Into the Rawahs

Sue Ellen Campbell & John Calderazo

Originally published by the Vermont Newsletter: Writing Nature.
Edited by Parker Huber.

It's a bright and chilly Sunday morning in October. Our kitchen table is as cluttered as usual—laptop computer, a phone bill, little hills of crumpled receipts and notes on paper napkins, stacks of books, a pair of mugs. Marmot and Weasel, our miniature dachshunds, take turns trying to jump into our laps and then onto the table, where they hope for stray crumbs or, Marmot's unfathomable favorite, balled-up Kleenex. On top of this chaos of plateaus and massifs, canyons and escarpments, we've spread a road map of Colorado, and with a purple marking pen we're tracing the places we've been together.

Except for some parts of the eastern plains, we can color over nearly all the paved and all-weather dirt roads. We draw little circles in the seven places where we've lived or spent a month or more, and tiny dots on some of our most memorable campsites, places we stayed on our honeymoon, anniversary destinations. Over territory we've really explored on foot or skis, we make a purple smudge.

We squiggle in a lot of purple around our current home just northwest of Fort Collins. Spider lines out east through farm grids into the Pawnee National Grasslands and north towards Wyoming. Smudges around three small home circles. Stronger threads and more smudges southwest into Rocky Mountain National Park and across the irrigated river valley where we live now, cupped between rows of the red sandstone ridges that mark the emergence of the Rockies.

We draw one thick line curling west along the Cache la Poudre river canyon (as we say around here, "the Pooder"), up Cameron Pass to the Continental Divide, between the high peaks of the Rawah and Never Summer Ranges, then over into North Park, a wide, cold, spare, windy basin where moose winter among brilliantly colored willows. We trace fine filaments to the sides, marking our ski trails, and one thicker strand running north along the Laramie River road into Wyoming. Finally, we draw a light cluster of dots and a small smudge to mark this summer's explorations—a pair of campsites along the Laramie River and two tiny trail lines into the Rawah Wilderness.

* * * *

Summer solstice. River mist, jungle mist. Mist like the vapor that must rise through the seething Andean gorges of the upper Amazon. Yet here we are, 9000 feet high, at the very northern end of the Colorado Rockies, looking down into a tumbling spring melt blizzard of a "creek" we'd noticed only as a thin blue thread on our map.

We hadn't expected this body-shaking waterfall with its mossy boulders and velvet cliffs, its all-day mist that fractures sunlight into a hundred spinning colors. What a thrill it is to sit on these watersmooth, waterdark rocks, on a day suddenly cooled by the river's damp breath.

At home we often walk in the evenings along a lake where cliff swallows swing down over the water to snatch bugs from the air. Here, electric blue dragonflies are doing the same, clicking and zipping in the rising mist, flashing in the sun, snapping up insects we can't see. And the insects are in turn sipping microscopic drops of water—water that last night was snow.

As hungry as the rest, insatiable for this furious beauty, we sit for hours taking it all in.

* * * *

The air moves lightly against my skin, and all around us leaves take flight. Yellow and gold, green and vermilion, a thousand disks pull free where stem joins branch and spin to the side, through loops and arabesques, up into the bright sky, then down again. Many join the thousands already on the ground, thinning and blackening into earth. Some land on the traces of this week's snow, crisp little drifts marking the shadows with white. A few brush against our heads and shoulders, thighs and swinging arms, lodge briefly on daypack or hat brim, then fall to the trail.

What pulls us to a wondering stop is the countless gleaming aspen leaves strewn over everything else in sight—knee-high sagebrush, smooth granite boulders, tall drying tufts of grasses and wildflowers gone to seed, low strawberry and kinnikinnik leaves turned red, mixed everywhere in a kaleidoscope whirl with the tiny spherical prisms of dew and melted snowflakes. On the soft sprays of fir needles gold leaves lie flat like coins cast onto a table; among the prickly needles of blue spruce they stand upright like coins flashing between the folded knuckles of a magician. They look like chocolate sovereigns covered in gold tinfoil, confetti cut with a huge hole-punch, Christmas tree ornaments strewn with extravagant fingers.

It's one of those moments that feel like pure presence, and yet it's layered, too, in space and time, geography and memory. Like the glittering leaves, other moments flash and sparkle and swirl around us and through us.

Suddenly it's also another September day a few years back, when with our teenaged niece Lea we lay still in a grove of tall straight white aspens. Bits of sunshine shifted and brightened with every invisible motion of the air, our tiniest flyaway hairs pulled lightly at their roots, and we watched astonished as leaves edged loose from their moorings. They spun and twisted in the sunlight, fluttered like butterflies, dipped lower, rose again, then came to rest on our jeans and sweaters, our hair and folded hands, our cheeks and mouths.

Suddenly it's also our last walk on this trail, in June, when we brought the dogs and Lea's little sister, Joy, for their first campout and wilderness hike. All three novices had been nervous the night before as dusk fell, the dogs shivering except when they were wrapped in our arms, Joy reluctant to move more than a few feet away from us. When it was time to sleep, we put Marmot and Weasel in their boxes in the car, safe from mosquitoes and coyotes, and, snug in our sleeping bags and tent, told Joy stories about the mountain nights, the sleeping animals all around us, the shining constellations. In the morning, as the pupsters pulled Joy up this trail, yanking her left and right as they explored all the amazing and mysterious smells, we found piles of fresh moose droppings and a young moose cow, a hairy woodpecker and clouds of tiny brown twittery birds, sweeps of Calypso orchids and tall spikes of almost-open green gentian.

And suddenly it's also one anniversary we spent camping out just north of here on a wide slope of sagebrush and aspen, lupine and paintbrush, hungry mosquitoes and forgotten bug repellent. We sat by our Coleman stove drinking champagne and poaching salmon and cherry tomatoes, looking north into the tawny space of Wyoming, and remembered the lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet "Pied Beauty," which we had chosen as part of our wedding ceremony: "Glory be to God for dappled things . . . For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/ Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings . . . All things counter, original, spare, strange . . . With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;/ He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change . . ."

On this September day in this one place, everything is layered and in motion. The world shimmers, adazzle, and swirling aspen leaves trace what ties the hidden past to the present, summer to fall, ourselves to our families, each of us to the other and to the mountains near our home.

* * * *

Autumn equinox. In light rain, we hurriedly pitch the tent among some golden-leafed aspens just off the Laramie River road, cook and gulp down dinner under a dripping tarp, then zip ourselves in against the wetness and the cold. Rain thuds down on the tent fly for an hour or two, stops, thuds again—or has it turned into fat packets of snow? At 8000 feet, it could easily happen. We'd love that, to wake to a murky, sagging-in tent, crawl out of our bags, and slowly zip open the morning onto a world of ice-glazed aspens and willows, a glassy brightness that would make us squint even through sunglasses.

When we hike or drive through Colorado, we wander along so many of time's directions. As we lie in the tent in raw, almost-winter cold in what's really only the beginning of autumn, we know that the valley we live in on the edge of the plains, just fifty or so wiggly miles down the Poudre Canyon, is still shimmering with mid-summer breezes, our five struggling backyard aspens shaking silvergreen, silvergreen, silvergreen. We also know that to wake up here to pure whiteness is to fast-forward to a mid-winter afternoon when we might ski in to this same campsite on a crust of hip-deep snow—ski in while a few coal-black moose (or so they seem in all the glare), wreathed in the clouds of their deep breathing, watch us from the willows.

On a simpler note, this chilly night marks an anniversary of sorts. Before the cold got serious, we'd planned to let Marmot and Weasel spend the night burrowing into the army blankets we'd tossed into the back seat of the car. Now, though, they're curled up with us for the first time in sleeping bags, and based on the small happy noises the guys are making, what they seem to have burrowed into are richly-scented dreams.

We, meanwhile, are lying in the dark, wide awake, as the could-be snow thuds down. Often on our first night of camping, in the tent or out, we squirm for a while on the world's mattress, adjusting ourselves to these huge mountains which are as silent as gravity. It's a good time to joke around, tell stories, then settle, like our bones, into quiet reflection. To reflect, say, on the hushed community of night: a great-horned owl arrowing down from a nearby treetop, migrations of high-flying cranes, migrations of stars.

But tonight we're much more down to earth.

"So. Where's your pupster?"

"Smushed against my chest like a water bottle. Mmmmm. And yours?"

"Same place!"

We lie in the dark, smiling.

By morning Marmot has worked himself to the bottom of my bag. He's a foot-warmer now, sighing only occasionally in his sleep. It's the only sound on earth.

And then suddenly he's marching up over my calves, my back, my neck. Has he caught the scent of morning light? Heard a coyote slipping through the aspens? He pauses on the back of my head, sticks his nose out of the bag. Weasel's up, too, somehow, and fully caffeinated; they do almost everything together and seem psychic this way.

Wet noses poke into our ears, snuffle through our night-crumpled hair. We laugh and laugh, and I drop deeper into my bag, as though I'll find some leftover sleep in there. Fat chance. And now the guys are hopping and leaping all over the place. We feel like we're being pelted with bean bags. They snarf and wrestle and tumble like the young brothers they are.

Whatever night animals have edged into the campsite have certainly fled. We resign ourselves to the idea that this morning will not be one of those silent, sacred wilderness experiences.

But we're wrong. We're wrong because of what happens after we emerge from the tent. We find not snow but a softly crunching layer of frost on the bent-over grasses in the campsite. The early sun is already warming our backs and the chestnut coats of the strangely calm, sniffing-around pupsters, and all four of us are uncreaking our bones in our own ways.

And then we are drawn to something gleaming in the western sky. High, high up between two closer, snow-and- shadow-dappled mountains shines one of the peaks of the Rawah range.

Icy, icy white against a slate blue sky, it rises out of its own immensity of lower-down dark pine forests and, lower still, swatches of turning aspens—red and gold and orange and a zillion subtleties of green and yellow. It's one of the most gorgeous things we've ever seen. It's a different world up there above treeline, a kingdom of snow and perpetual cold, the last great Ice Age brought forward a hundred centuries to remind us what so much of the continent must have looked like.

At the same time, it's also riveting us—two happy dogs, two happy people—to the here and right now of our Colorado home. Marmot and Weasel root quietly in the shiny grass, and we hold hands and fill our lungs with the beautiful cool air of morning.

©CopyrightSue Ellen Campbell & John Calderazo