It’s that time of year when snow is coming down enough to be trivial for skiing but consequential for riding bikes. So today I took a drive to look into places to ride the snow bike and to do some backcountry skiing in the eastern hills. I found an awesome road to do some winter bike riding on. The snow on it was so packed that I could drive my truck up it without trouble. Should have had the snow bike. I had my truck so I went up there.

That was a spur road off the main highway that leads over the mountain to a little valley where some old time farmers still live, Tabiona. I’d like to get up in there just to check it out. The town lies in the middle of a national forest with no major highway passing through it, just a county road.

As I traveled along the grey sky began to let snow fall. It was reminiscent of winter days, traveling through desert places and touring through canyons and across slopes to find high ridge lines and peaks. In those moments I moved across the snow in an almost ethereal daze feeling the energy of being alive. At peak’s pinnacle I could gaze across mountains and ridges to vast expanses of deserts and in the other direction to vast ranges of other mountains. In the moment hiking up a bootpack path on the knife edge of a steep ridge through four feet of fresh snow I feel closer to something; something I’m unsure how to explain. I’m unsure because I don’t know if I even know what it is.

It’s like this for me when the snow is just right. I’m happy at the chaotic situation and ecstatic to be alive in the chaos. If, on those days, I’d been at home missing the experience, I don’t think I’d know what it is to feel alive. When the snow is like this and I am moving through it I cannot help but feel that I have a purpose, that adventure is my sole reason for being. It’s like traveling through wilderness has always been for me. I am at home. I feel good about it.

And as I move through snow and wild I’m left with myself and a few close friends in a world far removed from the nests of civilization and economic structure. It is there, in those moments that living relies on the ability to stay alive. It means more than going to sleep, waking up, washing vegetables from the store, fresh linens, and knowledge of what the poverty stricken people half way around the world are dying. It becomes my survival. If I hesitate or deviate just a little, it could mean the end. It requires just enough.

But is that really why any of us go? There has to be something more. That’s not what Everett Reuss was after. There must be something more.