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The backcountry is wilder than the other, more frequented spots. I ride my bike there and hike or run there when I can. In the winter it is the only place to have unfettered control of the kind of snow you want to play in: untouched. Looking out from the top of Snowbird I gazed across the narrow canyon to the peak of Superior. It reminded me of something I had forgotten and now I’m aching to get out to it.
Backcountry travel in winter has its hazards but what hazard will stop the man from adventure? Today, in another part of the Wasatch mountain range I left the groomed slopes to hike through the woods on a nostalgic adventure high in the hills. I had no concerns as my trek would never leave the trees.
Thankfully someone before me, many someones, had done the grueling work of postholing up the hillside making my hike brisk at worst. I rode down through genuinely untouched snow on my day’s best run.
There is something primordial about winter adventure. I can’t name it or recall it from the collective consciousness of humanity but it has something to do with life and death. It seems that the only time I’m at ease with life is when there is a possibility of peril. I expect that I will see life through these trees my entire existence. But on these trails that have no name that take you to beautiful places and into adventure I will roam.
I think that I’ve been having interesting dreams, dreams that I would like to never repeat. It’s like the media and the social decline of civilization permeate the recesses of the brain and in sleep it comes out in dreams. The awful repercussions are dreams of violence, confines, and inexplicable reluctance. Why these dreams?
Why do we dream about being late for work? or getting in fight with our boss? Why do we dream about violent things? Why aren’t dreams like they are in the movies?
Dreams in the movies portray places of serenity and peace, nature and an abundance of green. But how can you dream of that if your existence is one of pollution, noise, and cement? Then into the room steps Edward Abbey and Everett Reuss. And then you wonder, these men, who spent so much time in the wild and open places of the desert southwest; what did they dream about? Were Ed’s dreams of Caro syrup in backhoe fuel tanks? Did Everett dream of coyotes howling to the moon on a clouded night in Mesa Verde?
I want those dreams. Dreams of wild places and road that lead off into the sunset, to hamper forever the nightmarish dreams of a civilized world gone awry.
