November 2020 – Finding Timo

Part 3: Welcome to the West 4/20-5/2 2015

“So, let me see if I understand this,” the barkeep said, eyeballing me skeptically. “You’re 24 years old, you ain’t married and you ain’t just got outta jail, and you’re just…driving ’round the country?”

I’d been in Omaha less than an hour and I already felt like a pariah.

I tried to calmly explain my tentative plans about the future and how I was making an effort to stop in places I traveled through to add to the experience of my road trip. The reaction from the bartender was mixed at best.

“Yeah, but why are you here? Nobody comes to Omaha that ain’t born here or stuck here,” she said as she tried to pour me another beer. But like the first attempt, this one was a total disaster from start to finish, and I was handed a glass of about 85% foam. The frustration must’ve been evident on my face because, at long last, she relinquished her line of CIA-style questioning and accepted the fact that I was probably just a weirdo.

Rock Bottom, Omaha’s self deprecating brewery (yes, I realize it is a chain)

I guess I really hadn’t anticipated what other people might think of my modern manifest destiny. My friends and family had been supportive of the idea, but in Nebraska, I might as well have been speaking Yiddish. Wasting gas on a thinly veiled mission to “find myself,” was not finding much of an audience here, so I drank the 15% of my glass that had beer in it and got back on the highway. What a strange place.

Since leaving Chicago, I had rolled across the Mississippi River, stopped briefly in Des Moines, and continued churning across the low plains until my awkward encounter in Omaha. For the most part, the Great Plains had, not surprisingly, been rather plain, though I did think Des Moines was quite pretty. Geographically, the occasional fold of land or river was as exciting as the region could muster, so it did feel good, five hours after Omaha, to finally cross into the centennial state.

It wasn’t really the state crossing or the mileage markers that convinced me I must be getting close; it was the air. One of the things I had found in my research of Colorado was how high and dry the state is. Despite its hundreds of inches of snow a year, most of the state is in a semi-arid climate at best. So, once I felt the moisture flee my lips until they were just dry husks of skin, and blood began pouring out of both nostrils simultaneously, did I finally feel like I was getting close.

My goal was to get to Denver, the capital and largest city in Colorado. The city has a great atmosphere, as I was to discover, but its location is also very telling. The city is nestled up against the front range of the Rockies but still technically in the plains below it. It’s as if those first frontier miners, traveling in their rickety old wagons and riddled with dysentery, took one look up at the formidable mountains and instead of declaring “There’s gold in them there hills!” settled for, “Nope, there’s probably gold down here somewhere.” As history can verify, it turned out there was, and that’s how the city started.

My destination was my friend Allison Johnston’s place in Lakewood, a western suburb of the city. I didn’t have an agenda or list of things to do when I got to Denver but I figured the area could hold my interest for a day or two. I ended up spending nearly a week in the mile-high city and it definitely left an impression.

Looking down at Denver from the first big line of ridges to the West.

The first night I arrived, I wound up at a local bar with a ridiculous variety of craft beer. In fact (at the time), Colorado had the second most craft breweries in the US behind California and considering there is a population gap of 34 million people, that’s an impressive feat. 5.6 million Coloradans can choose from a dizzying 180+ breweries; Colorado does beer well. Allison met me at the bar, and we caught up before heading back to her family’s place. Allison, like a proper adult, had a job, and since I was in the midst of my road trip of discovery, I used her family’s place as a launchpad for day adventures while she worked.

Getting hikes in was a priority, so over the next few days, I made my way to the front range foothills to get some elevation at Green Mountain, White Ranch Open Space, and Mt. Sanitas, which was just outside of Boulder. On the nights when Allison was off work, we’d venture into Denver. The first night, we visited Voodoo Comedy Playhouse and watched an immersive improv comedy group, and when I say immersive, what I mean is that at one point one of the comedians took his shirt off and started gyrating through the crowd. I had gone in expecting nothing and came out smiling from ear to ear. If you’re in the area, I would recommend a visit.

One of the more memorable evenings was being able to take the light rail into downtown to see a Rockies game in the highest professional baseball stadium in the US. Watching the sunset behind the formidable line of mountains to our West was brilliant. I’m not a huge fan of baseball, but the position of the stadium, looking towards the mountainous skyline, helped elevate the experience.

ANYWAY, while Allison and her friends were staring at the game, I was staring at the horizon. It was hard not to marvel at how big the sky felt out here, vast and unending. While the Great Plains had given me that expansive feeling as well, with the mountains visible for scale, I was able to really appreciate how immense the land was out West. Nothing like a road trip to make you appreciate how dang big the U.S. is.

While I would’ve liked to stay and explore the area more, I reckoned that with my eventual move to Durango, I’d have plenty of time to explore this state in the not too distant future. Five days into my stay, I began to yearn for the open road and committed to pack up and continue my adventure. The next stop was Estes Park at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.

It was warming up across most of the continental US as April continued churning forward, but Estes Park had evidently forgotten about this, so as I drove up the clouded canyons towards town, I found fresh snow!

After playing in it for a while, I ventured into Estes Park proper and was surprised to see elk casually hanging about. Unbeknownst to me, Estes Park sports a huge elk population, and they are, for all intents and purposes, locals. Seeing those Elk up close was a reminder of how large the wildlife can be out west. Some of these guys were just about as tall as my Subaru!

The weather began to close in before long, and I decided to get lower in elevation before the snow overnight forced me to stay. The drive down through Big Thompson canyon was windy and steep, a gnarly ride with craggy rock faces looming over both sides of the road after every turn. While it was hard to peel my eyes from the road, during one straight section, I glanced up at the cliffs above and spotted bighorn sheep! I couldn’t stop for fear of creating a car pileup behind me, but there was a whole herd, maybe 30 in total. They were hanging out on steep and rocky terrain above the curves of the road, silently judging all the cars below. I managed to snag a couple of pictures before continuing on.

The weather only began clearing once I had driven into Wyoming and started heading west on highway 80. I could still see the snow clouds lingering to the south, but it was dry as I rolled past Vedauwoo, a prominent rock climbing area, and over a lower point of the Continental Divide.

Wyoming is a geographically interesting state. It’s high up in elevation, but a lot of the state is desolate, with a few pockets of mountain glory. Some of the better-known areas include the Wind River Range, Yellowstone National Park, and the Grand Tetons. Unfortunately, the part I was driving through was just high and dry, not a whole lot else out there. By the time I finally pulled off I-80 and headed towards Jackson Hole, the sun had gone down, and I made the rest of the drive in the dark, wondering what the rest of Wyoming looked like.

My insistence on driving the rest of the distance that night was because I’d rented an Airbnb for two nights on the Idaho side of the Tetons in a HuuUGe remodeled ranch house. The house was owned by a retired horse rancher who had come back to her native corner of Idaho. The following morning, after a lovely breakfast and conversation, I heaved myself back into the car and headed towards the Grand Tetons National Park. Between the Tetons and Yellowstone, northwest Wyoming has some of the most stunning mountain terrain I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. The Teton range, in particular, is one of the most picturesque mountain ranges in the Western United States, drawing millions of visitors a year to its rocky reaches.

Because it was early season, the road connecting the Tetons to Yellowstone was still buried under snow, but I spent the day staring in awe at Mt. Moran and Grand Teton Peak, shooting up from the Snake River like silent sentinels. Early season visitation has both pros and cons, the biggest con being the road and trail closures due to snow. The biggest pro, however, is the solitude. Not many people come out early to the Western Parks, so I had a lot of the park to myself. Though that isn’t an entirely true statement, I had to share the views and open trails with a serious abundance of elk. They were everywhere and not afraid of me.

Strapping snowshoes on, I ventured out to climb Signal Mountain from the shores of Jackson Lake. In the summer, there is a road to the summit, but with everything closed down, I ventured out into the snowy scape, accompanied only by my thoughts. By the time I returned to my car after a satisfying and successful summit, the sun was beginning to set. I drove out further around the Lake and found a pull-off along the road where I could watch the sun descend behind the mountains. It was a very surreal moment and one that I can still feel as I type this almost years later.

the Tetons: Grant Teton (L), Mt. Moran (R)

The next day I was off to Yellowstone, through southeast Idaho, which gave me this cool view of the backside of the Tetons.

After a couple of hours of driving, I arrived at the Western entrance to the park and was no more than twenty minutes into the park itself when the Subaru became surrounded by wild Bison. What magnificent creatures!

Though, seeing them reminded me of how close we came to losing them entirely. In fact, the Bison of Yellowstone are one of the only herds of wild American Bison that weren’t hunted to extinction in the late 19th-Century.

Ultimately, I think the story of the wild Bison is emblematic of America’s historically convoluted relationship with nature. First, we go in guns blazing, killing, and eventually running out of the resource entirely. Then, we feel regret for killing all the wild (insert animal type whose habitat we have constricted or decimated). Then, through science and conservation, we bring back the (insert animal type), and finally, we forget that we killed them all in the first place. Lather, rinse, repeat? A pessimist could make a fairly compelling argument that we haven’t really learned anything at all, and instead, just keep covering up our mistakes. At least for the time being, animals such as the American Bison and the Bald Eagle have entered our societal subconscious as crucial to “American Heritage,” so they are offered more protections than other animals, but that doesn’t bode especially well for animals such as the passenger pigeon, which we killed off entirely by the early 20th century.

I think in a lot of ways, the National Parks allow us to hold a mirror up to our own understanding (or lack thereof) of nature and how we as a species fit into the natural design of the world. For some, a visit can become an almost spiritual experience, where the symbiotic relationship between species is on full display. Some National Parks, however, have to contend with millions of visitors a year, and sadly, many of those people do not care about the delicate natural balance that the Parks represent. Yellowstone is in many ways the epicenter of the US national park complex and, as such, appears to attract a stunning amount of stupid people.

While I didn’t personally experience gross levels of idiocy during my exploration of the park, one needs only to turn to the internet to find examples. For some reason, Yellowstone just appears to be a magnet for imbeciles. From tourists putting animals into their cars to chasing bison to pissing off bears, to stepping into off-limits areas like geysers, people continue to impress with their complete lack of awareness. Seeing that type of behavior makes you wonder how on earth we ended up at the top of the food chain…but I digress.

For those who come out to genuinely enjoy the parks, Yellowstone offers a dizzying amount of terrain to help people find their spiritual moments. It has everything: wild animals (including the bison and reintroduced wolf), thundering waterfalls, mountains, hundreds of miles of uninterrupted wilderness, lakes, and the world-famous geysers.

Even more interesting, or terrifying depending on how you look at it, is the geology of the area. More than half of the national park lies atop the Yellowstone caldera or supervolcano. A little more than six hundred and forty thousand years ago, the last of three eruptions occurred, spewing ash as far as Mississippi and covering the intermountain west. Scientists suspect it’ll be another few hundred thousand years before a subsequent eruption, but the land is definitely alive, epitomized by the geysers themselves, which are essentially pressure release valves blowing out scalding hot water.

When the day finally closed, I had seen bison, geysers, Yellowstone falls, climbed Bunsen Peak, and managed to set up my tent at a developed campsite by Mammoth Springs. Yellowstone is a national treasure, and I hope collectively, people continue to appreciate how crucial these areas are to biodiversity and our understanding of the environment.

Looking towards Static Peak from Bunsen Peak trail

The next morning, satisfied with my visit to Yellowstone, I soldiered on, driving into Montana to continue my transformative pilgrimage.

Montana, like Wyoming and Colorado before it, was awesome. From the views of the Beartooth and Absaroka Ranges to the headwaters of the Missouri river to the funky college town of Missoula, Montana exceeded expectations. I confess I didn’t spend much time there, busting through the state with a small stop to climb the M outside Missoula, but I logged away the memory of the drive and vowed to return to explore the state properly. There are so many things to do in the rocky mountain states that if you’re a tree hugger like me, it’s worth splitting it up into multiple adventures, to really give an area the appropriate amount of attention it deserves.

The surprise of the day was Northern Idaho, that skinny panhandle section on the map. After a long crossing through the Bitterroot Mountains, I ended up in Coeur D’Alene, a fun town on the banks of a giant lake of the same name and ringed by steep hills. I took a detour to explore the area around the lake, and it was absolutely breathtaking. The foliage was thick and a deep shade of green, pockets of snow still hiding beneath the canopy of the denser areas. I hadn’t expected much from this small part of Idaho, which is more easily accessible from Canada than from Boise (the state capital), but it was surprisingly beautiful.

I spent the night in another AirBnB in Spokane Washington, driving the following day across one of the most barren parts of the states I’d seen so far, comparable to the Mojave in Southern California. I did NOT expect Washington to be that dry! It’s really only that sliver of land between the Cascades and the Pacific Ocean that gets 90% of the rainy Northwestern stereotype. As expected, once I crossed the Cascades it started raining and continued to do so as I blasted through Seattle and up the 5 past Bellingham. By the time it stopped raining, I had reached the Canadian border, bound for my most northerly destination: The Gold Coast, British Columbia.

As I sat in my car at the border crossing, waiting for my turn in line, I thought about what the barkeep had asked me way back in Omaha, “why are you here?”

…I guess it had seemed like a legitimate question at the time, but this road trip had morphed into something beyond a simple explanation to me. The roar of the car engine, the ability to be my own captain, and the freedom to set my own course were things I was finding to be incredibly inspirational. I was drunk with choices, and I wanted to see as much as I could. Logically, I’m sure it didn’t make any sense to her; Omaha might’ve been the only place she’d ever known. But, after seeing Colorado, the Tetons, Yellowstone, and Montana, sitting still just wasn’t an option for me. As silly as the answer might’ve seemed to her, were she to ask me the same question again, I might only have responded with, “Why not?” Life is for the living soul, and after this adventure (and all the ones to follow), not even that bartender in Omaha could say that I hadn’t lived.

Part 2: Modern Manifest Destiny

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Don’t let the title fool you. The old Manifest destiny, if you are unfamiliar, was a widely held belief in the 19^th century that westward expansion of American interests throughout the North American continent was not only justified but inevitable. What ended up happening was nothing short of terrifying and involved lawlessness, greed, murder, and the forced removal of thousands upon thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands.

In contrast, my modern version of manifest destiny was highly personal, completely peaceful, and had almost nothing in common with the old one, save one word: inevitable. Like the original doctrine, I knew my journey west was inevitable. Justified? maybe not, it was pretty self-indulgent but definitely inevitable. It wasn’t just a dream that was nice to think about, this was going to happen…it had to happen. I couldn’t tell you when I knew it for sure, but for years I had flirted with the idea of going the way of the setting sun, and with each passing year, the feeling had grown. Eventually, I couldn’t stifle it anymore and the result was spectacular.

2014 was, for the most part, a very challenging year. I had graduated from UNC-Asheville the previous fall, and while I was thrilled to have earned an undergraduate degree in four years, I had spent far too little time figuring out what my next steps were going to be. So, with panic setting in and a flimsy piece of paper that said “Bachelor of Liberal Arts,” I looked at the adult world looming in front of me and thought, “oh shiiiiiiit.”

Consequently, I grabbed the first stable gig I could find and moved to Northern Virginia, where I worked through the end of 2013 as a counselor at an adventure camp.

Once 2014 kicked in, I moved right back to my college town. Two wrongs don’t make a right, in case anyone was counting, but at the time, I thought I had solid reasons for moving back. I was in a pretty serious relationship with a woman in her senior year at UNC-Asheville, my job in Virginia wasn’t pushing me in a direction I felt was worth pursuing, and most of my friends were still in Asheville. Perhaps the most powerful reason was that I was still subservient to the siren song of the Blue Ridge. If you’ve been there, you know, it grabs you hard. I guess I thought I’d be able to tread water for the duration until opportunity fell into my lap.

Well, you can imagine how that went.

As 2014 dragged on, I began dragging myself down. The two highlights I had were hiking and working for a zip line company north of town. If you’ve never zipped through the canopy at upwards of 60 mph. I would highly recommend it. Through that experience, I began to open up the possibility in my head that somehow, I could combine my intense desire for outdoor recreation with something that resembled a decent paying job. The big question I needed to answer was, could I do it in Asheville?

Asheville had, and always will have, a special place in my heart, but moving back to your college town is risky. I didn’t realize it immediately, but I was stuck. For me, Asheville, like TV shows that run too long, needed to end. The good seasons were gone, the most relatable characters had left and everything else was filler. I had to give Asheville a dignified death and move on or risk sinking along with it.

So, I divorced my college town, broke up with my girlfriend, and planned to move out west, buoyed by a fairly comprehensive set of outdoor skills. Having spent the better part of four years hiking everything I could in North Carolina, I was comfortable with the outdoors and figured the easiest way to transition was through an outdoor-oriented job. It didn’t take me long to stumble upon Conservation Corp.

As I poured through the history of the organization, from its humble beginnings as the Civilian Conservation Corp during the great depression to the present, I found myself attracted to this concept of trails. I guess I’d never considered how much effort went into maintaining our access to the outdoors, not only for our enjoyment, but to limit human damage to sensitive areas. I knew I was in shape, and of *relatively sound mind, so I gave it a go. Then, before I could hit apply on the website, I found the prerequisite section and stumbled onto this word, WFR…what the hell was that?

WFR (Wilderness First Responder): An individual who has been trained to deal with emergency situations in remote areas, thanks Wikipedia.

It was a seven days course that covered everything you could possibly encounter in a wilderness setting, and as I was researching it, a few things hit me. This was real. If I took this course and got the job, then I could be in situations that might require serious medical mediation in isolated and remote places. I think to some, that might’ve been a deal-breaker, but to me? I got excited. I thought fondly of the life-changing Outward Bound experience I’d been in for 14 days in the Gore Range of Colorado back in high school. Really being out there, and having your finger on the pulse of the land was freeing in a way that I hadn’t been able to replicate since. My mind was made up. I signed up for the nearest WFR course and applied to be a crew leader for Conservation Corp in Colorado. The branch I ended up choosing was Southwest Conservation Corp, out of Durango. Why? Location, location, location.

Within an hour of Durango was the San Juan Mountains, Colorado’s most extensive mountain range with wilderness areas up to half a million acres. Half a million?? Y’all, the biggest wilderness area in the Southern Blue Ridge was the Cohutta at a little over 37-grand (up to 40-grand if you add the Big Frog just across the border in TN). The Weminuche Wilderness in the San Juans? Almost 500,000. The difference in scale was enormous. Plus, the San Juans had 13 of Colorado’s famed 14,000-foot peaks, which I’d wanted to climb ever since I’d found out about them. To sweeten the pot, Durango was only 40 minutes from Mesa Verde National Park, 5 hours from the Grand Canyon, 2.75 from Canyonlands and Moab, 2 from Telluride, 3 from the Great Sand Dunes, and only an hour from the hot springs in Pagosa. Appropriately, I began frothing at the mouth.

In the meantime, I moved back to my parent’s place in North Georgia to gear up for what I was certain would be an exquisite next chapter of adulthood. If I got the leadership position, I could begin as early as March, which would limit my time pretending I wasn’t a college graduate living at home again.

Silly Timo.

I didn’t get the leadership position.

Admittedly I was a bit hurt, I mean, why wouldn’t they take a gamble on someone with no leadership or trailwork experience? RUDE.

I guess zipline guide, camp counselor and Outward-Bound participant weren’t exactly confidence inspiring resume highlights. But, they did offer me a position to join as a crew member for a 26-week program starting June first. I felt a little crushed by the leadership rub, but there was no way I was staying at home. Seeing no realistic alternative, I made the best of it and accepted. That was late February 2015.

I have a confession to make, I’m not a very patient man.

I knew that if I sat on my butt for four months, my motivation would be shot, and I wouldn’t have the strength to marshal it back. So, I adjusted. I’m not super with money, but I knew enough to save, and because of graduation, I had received a bit of a bonus from family members that I hadn’t used. Armed with my wilderness certification, a little cash, and facing down the possibility of a demanding summer working for Conservation Corp, I made a plan to stay in shape.

I was highly motivated in this department. While in Asheville, I’d completed hiking all the peaks in North Carolina and Tennessee that broke 6,000 feet. I was also 11 wilderness hikes into a 12-wilderness hike challenge called the Dirty Dozen, created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. More ambitiously, I had done a 50 mile, 4-day loop of the AT and Bartram Long trails with my friend David Greene, and that previous winter had done a demanding three-day trek in the snow, through the northern section of the Great Smokey’s. I was seasoned, but how could I keep the physical activity up? Well, Georgia had 78.6 miles of the Appalachian Trail…ok then.

In order to keep it interesting, I had my dad drop me off on the North Carolina side, I’d then hike south into Georgia, ending at the southern terminus in about a week. With all side trails and approach trails counted, the total mileage was more like 97 and change. So, one morning, my dad drove me out to the North Carolina side and dropped me off at the Chunky Gal approach trail, a voluptuous stretch of path that let me know right away how demanding this adventure would be. A week later, as I lay half-collapsed on a sunny rock at Amicalola Falls, with every single muscle screaming for mercy, I thought about the things that my week in the woods had taught me.

1. You can never have enough moleskin for blisters

2. Make sure your tent is WATERPROOF

3. Stretch every day, make it a habit

4. Trail people are weird, but ‘weird’ is more of a spectrum than a blanket statement: good weird, weird-weird, bad weird etc.

5. BUY A SLEEPING PAD

6. Clear sticks from underneath where you set up your tent

7. Softshell tortillas are cheap and take up no space in a backpack

8. Trail-runners and ultra-light hikers make everyone else feel bad about themselves

9. Trekking poles=knee savers

10. North Georgia has a surprising amount of what I would consider to be wild places

11. Your nostrils give up around day 3, after that, you don’t smell so bad anymore

12. Dry wet clothing on the outside of your backpack, especially socks

13. ALL SMELLY ITEMS NEED TO BE IN A BEAR HANG OR BEAR BOX

14. Every meal is DELICIOUS

15. Even though my body hurt, I woke up every day with a smile. The outdoors were my slice of Nirvana.

That adventure and subsequent hikes took me to the tail end of March, but I still had time. One night, I took out the maps, got the computer, and began to plan a road trip. I’d been across the country a couple of times, but they were usually pretty fast trips with a set destination and time frame in mind. With two months to kill and my money calculator telling me I’d have just enough to limp back into Durango at the end of it, I decided to go big. As I suspected, the planning stage took some time because the undertaking was immense, but things came together, and on April 13, I knew it was time to go.

So, after a tearful goodbye with my mama, and on a rainy North Georgia morning, I packed up the Subaru and headed out into the world. Timo had been released.

I decided to divide the cross-country drive into three sections. There was so much to see and do that I had to break it up, or it would all blur together. Seeing as I was on a tight budget, a lot of the drive would involve hopscotching between locations that had people with whom I could stay. It also meant that certain parts of the trip looked completely schizophrenic on the map. Regardless, I was ready.

The start of the trip could’ve had some better weather, but since the rain and fog had socked in everything east of the Mississippi, I had to make do. Three hours and a little extra after I started, I found myself in the cold gray woods of Southwestern Tennessee. SW TN is moonshine country, lots of little hollers tucked up in the folds of the hills where you don’t venture unless it’s very clearly marked public land. It’s one of those regions where you might hear the dueling banjos start to play, and if you get that reference, you may understand how I felt in the moment. (Dueling Banjos).

I had to come this way because I had one wilderness left to hike before I completed the Dirty Dozen Hiking Challenge and Big Frog Wilderness was one I’d never been to. All in all, it was a cold, wet hike, but it reminded me about some of the things I’d be leaving behind in the Southeast: the humidity, the sound of leaves underfoot, the roaring creeks and moss, and the insane biological diversity of the region. In fact, according to the USNP website, the Smokies and the surrounding mountains may have somewhere between 80,000-100,000 individual species within them, which is bananas! It’s a part of the world that is brimming with biological life, a naturalist’s paradise.

I finished the hike in good time, no views to speak of on account of the weather, but no run-ins with moonshiners either, so we’ll call it a win. The last part of the day I spent driving towards Asheville NC, to put a final lid on my history there.

In many ways, the city and the surrounding environs belong out west. The outdoor recreation opportunities, fairly progressive mindset, and craft beer craze would put it right at home along the Colorado Front Range, or the Pacific Northwest. People were very proud of the weird things that made the town hum. At one point, it was called a ‘cesspool of sin’ by conservative North Carolina senator James Forrester, and those Blue Ridge hippies just turned it around and made it an unofficial slogan. I loved its connection to the outdoors and the mentality it fostered but, for me, after a total of five years there, the town had become small.

When you first move to an area as beautiful as Asheville, you fall under its spell. When the spell wears off, you notice small things that bug you, and eventually, those small things become too large to ignore. But I owed it one last visit, this time as a tourist, to rekindle the magic that it had given me when I first arrived.

After a night sipping beer at Wicked Weed and reconnecting with friends, I ended up spending the night at my friend Steven Whites’ house. He was a direct connection to my college years and we had an absolute blast recalling all the ridiculous episodes in that four-year series. It was a night that did exactly what it was supposed to: remind me of the good times.

The following day, I got a quick reminder of what I was escaping…

Another friend I’d known had recently overdosed. They’d woken up 8 hours later, after having collapsed on top of their arm. The blood hadn’t been able to flow to the arm so it was essentially a dead appendage, and their kidneys had failed, trying to keep the rest of the body working. In order to save the arm, doctors had to cut out dead tissue, and graft a chunk of skin and tissue from the leg back onto the arm. I went to go see them in the recovery center, and while their attitude was as bright and cheery as I’d ever seen, to be with them really hit home because I had partied HARD with them in college. Were it not for a handful of different choices, friends, and circumstances, I could’ve been in their situation, or worse.

I’m sure people have all sorts of theories on happiness and success, but mine have always centered on geography and location. After moving so much as a child, I STRONGLY feel there is a time limit on the places you live. Once you exceed your time limit, bad things tend to happen, and if you go past it too far, there is no reset button. At the end of the day, you need to have that honest conversation with yourself, is this still working for me? I knew in my heart that going west was the best move for me, and in a strange way, seeing my friend in their condition helped validate it. After some heartfelt goodbyes and a few “see you arounds”, I set out for my next stop, Boone, NC.

My time in Boone was brief, but just long enough to reconnect with Chloe, an old study abroad friend I’d met in New Zealand. She is/was/will always be a wonderful person, and although she wasn’t at her place when I arrived, there was a key for me, a fully made bed and a note that said “So excited to see you! Help yourself to anything, mi casa es su casa! You can use the IPad (wifi on the fridge) or take a snooze on the bed. See you tonight!”

It was only a small, simple note, but the effect on me was profound.

The drive from Asheville to Boone was only three hours, but from here on out, it was all unfamiliar. I had left the last vestiges of my world behind and was into uncharted lands. To have that beautiful note, open and ready to be smiled upon, constituted a precious moment for me. I knew I was welcome, and there is no finer feeling.

With a big smile, I fell right asleep. That evening, Chloe, her friends, and I went out, played some pool at Appalachian Mountain Brewery, listened to some live southern rock, had a great conversation, and turned in. When the morning came I was off again, to more uncharted territory, content with how the adventure was shaping up.

The drive down into Tennessee was interesting because it was new! My years in Asheville had me chasing mountains all over the place, and every time I hit a new summit or traveled on a new road, a new piece of my mental puzzle fill in. For RPG gamers, this should sound familiar, your map is a fog until you explore it. Once explored, the knowledge stays with your character, and they can easily navigate that part of the game world. I was just filling in my map. I felt I knew the Southern Blue Ridge better than many of my college friends because I’d stood on top of most of it, and it gave me a strong sense of place. New roads added to that understanding.

The Appalachian Trail crossed the road I was descending, and when I pulled over to take a photo of the sign, I found a thru-hiker taking a break on the shore of Watauga Lake. Recalling my week on the trail in North Georgia and how hungry I had been, I made sure to throw as much food as I could at him…which was probably very startling at first. I don’t think I even introduced myself before hurling instant ramen at the poor guy. But, once the initial fright subsided, he gratefully accepted and I offered to haul some of his trash out for him. Leave no trace! After a couple of quick words of encouragement, I was off and he was packing up to head out again.

My destination for the evening was Bloomington, Indiana, via a stop at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. One of my best friends growing up, Chris Schreiber, lived in Bloomington, and I hadn’t seen him in a while. I just had to get there first. From Boone to Bloomington (sounds like the name of a country album) and was also a total of 8 hours, my longest driving segment yet. After blasting through Kentucky coal country and down towards Lexington, the clouds that had lingered for the last three days finally parted, and I saw a brilliant sunset over the horse pastures of Northern Kentucky. By the time I got to Bloomington, it was late, and I was tired, but Chris helped me grab my stuff, set me up on a bed, and I was out almost immediately.

Bloomington is like a mini Asheville, a college town in its own right and far more personable and friendly than I had anticipated. We spent the following day walking around and exploring the kooky ins and outs that really only exist in the forgotten corners of college towns. In the evening, we had dinner with some of his friends from the University of Indiana, one of whom worked in the anatomy department. They were working on dissecting cadavers and had been for the majority of their semester. When we expressed interest in what they were doing, they offered to let us see some dead people, so, naturally, we agreed.

The next morning, I was standing with Chris in a whitewashed room with a couple of corpses on some metal tables. At first, it didn’t seem real because the heads had been removed, and most of the guts scooped out. What was left were the circulatory and musculoskeletal systems. Fighting the urge to pretend I was on some procedural crime drama, I watched with fascination as the students explained what they were doing. Their explanations and the way the students presented the information was so clinical that I forgot for a moment that these used to be people. That naiveté came crashing down when one of the students offered to show me something cool and pushed down on some of the veins and arteries near the wrist. Almost immediately the fingers of the cadaver began to curl in slowly like they were trying to grab something. Seeing the fingers move, seemingly independently, was enough to remind me that this was all very, very real. There was only one thought bouncing around in my head, but it wasn’t shock or horror as I had expected. All I could think was, “Oh my god, how cool is this???”

Admittedly, it was nice to breathe the fresh air again after being in a room that smelled like formaldehyde for a good half an hour. After that unique experience, we grabbed a last lunch together on the patio of a downtown establishment. Then, I parted ways with Chris and got into the Subaru, bound for the next destination, Chicago.

The southern part of Indiana around Bloomington had been hilly, and at least mildly interesting. Northern Indiana was flat. That’s it, just flat. While it was only a four-hour drive to Chi-town from Bloomington it felt at least twice as long, and I was thrilled to get towards the metro area and finally have some things to stare at.

The lady I was to stay with in Chicago, was named Kate. I had met her in the Wilderness First Responder class I’d taken and we’d learned how to create traction splints together. Unfortunately, the last time I’d seen her was a little embarrassing for me.

I’d invited her and about six friends over to my place in Asheville to celebrate the completion of our WFR certification and to have a couple of drinks. Well, it had snowed that evening and we all got this brilliant idea to go sledding. Mind you this was fresh snow on top of nothing, there was no base layer, nothing had settled, just a few inches of white on cold hard ground, or in my case asphalt.

To make things interesting, I had decided to launch my little plastic sled in front of me and was then going to dive on top of it and slide down this side road in flawless fashion. I launched the sled according to my brilliant plan but was a little overenthusiastic about the dive and ended up overshooting my landing zone. I crashed into the snow, chin first, and sunk right through to the asphalt underneath. What I had created for myself in medical speak was called an avulsion, or a ‘flapper’ in laymen’s terms. A part of my chin skin was just kind of flapping about, a deep cut separating its previous bond with the rest of my face.

Initially, I was mortified, but since everyone else was pretty tipsy I managed to retreat back to the house and look at the damage without arousing too much suspicion. Being a newly certified wilderness first responder and all-around excellent decision-maker, I decided to skip the hospital visit and fix it myself. So, I put a bandage clumsily over the wound, and then, realizing I didn’t have any medical adhesive, used an excessive amount of Blue Painter’s tape to cinch everything down. With the mission seemingly accomplished, I went to sleep. Needless to say, when I did finally go to the doctor the next day, everyone in the hospital was thoroughly disappointed in me.

The point is that Kate had seen the whole thing unfold. I had conveniently forgotten about this episode until I was driving towards her apartment in Chicago and then promptly realized that I might need to craft a better impression of myself. Maybe by some miracle, she had forgotten too…either way, the bar was set pretty low.

After what seemed like years of trying to find street parking, I finally stopped the Subaru and made it to the apartment. She and her boyfriend were just west of downtown in a “hip” neighborhood with a great atmosphere. Turns out, she did remember my night of idiocy because unlike my friends and me, she hadn’t been drinking. Ten points to Timo.

After a solid round of laughing at my expense, we took off walking into the city. Her boyfriend was working at the time, so we picked up one of her friends and strolled through the city towards the downtown area. At this point, the light of the day was fading, but we soldiered on and made it all the way to the shore of Lake Michigan. There, I got to stare at the famous Chicago skyline. The Hancock tower was glowing ominously, and the lights of the city were bouncing off the fairly violent surf, it had a real Dark Knight kinda vibe going on. Having made it this far in my journey, I figured it was time for a celebration, so I ran into Lake Michigan…and then ran right the f_8C* back out. It was only April, and that lake is COLD.

The city was such a contrast from my mountain living for the past few years that I really enjoyed being out amongst people. There’s obviously a huge difference between visiting a city and living there, but I liked the way Chicago presented itself to me. Once we had retreated back to the apartment and met up with Kate’s boyfriend, we all set off to go see What We Do in the Shadows, a vampire mockumentary courtesy of soon to be super famous director Taika Waititi, that had me in stitches from the opening scene right up to the end. The movie was showing at the Logan Theater, a great older venue built in 1915 and chock full of hipsters. The building and atmosphere were impressive, and perhaps the most exciting part for me was the commute to it via the local elevated train line. After living in the South, where public transportation is more of a joke than an alternate mode of travel, it was nice to be able to get to somewhere via train.

The following day Kate took me to the ‘bean’. It’s art, it’s weird, and it’s in Chicago, tell your friends? Actually, check this story out, apparently, the history of the statue and its wackadoodle creator is an adventure in its own right, enjoy.

After waltzing through downtown, Kate and I were picked up by her boyfriend and taken out to Lagunitas Brewing near the shore of Lake Michigan and just south of the main parts of downtown. Originally, the Brewing company was based out of Petaluma, California but the state had been in a crippling drought since 2011, and by 2015 it hadn’t gotten better. Fearing that the conditions would continue to impact production, and since beer production is so water-heavy, the company opened a second location in Chicago. With Lake Michigan so close by and with a huge beer drinking population available in the immediate area, it seemed like a good move.

We took a brewery tour, and the facilities were enormous, set up in a gigantic old warehouse. Our tour guide’s official title was Raconteur, and he had what can only be described as a…unique accent. He had a microphone, which he held so close to his face that every time he opened his mouth I thought he was going to eat and/or make out with it. When he said Chicago, he would swallow the back half of the word until all that was left were some strange gurgling sounds. Phonetically, what we heard sounded like “Shi-Kawwwhrghhhlo…” I guess he kind of liked us though, because, after the tour, he took us back to an employee part of the brewery and loaded us up with a 24 case of beer from his personal fridge, and sent us out into the world. Thanks guy.

After a final night in the windy city, spent enjoying our beer and trading stories, I said another round of farewells and headed out towards the great plains. The next phase would take me across the mighty Mississip, following the way of the ancient covered wagons during that first Manifest Destiny. Yeehaw!

Part 1: Various Methods of Escape

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(Sept. 2017)

Without context, memories are just words and images floating in space. Context wrestles them down and tethers them to meaning. But, in my opinion, there is a crucial third ingredient: time. In order to publish complete memories, you need to let them mature, let them wander, and then let them come back to you in time. We often don’t see the context surrounding a situation until time has passed, and reflection takes hold. You can capture the moment as it occurs, or shortly after, but then let it age. Maybe not for too long, lest we forget entirely, but enough to see why those memories were worth remembering. When enough time has passed and the memories ferment, you allow yourself to really see how it all fits. Once the process concludes, the words and images are free to take on a life of their own and what you’re left with is something much more powerful than just memories…

The rain was still coming down, had been for the past hour, but it might change over soon, I could feel it getting colder. Tonight could bring snow, the first of the season. September was always an odd month for me, really an odd month for Colorado as well. Conditions were highly dependent on what part of the state you were in. For most people, living in the Front Range or the lower areas of the western slope, September was synonymous with Colorado’s brief version of autumn. These were the precious few weeks of fall when the aspens all turned bright yellow and the sky revealed a radiant blue, deep enough to fall into. But for me, September meant the beginning of the end. You couldn’t build trail when the ground was buried under snow. So, while some parts of the state were reveling in the crisp air and brilliant sunshine, I was standing in a cloud, on the forgotten side of Mt. Quandary, dreading the possibility of snow.

Don’t misread, I do love winter, but the transition to it is rough. This was the third year I had been living off the seasons. In the winter, I was a ski instructor at a fancy resort. In the summer, I was a dirtbag, building trail in the alpine. I loved both my lives, but the contrast between the two was heavy. I wasn’t sure if I could keep them both anymore, in fact, I knew I couldn’t, but I wasn’t ready to admit it just yet.

The company I worked for was called Colorado Fourteeners Initiative or CFI for short. They built sustainable trails up the 14ers; the 54 peaks in Colorado that broke 14,000 feet in elevation. To this day, working for them has been the best job I’ve ever had. But manual labor at high elevation is taxing, if you don’t end up getting hurt, it slowly starts to wear your body down. So inside, I knew that this was the last September I’d be out amongst it, so to speak.

The reality of the transition away from dirtbag life had been hovering around my head for a while, but it was this night that it really sunk in. Soon, I would have to give up my escape and rejoin society in some capacity. Ugh. The weather wasn’t helping either, but it did solidify the dreary mood with which I approached this particular evening.

“Heading into town tonight?” Margaret asked, emerging from the wall tent behind me. I nodded silently.

Margaret had been on Quandary for two seasons and had worked in the trail world for nearly thrice as long. She had spent countless hours shaping trails into formidable ribbons of foot traffic that would last for decades. For all intents and purposes, Quandary was her project, and when she spoke about it, you could feel the attachment to it. I understood that feeling well because I felt it too, we all did. It was more than a project, it was happiness. The emotional attachment was strong, and the resistance to change formidable in its own right. Yet, I knew change was inevitable, and I needed to find some way to accept that.

Part of accepting change is understanding why it’s necessary. For me, I knew that I needed to break away from my seasonal job because I was getting married in less than a year, and my future wife was not a dirtbag like yours truly. Trailwork is a hard life to empathize with unless you are living it, and the challenges to maintaining a healthy relationship when I worked out of cell range for days at a time were numerous. Not surprisingly, having ski instructor and trail builder as my resume backstops didn’t really add all that much to my portfolio. I needed a bit more. So, I applied to graduate school; which, naturally, created more problems.

Trail work requires you to be all in for the duration of the season, usually June through the first week of October. My graduate program started in August. Determined to make it work, I convinced the program to let me take the first couple of months online. Somehow, I would be able to manage the coursework around a 10-hour workday that started at 4 AM. In hindsight, that may have been a little enthusiastic, but so far, I had stubbornly found a way to force it to work. It just meant my days were a lot longer than my coworkers.

“Well, we’ll wake at five tomorrow, it’s the last day of the hitch anyway,” Margaret said with a smile, understanding my day wasn’t over yet. That extra hour of sleep would honestly do a lot for me. “The propane is off, so you just have to close the wall tent.”

“Will do,” I said back.

She nodded and turned to walk to her personal tent to escape the cold. Jack, our intern with Rocky Mountain Youth Corp. was already in his tent, probably cocooned in sleeping bags and a full set of clothes, a Nalgene filled with hot water at his feet…this was high living. It was only 4:15 PM, but when you wake up early to work, the day ends early.

I waited a few more minutes in the cold and silence, appreciating the simplicity of it all. I loved it up here, away from the noise. It was nice to be able to breathe. But, I had homework tonight, an essay response to an article I hadn’t read yet, so, I knew I had to go. With a deep sigh of acceptance, I closed the wall tent, zipped up my layers of clothing, and walked away from camp, towards the dirt road.

We had a work truck with us, an F-250, parked on an old logging road behind a forest service fence. Its name was Headache, and I hated it. Some people can handle trucks well; I am NOT one of them. It was clunky, loud, and enormous. Aside from an abysmal turning radius and Manhattan-sized blind spot, it’s rusted frame and beat up demeanor served as another visual reminder that I was not bringing class back to Breckenridge.

That was my destination, another Colorado resort town, and the closest one with reliable wifi: a prerequisite for online classes. After struggling to climb into the elevated cab like it was the top of a 5.12 rock wall, I turned the key and started it up. The drive from camp wasn’t long once I got off the dirt road and back on route 9. There weren’t many cars around at first, but by the time I approached the town limits and was passed by a couple of Teslas and BMW’s, I began to feel out of place. Breckenridge was pop, and I was all grunge.

The whole situation I was in was pretty absurd, dirtbag by day, student by night. I definitely felt absurd, walking towards the coffee shop after parking the truck out of sight and off the main street. I’d pass the occasional couple with brand new designer clothes and fancy smelling fragrances. They took wide paths around me, I guess I couldn’t blame them. I looked like a vagabond, crusty, and gross after a week of alpine work; but, instead of letting it work on my mood, I embraced the absurdity of the moment and escaped along with it. Allowing myself to smile, I thought about a runway fashion announcer, trying his best to introduce me and my get up…

“Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome back to dirtbag fashion night, and boy do we have a special treat for you! Our model tonight is donning a ratty 7-year-old backpack, Carhartt knock-offs with dirt and sweat soaked completely into the fabric, and covering up that greasy head of hair is an Avalanche beanie with what appears to be either ketchup or a bloodstain over one side. Delicious.”

“Covering his beleaguered frame is a disgusting green t-shirt, expertly hidden by a red fleece with a zipper that won’t zip. On top of that is a hideous gray rain shell held together by little more than duct tape. To complete this bizarre ensemble, our model is showing off a pair of what used to be hikers, with blown-out seems in no less than four places and rubber traction on the soles as featureless as a bald set of tires…wow.”

It was called the Crown, the coffee shop I ended up at, and still one of the best coffee shops I’ve been to. No, it didn’t have one drink that blew my mind, and no, it wasn’t the only coffee shop in town, but it had exactly what I was looking for: warmth. The lighting was soft, the people respectful, and there was this Kiwi behind the bar tonight, hearing his accent was always satisfying. There were your usual choices of coffees and teas, and a handful of local beers to really tap into that Colorado feeling. I knew that because the seasons were transitioning, I would find an emptier shop, with more room to grab a table and get to work.

So, once I found an empty table, I opened my laptop, grabbed my notebook, and prepared to get some schoolwork done. Then, when I had finally psyched myself up enough to try to read my assignment, I pulled up the essay prompt, noticing immediately that the due date for the assignment was next Thursday, not today. There was no homework for me to do.

Well done Timo, 10/10.

Dumfounded, I sat for a moment, thinking on how idiotic I was to waste time, gas, and energy to come all the way down here for nothing. What a classic fool.

Logically, I should’ve returned to camp, my primary purpose in being here was no longer relevant, but something kept me seated. Could’ve been the fact that it was freezing outside, and I was finally warm, or that the smell of hot cider and tea was making me deliriously happy. But I think I wanted to salvage something from the moment I created by coming here. Yeah, I mucked up the due date of my assignment, but I was here now, so what could I make of it? If it had been a schoolwork night, I’d have a little more than four hours to do work before the shop closed. So, I had created a couple of hours that I didn’t have before, I had a fat computer full of memories at my disposal, and was mentally wrestling with the idea that my life was going to change dramatically after this trail season. I think deep down I knew that the Crown coffee shop was calm enough, and quiet enough, to reflect. So, I began to reflect on the end…not of life or anything too dramatic, but the end of a phase.

I’d been working in trails for three years, and that time was winding down, graduate school was proof of that. In my constant state of planning for the future, I’d forgotten to realize that I was charging towards a new uncertainty with gleeful abandon. Had I really given the last few years an adequate ending in my mind? The second I asked that question of myself I knew the answer was no, and suddenly felt cheated. I’d forgotten to package up those dirtbag years, and for some reason, this coffee shop was going to be the place that I would do it.

Of course, that thought led to an obvious question, why here? Usually, I was repulsed by the idea of people, why did I want to start my mental farewell to trail work here, as opposed to my tent? Did these coffee-shop dwellers deserve to occupy the space within which I would barrel down memory highway? Well, yes, because as I looked at the people around me, I realized that they were all doing the same thing I was. They just had different ways of expressing it.

The young lady by the window, watching her show on her computer with headphones on and shooting glances out at the rain coming down; the old man and his grandkid, sitting on the couches playing cards; the middle-aged man with his pencil flying to paper, sketching out his thoughts as he hummed along to whatever song was playing inside his head; the table of three ladies, each consumed by the open books in front of them; and the staff behind the bar, chatting quietly amongst themselves: we were all doing the same thing, diving head first into our various methods of escape.

Coffee shops are like culturally approved mental escape areas. You can have a conversation, or you can ignore the world, and it’s all totally fine. The Crown was one of those places where you could have the comfort of knowing others were around, without having to actually speak to anyone. And while I can’t heap that kind of praise on every coffee shop or bookstore, those are the kind of places where you can find that strange balance between those that have no interest in society and those that can’t live without it.

After I looked around at all the people, I ordered a warm cider from the bar, sat back down at my computer, and began looking at the notes, scribbles, and thousands upon thousands of pictures I’d taken since coming to Colorado. While I hadn’t ever given proper thought to the ridiculous set of circumstances that brought me out here, I had taken pictures, and I began to use them like mental bread crumbs, following the memories as they flooded in.

Three years is a long time, especially when you pack it full of adventures. Road trips, summers of trail work, winters of ski instructing, hikes and summits, hot springs, sand dunes, canyons, concerts, a proposal, and plenty of ups and downs. It felt odd, to be sitting there in my state at the ripe old age of almost 27, and thinking back on three years as if they contained a whole lifetime of activities within them. But they did, and while I had no plans to stop immersing myself in whatever bits of nature I could find after this evening, I knew it would be different going forward because it would be without trailwork.

Trailwork had been the key that made my move out west possible, the gateway to my love for, and appreciation of, the high country. It was like saying goodbye to an old friend. So, while I had come to escape the weather and do schoolwork, I began instead to drift and found myself escaping back to the stories that had taken me away from my previous life, and brought me all the way to this moment.

It was a beautiful meditation and a fitting tribute, a poignant farewell to trails.

Now, years later, the thoughts from that night have fermented, aged and matured, and I think I’ve finally found the words to match the meditation I had, that cold night at the Crown.