Three years ago to the month I stood at the pass looking down on these impossibly blue bodies of water nestled neatly some five hundred feet down below. Sat for a moment on a lichen encrusted out cropping then turned and left to make it the ten miles back to the road swearing I'd return to spend the night. Life, as we know, has it's own inertia, choices kick off rock slides we feel powerless to extract ourselves from once the decent is begun. So on the sharp edge of gains and losses I drug myself up the mountain, half out of my head with grief, to make good on that oath; escaping the inertia created when this place was covered in snow.
Early spring the salmon berries send out their precocious blossoms at the first hint of warming weather and longer periods of sun; trillium, if not for their triune symmetry of petals and bracts would be gaudy, too starkly luminous against the deep greens of the forest floor, signal not the beginning but a time become. Walking this weekend through the low land forest and sub alpine ridges the feeling is one of unraveling, grand last stands. All things seemed to be anticipating the cold, clinging to the vestiges of the waning sun: a transient time.
My feet are bloodied, tan wool soaked through with the color sub alpine blue berries leave on fingers. My hips are raw from the ill fitting pack and my arms are creased with gouges from from the rocks as I moved too quickly down the scree in fog dense enough to make me question the wisdom of my path. A transient time, a time to overcome inertia with a force greater.
