By Annie Dawid
Despite having traveled abroad and lived in diverse places – London, Australia, and a 1951 yellow Jimmy schoolbus in Northern California – these days I don’t want to travel farther than I can see. From my tiny cabin, set in a bowl of the Wet Mountains with a head-on view of the Sangre de Cristos, I see far.
On a crystalline day like today, when the temperature’s zero and the light so bright on the snow I wear sunglasses inside, I glimpse the Huajatollas (Spanish Peaks) sixty miles to the south, and the Collegiates far to the north. No trees obscure my sightline. Mountains and me, my dogs, my son, the sun, and wind. Sky and clouds and nobody else. Here at 9,100 feet, we live at what feels like the top of the world. When I drive home up the steep rocky incline called “Little Bad Hill” – not to be confused with “Big Bad Hill” further south – I leave mundane troubles behind for the heights, where ideas emerge sharper, like the spires of the Crestone Needle due west, and emotions richer, like the plumed cumulonimbus roiling up and anvilling out in summer thunderstorms. Here, I can think, feel, and breathe, unencumbered.