The Wind River Mountains

Wyoming's most extensive mountain range, the Wind River Mountains, rises north of Rock Springs and angles to the northwest just short of the Gros Ventres Mountains, thirty or so miles southeast of Jackson Hole. It makes up nearly 150 miles of the Continental Divide and has over 40 peaks above 13,000 feet. Wyoming's highest point, Gannett Peak, lifts its glacier-capped summit to 13,804 feet in the range's northern section. A surprisingly vast area of its highest cirques remains filled with glaciers to this day--more total area, in fact, than any other range in the lower 48--though, like glaciers all around the earth, they are melting faster than they are building up.

The name of the range is a poem itself, allusive to three of the four primordial elements recognized by the pre-Socratic philosophers: air, water, earth. And because the Wind River Mountains are an igneous intrusion that formed over 1 billion years ago--a type of formation known to geologists as a batholith--the range bears the impressions of its birth in the fourth element, fire. Despite its molten origins, the range as it now appears has been shaped most profoundly by rivers of ice. Since its current glacial remnants began receding just over 18,000 years ago, much of its granitic gneiss, bedrock for 2 and 1/4 million acres of wilderness and primitive areas, is freshly polished and striated, with thousands of lakes and tarns filling the declivities and bowls left behind by the retreating glaciers. These lakes, and the rivers and streams that connect them, are surrounded by forests, wildflower meadows, boulderfields, and steep mountain walls.

A couple weeks ago my son, Eli, who turns 22 in September, and I backpacked into the Dinwoody Basin on the Glacier Trail, which wends 12 rugged miles along the range's northeast flank before entering the Dinwoody's U-shaped valley at the lower apron of Floyd Wilson Meadows. A turquoise stream, which gains its color from tiny particles of silt held in suspension in the meltwater flowing down from the glaciers above, meanders in oxbow bends through deep green willow bogs. At the head of the valley is Gannett Peak. We were accompanied by our good old family dog, Sadie, still fit and frisky at age 12, though her muzzle has turned from black to white.

From our base camp just below treeline, at about 11,000 feet, we ventured off on our fourth day toward a mountain that, so far as I know, remains unnamed. We named it Mystic Mountain, in honor of the Greek word mystos, root for the words "mystic" and "mystery." Mystos is a word meaning silence. We both had experiences that were mystical, in the sense that their deepest manifestations may only be expressed, or apprehended, through silence, much like the lines in the Tao Te Ching that read: "She who knows does not speak. She who speaks does not know."

I can say that we were overwhelmed not only by the scale of the Wind River Mountains, but also by the ceaseless movement of every little thing, from the cells in our bodies to the crystals of hornblende, quartz, feldspar, and mica in rocks and boulders and cliff-faces, most of which have not moved appreciably for thousands of years. But just as DNA is known to transmit photons, the flowers, rocks, and pine trees, along with the water flowing from the glaciers and the clouds above, though all bathed in the brilliant light of the barely filtered sun streaming through the rarefied atmosphere, all seemed to give off a light of their own. I felt wounds that had remained open for many years slowly being healed from the inside-out, which intensified my awareness that life is a wound we are given to feel, not heal, a wound through which we have a chance to give birth to our true selves, our souls.

When we returned to our base camp, Eli climbed barefoot along the smoothly polished granite next to the roaring cascades of Dinwoody Creek. From about a hundred meters above him, with the roar and mist of the torrent filling the air, I could see him open his arms to the great valley below, draw forth the sorrows in which his heart had been packed, and heave with sobs of love and joy and gratitude. A resonant, empathic pulse rippled through my heart, and there we stood, our roles as father and son falling away from us, two free souls opening to the world, moved, as Dante writes at the end of the Comedia, "by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Two days later we hiked out of the Wind River Mountains. And two days after that, we returned to our independent lives: he to Colorado Springs where he is soon to begin his junior year at Colorado College, me to my students and fellow teachers at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, Washington. I cannot speak for Eli, but I know our experiences in the mountains have changed me--are changing me--in subtle and profound ways. Those mountains are influencing me, apparently without any conscious will or effort on my part, to open my heart to the world, to find ways to uplift the lives of others, and to listen deeply and humbly to this great living being called Earth, our dear home.