By Hayden Mellsop
Twenty minutes from home is a ski area I sometimes go to. Leaving town, I drive up into the mountains, from sunshine into clouds and a whole other world. It’s not a particularly fashionable resort. The parking lot is small and full of tattered Toyotas and sticker-clad Subarus. The lifts aren’t heated and are kind of slow, and sometimes they break down. Chances are you won’t share a chair with someone who is followed on Twitter, but that’s why I like it.
The best days for me aren’t bluebird, but rather those when the weather is shrouded and grey. The air is still and flakes of snow fall fatly, settling on my clothing as I take the lift. I stand and ride off the chair, my board hissing softly, ghosting through the powder. I turn into the trees, and suddenly I am alone and all is quiet, ducking and carving, floating on clouds until I drop back onto the run and stand tall, grinning back to the lift.
My legs don’t last like they used to, and after a couple of hours I retreat to the lodge. A fire crackles in the hearth and the air, smelling of damp gloves and Gore-tex, is alive with smiles and the hum of conversation. A bar stool and a red beer work their recuperative magic, and I say hello to friends I strangely encounter hardly anywhere else; then it’s down the pass, out of the clouds and into the sunshine, back to attempting to be a productive human being.
*********************
Twenty minutes from home is a stream I sometimes fish, when I have a couple of hours and feel the need for headspace. It’s a little dusty where it flows alongside the road, and fire rings and campsites dot the open places, but then the road ends. I buckle on a pack and start to hike, up through a steep ravine where the trail cuts across scree and around boulders. Near the top I stop to catch my breath in the trees, and then a meadow opens out before me like the pages of a favorite, familiar book.
Over the aeons the beaver have been busy, and the stream meanders its course through willows and grass soft underfoot. The bed is cobbled with red, brown and gold; the water is slender and clear; and the fish, if you don’t spook them, rise guilelessly to your fly. They slash and turn in the blink of an eye, and many times I miss, but once in a while I connect and my rod bends with the struggle. There are brookies and browns, bright with purple and orange and crimson and yellow, and I cradle them gently in my fingers; then they slither from my grasp and are gone.
I sit against a boulder and close my eyes to the sun. High overhead, a jet plane hurries on its way. I think of the lives of those on board and bet there are not many I’d trade place with, now or anytime soon. I rouse to lengthening shadows and a creeping crispness to the air; it is time to return to home.
*********************
Twenty minutes from home there’s a trail I sometimes ride. Like most trails around here, getting to it means a climb, and I stand on the pedals, breathing a rhythm, pumping my legs and filling my lungs while my mind wanders to places I seldom recall once I get to the top. The road narrows and steepens and slowly tapers to a stop, like it suddenly lost interest in going any higher, and I sit, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, and take in the view and guzzle down water and regain my breath.
While the downhill is fun, it wouldn’t be so without the climb beforehand, reward being defined by effort. I lock in to my pedals again and crouch low over the bars, and the earth rushes past me in a blur, save the narrow strip of single track, my sole focus, thirty feet in front of me. At times I forget where I am, my entire attention on the next turn or twist in the trail. Over my right shoulder an eagle swoops low down the ravine below me, and I steal a glance but that’s all I dare, and it wheels and soars higher.
The trail largely follows an old water course, and depending on the season there’s snow in the shady places or wildflowers blooming or leaves of molten red and gold and hoofprints in the sand. One last climb and I pause on the ridge top. Nestled below me in the valley’s crook sits town, a fledgling against the quiet patience of the mountains, home to lives full of hope and aspiration, fear and doubt, laughter and pain, love and loss. I glide back across the river and pedal lazily through the streets, body tired, mind revived.
A native of New Zealand, Hayden Mellsop lives in Salida, Colorado, where he raises a family, works in real estate, guides fishermen and writes to try and make sense of it all.
