beyond the lake. The canyon is filled with moss covered boulders. At the top it opens up and I don’t need to backtrack. I am on a causeway nestled between two beautiful tarns, high rockbound mountain lakes. In front of me rises an eight hundred foot granite wall, crisscrossed with grassed benches. A labyrinth of route finding. Deliverance from civilization, perhaps, but in that is a dependence on one person. Without a way to connect to the outside world there is an ownership of choice rarely experienced in the world below. Lose my way, it’s on me; become frustrated, I’m the cause; get injured, I brought myself here. The going is slow, methodical, exhausting. Walking in this way is liberating, but it’s taxing on both mind and body. 

I scramble to the top of a rise and to the east, toothed in graying spires, is a wall of sheer granite. There is no trail into this place. There used to be, but it stopped being used in the 1930’s. The early explorers couldn’t find a way through to what would later be called Upper Basin. This valley is shaped like an amphitheater, a bowl dotted with tarns and benches rimmed almost completely by walls of granite. I can see why the early explorers had trouble finding a way through. My exit is an inconspicuous notch at the top of one of these walls. 

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. One is a state of being, the other a reaction to circumstance. That humans are social animals is not refuted, but what social animal doesn’t need, at times, to disappear with themselves, to go out into the wilderness, to find the good, healthy air. To unchain oneself from the shackles of social pressure, the release from societal opinion and the removal of incessant noise. Go into nature where external eyes look on you only with emotionless curiosity. All my life I’ve been more comfortable alone than with people, even though others have labeled me an extrovert with an outgoing personality. What I seek out here is not merely to be alone, but to be alone while seeking a connection to the landscape. This connection is where landscape art resides. 

At the bottom of a short notch, the half used trail simply fades away into nothing. Beyond is a thousand foot dropoff wall of rock, laced with interconnecting grassed benches that zigzag down its face until meeting the forest floor. Overhead the clouds are building to a stormy crescendo swirling in rich grays. To the north, deep booms of thunder echo off unseen canyons. I should turn around and make my way back, but I don’t. Wilderness decisions aren’t always logical. When alone other emotions can tempt me: curiosity, creativity, fear, love. I continue to weave my way down the cliff face to the valley floor below. I find a set of ungulate tracks and follow them down a short section of cliff bands, but lose them quickly as the dirt disappears to rock. This rock is too steep to walk, I need hooves. I unclick my backpack and lower it down over the next series of cliffs with a short piece of cordage I keep for just this reason. I climb down after and repeat the process until coming to a group of pine trees tucked on a small horizontal shelf. The storm is still building and the sun is going down. I’m only halfway down and don’t relish the idea of continuing in the dark. I’ve been walking for almost twelve hours. My legs are wobbly and my mind is tired. This is when accidents happen, and they happen fast. I sit and pull out a little food. The building storm clouds are too magnificent to ignore, so I set up my camera and photograph. My mind settles into its artistic rhythms; placing foreground and background, how much cloud movement, how much density. Make art and liberate thyself. A soft rain begins, light and effervescent. It feels nice.

Two years before this, I sit on a granite boulder and watch a Clark’s Nutcracker drive its adapted beak into the tight, sticky recesses of a whitebark pine cone to extract a tiny sweet nut. I walk around this grove of pines, searching for a cone within reach to try my hand at getting a nut, but all the uneaten cones are high on branches too thin to climb. I pick over the cones the bird has dropped on the floor, looking to see if it had missed any nuts. It’s a good worker, it doesn’t leave any. Tree to tree, the bird continues its work. This play has no end unless I decide to walk away from its open air theater. The bird's story is a free verse poem, performed live and alone. It, too, is another wanderer. I sit on this exposed rock watching, just watching. In time I will move on, as it will, each heading someplace else. There are no pressing questions. There is nothing to understand other than the simplicity in the bird’s purity of purpose, in the purity of my purpose. And so I sit and watch and try not to think. 

Eventually I must move on, as we all do, to the next place, the next thing waiting over the horizon, until there are no more horizons. But for now I leave the bird to its nature and keep walking.