Plan Your Course Now

At a small cutoff in the trail, we waited in huddles for the remaining climbing gear to descend the mountain. The sun was near setting and the looming canyon walls cast large shadows with only a few pockets of sunlight for us to scurry towards to stay warm. Together as classmates we joked and reminisced over the events of the semester. I remember regretting not bringing a thicker jacket as the night air began rolling in. However, this seemed hardly a nuisance as the lively nature of our conversation distracted us from the chilled winds cutting through Rock Canyon. This was the last time we would find ourselves together like this. The class itself would continue into December, but our days of climbing together would not.

Last semester, through the guided teaching of my Wilderness Writing professor, combined with the therapeutic benefits of nature, I discovered the importance of choosing wisely our zero-or-a-hundred moments. Rapelling off cliff faces into aspen trees below required me to be all in; the drive home at dusk from a faraway forest thrived in my passivity; thought-provoking prompts in my leather-bound journal required everything along the spectrum, capturing in words everything that these experiences had to offer me. The class became the catalyst for all these realizations, as we were taught the beauty of written reflection. As vivid as our experiences are, our written reflections are what capture their importance in time. Though the color of memories may fade, the words that capture our colorful experiences do not lose their detail. Without written reflection, the realizations I have had through my own all-or-nothing moments would have been bound by time stamps of the past. It is through written reflection that our experiences transcend these limits, and become lasting parts of who we are.

Planting our skis and poles into the snow so they stuck up like giant misshapen toothpicks, our little group tromped over towards the edge of the ridge. We perched along the knobby length of a log, chatting and looking out over the sparkling Uinta slopes. I think it was our TA, Wyeth, who first asked me if I needed some water or a granola bar. I was conspicuously free of any kind of pack for an afternoon of cross-country skiing. Anxious to practice faster skiing, I’d skied ahead of my friend with whom I was supposed to swap carrying a backpack with water and snacks for the both of us—only to find out a mile or two later that this group wasn’t planning on going the same route as the other half of the class left behind. And my friend had the bag.