Mountains

I've got to be honest about where my loyalties lie. I am strangely not the type to lament the arrival of colder weather. My California and Arizona friends marvel at my deep and true love for winter with it's shorter days and longer nights. I will always love the feeling of walking out into the crisp winter night and breathing deep, feeling that cold air fill every space in my lungs. I love the smell of frosty pine and I find snow absolutely enchanting the way it sparkles and spins as it falls in perfect white sheets, making everything look untouched as if I'm the first to see it. Things feel different in winter air. Winter looks, feels and smells like Christmas. Maybe it's because I'm a Christmas baby... I am fully converted to winter. The roommates and I decorated for Christmas this weekend and it just feels better here. Sparkly twinkly lights everywhere.

I went running yesterday morning and marveled a bit. As the sun rose over snow-covered Y mountain I stopped my run and took a seat on the curb while gazing up at the rosy pinks, pale peaches and deep lavenders spread across the sky. No painting or photo can capture that kind of color- they exist only in the moment and then they're gone. Looking towards the mountains made me reflect on a bunch of decisions I've made as a result of mountains. Just as things feel different in winter air, everything is different up in mountain air. I think clearer, I breathe deeper, I see better, I feel easier. It sounds cheesy and like I'm quoting Backpacker Magazine or something but it's true. I was taught to love the mountains from the time I was a little girl and suddenly while sitting on the freezing cement curb, I remembered that. I remembered what the sun felt like on my back and how the air tasted like aspens. I remembered the great feeling of looking out over the valley and down to where a trailhead began and realizing that I conquered something. 

Six years ago I was a lot younger. At twenty, I hadn't yet had some important experiences that shape and define who I am today. I had just completed a class at BYU called Wilderness Writing in which we spent most of our time hiking, backpacking, and camping and then recording our experiences in personal essays. It was during a backpacking trip in southern utah with that class that I decided to go on a study abroad with the same professor. It was on that study abroad in the British Isles, backpacking several hundred miles across the Scottish and English countryside, that I decided to serve a mission. It was on a hike in the Tuscan Mountains on my first P-Day on my mission that I fell in love with Italy. It was while hiking Timp that I decided to apply for a job at the MTC. It was while up at the cabin in the mountains that I decided to apply for my current job as Training Coordinator at the MTC. And if you'd like to hear more about what Hiking Mount Kilimanjaro meant to me, read the posts from September. I have made some of my best decisions in the mountains.

So yesterday morning while watching the colors of the sunrise fade in to classic blues and the light begin to fill the valley, I'll admit that I began to wish winter away just a little. I've got some pretty big decisions to make in the next year and I need my mountains.