AUTUMN COMES EARLY to Colorado’s high country. It doesn’t wait until October to get going the way it does back where I grew up in London, but instead begins altering the landscape even before August is done. The thrill and wonder of it catches me out pretty much every year.
When I set out uphill on August 24th I certainly wasn’t thinking autumnal thoughts. Instead, I was still in a summery frame of mind, and dressed in shorts and tee to match. It was August after all, and the sun was shining with real warmth even though the day was only a few minutes old. I’d parked at an empty lot a mile and half downhill from one of Colorado’s busiest hiking locations, where no doubt several hundred cars were already parked, but I set off uphill and off-trail into a steeply-rising forest… alone, as I was to remain for the next thirty-two hours
My chosen route was one I’d looked at from afar for years: a steep haul through the forest to treeline, then a great traversing loop around a broad bowl to reach camp. Camp lay directly beneath a hugely popular peak, but hidden from it within a deep cirque that very few people ever visit. Hemmed between vertical rock walls on one side and a tangled willow maze on the other the location is surprisingly difficult to reach, and for most people simply not worth the effort. And this makes it perfect to my mind – safe from the ravages of those who don’t know how to visit nature without leaving their mark.
The forest start of my walk went smoothly, with no mark left by myself on the forest… or by the forest on me! Until one learns how to travel gently, off-trail forest walking can leave quite a mark of its own! Think torn skin and clothes. Think pine needles, twigs and moss caught in the hair, and muddied knees, and scraped and frayed backpacks. Think streaming sweat! Off-trail, there are toppled trees to weave over and under, and spear-sharp branches to constantly avoid, and tight thickets of clawing limbs to negotiate, and steep, unstable, ankle-threatening ground to cross. But there’s great beauty in all of these obstacles. There’s beauty in the rough-edged surfaces and details, beauty in the puzzle-solving that’s needed to find a way through, and beauty most of all in the authenticity of it all. A trail can make a forest too easy, cut a visitor off from a forest’s real nature. But trail-less can reveal the forest as it really is.
Go off-trail into a forest and one can feel like the very first person to ever visit it, the first to ever step on any particular patch of sacred earth. It’s a heady feeling, and one that prompts deep respect. Well, for me it prompts respect. It makes me really want to step gently, both for the forest’s sake and also for other people who might one day follow, people who might also come seeking the rare rewards that only untrammeled nature can provide.
In my younger days I used to rush through such wild forests, feeling unsettled by not knowing exactly where in the landscape I was. But those anxieties have long gone. Now, I feel profoundly relaxed, perfectly content to ‘feel’ my way through the trees, knowing what to expect, knowing that my passage will take as long as it takes, knowing it will all work out no matter how many rough surprises lie ahead. On this walk – as on pretty much every walk over the last year and a half – I didn’t even carry a map. It wasn’t wanted or needed. Maps are for visitors, but I wasn’t visiting. Here, I was home, even if I’d never ventured into this exact corner of home before.
Progress went well. I gained the forest’s edge without drama – without even breaking sweat – and reached open ground above. Before me now stretched a broad bowl. It was filled to the brim with willows and sprinkled with beaver-built pools. My route circled above it on sunlit slopes. Out here in the open away from the warm stillness of forest air a chill breeze blew, instantly raising goosebumps on my bare arms. It was a sudden taste of another season – and not of summer. And it wasn’t only this half-forgotten chill that prompted goosebumps but also the appearance of the landscape now ahead… the ambiance of it… above all the feeling.
Since the previous week everything had altered. What had been verdantly green only seven days earlier was now burnished – edged subtly with copper, russet and gold. Vegetation that had seemed brilliantly alive now seemed partially subdued, as though resigned to an unstoppable fate. Air that had been crisp and sharp was now softened. The entire scene was somehow earthier, damper, muted. But it was also, simultaneously, shining. There was a golden hue to the land that set my pulse racing.
It was a hint of autumn. It was change!
I’ve grown to treasure change, and not only change in nature but in life as well. Change is inevitable in all things, impossible to avoid or fight, pointless to fear. The security of stability that we are programmed to seek and cling to can only ever be a fleeting illusion… or so nature has shown me. Summer in life cannot ever be eternal. Change is to be expected, accepted, and even welcomed and embraced. It’s a cliché but true: the only thing that will never change in life is change itself.
In nature, the most thrilling change for me is the change of the seasons – especially that tipping point where one season suddenly spills over into the next. It’s a change that has nothing to do with dates on a calendar and everything to do with the realities on the ground, with what the land and its inhabitants are ‘saying’, and above all with the feeling of where in the year one is standing. The more time one spends in nature the stronger that feeling can be. It’s an awareness built upon connection. On each of my long walks there was always a single moment when I looked around and ‘knew’ in an instant that summer was over and autumn had begun. In the Alps and Pyrenees that moment of recognition occurred in September. In the Arctic during my longest walk it came at the end of August. And in Colorado this year there autumn suddenly was, present in the bowl right before me, even though the date was a summer-sounding August 24th! It was clearly evident in the willow leaves already on the turn, in the thicker, softer light, in the chill wind, in the damp feel of the air, and in the scarlet vegetation on the tundra above. Autumn had begun… change occurring… to be embraced and celebrated… and celebrate it I did as I walked onward towards camp.
The following photos chronicle this ‘early’ start to autumn. They celebrate it, I hope. They were taken during the outing described above as I circled the bowl to camp. And they were taken during the outing that followed a week later. I hope they hint at how this early arrival of autumn made me feel. I hope they share some of the joy I experienced, and some of the ever-growing affection I feel for this special, fragile High Country home…
Visit gently my friends!
