10.8: Mount Antero, find where you thrive & please (please) run there.

14,269ft.
Sawatch Range
30/58

“.. I have an opportunity to go on a hike this week ..” I blurted out to my physical therapist as she was trying to wrap up my session. I had waited the entire hour to mention it and I intently watched her face to gauge a reaction the second those words fell out of my mouth. I felt like I was back in elementary school, asking my parents permission to do something I already knew they didn’t approve of. (There’s a tiny chance I left out the 14er detail).

“You won’t be doing yourself any favors,” she hesitantly said, “but you probably won’t injure it worse ..”

That was all I needed, mountains have become my rest, my victory and my recalibration. I crave them. I need them.

In the past month I’ve tried my best to gracefully balance full time work and full time school. I’ve been living off of tortillas and almond butter. I’ve struggled to fall asleep most nights due to the aforementioned leg issue and the nights it’s tolerable are, without fail, the nights I have homework. My toilet is broken, my room is a mess. The Steelers lost to the Ravens a few weeks ago. Today, my carpool dropped me off after school, I got out of the car and walked straight past my own front door; “I just walked right past my house,” I unnecessarily confessed to a stranger walking their dog, as I turned around and retraced my steps home.

Over this month, I’ve perpetually neglected to condition my hair because I keep forgetting to pick up conditioner at the store. I haven’t seen my roommate in weeks. I’ve dealt with the ache that is unreciprocated vulnerability. I’ve lost sight, and at times, grip of growth and progress I’ve made. By now, I should have my own revolving door to the courthouse and a few days ago I spent a solid minute trying to find the “cook time” button on a microwave. I eventually gave up and ate my food cold.

Oh, and in this time, three people I care for deeply left this earth. One who inspired and encouraged me regularly and whose absence is felt every time I climb a mountain, one with whom I feel I abandoned and lacked closure with and one who will leave an empty seat at my family’s holiday celebrations this year.

I’ve been fumbling forward and hanging in there. But maybe the microwave manufacturers could collaborate and agree to put that damn button in the same spot. I think that would make a big difference.

I agreed to set October 8th aside over a month ago, to hike with a friend I met on a different hike earlier this summer. Our initial plan included two separate 14ers. It was an elaborate and perfect plan and it was comprised entirely of my dream to have a healed leg and our ignorant reliance on a conducive weather forecast.

As the calendar date approached, both my injury and a storm prediction rearranged everything we had planned on.

We scrambled to throw a backup plan together, which included lodging at a hostel I knew of in Leadville. We still managed to check off another 14er (my 30th, his 41st, Arlo’s 15th and another friends something-th) and we did so in what the weather forecast called “hurricane force winds,” which proved to be nothing short of a blizzard.

There’s a lot more that could be recounted about the climb itself, but this time I have a little less to say about that because I have a little more to say about something else. (And then I’ll go back to retroactively writing about 14ers, because I’m still eleven of them behind).

“Hi Kate here is some good news for you: I was nominated for the senior award of the year at the senior center I went to receive my award as soon as I get a picture I will send to you, have a wonderful weekend it’s been cold over here and getting cooler expecting some snow in parts of Colorado love and God bless have fun from your friend from the hostel.”

I received this email right before I got in my car to drive to Leadville. It is from a dear friend I met at a different mountain-town hostel back in December. I recently reconnected with him and he sends me regular updates about his life. I quickly responded, I told him I was proud of him and not one bit surprised, that I couldn’t wait to see the picture and then I began driving southwest. I spent a good chunk of my drive on the phone with a friend I met in Spain. And when I arrived at the hostel three hours later, I was greeted by a friend I met on top of a mountain in June.

We checked in, got a few hours of sleep and then drove to our mountain. We hiked, we summited, they dropped me off and drove back to Denver and I stayed at the quaint little hostel a second night. Burnt out from a day of battling elements and the weight of processing through life’s recent events, I begrudgingly retreated to my room where I curled up near the space heater and wrote and sobbed and kept healing. Before I fell asleep, I resolved to crawl out of my room first thing in the next morning, rightfully giddy about the potential of new friendships.

I’ve spent over a months-worth of nights in hostels this past calendar year. Some of my best laughs, most cherished friendships and favorite memories have been made gathered around their tables, pianos and fireplaces; or on the front porch watching the snow fall as we shared a bottle of wine, life stories and a cigarette. Hostels have become a place of solace for me. I crave adventure, but I crave the community adventure cultivates even more. I crave the way it brings people together who wouldn’t have met otherwise. I crave the stories. I crave encounters with the people who you meet and walk alongside and say “I’m hurting, too, but I have room to write you into my story.”

When I woke up that next morning, I made breakfast and talked with a pair sitting at the kitchen table. One thanked me for what I do and told me the story of how his life had been literally preserved and elongated by others out there in the same line of work I’m in. I talked with the new hostel owner, who made it easy for me to get carried away with what calling a mountain town “home” might be like someday. I met another pair who had stumbled upon the hostel as a place of retreat after the previous days storm ended their Colorado Trail trek prematurely. And I met a man who’s feet had carried him from Delaware to that very room in Leadville, Colorado. His finish line was San Diego, California and I was instantly drawn to him, entranced with the stories I hadn’t yet heard but knew existed.

A few hours later, we stood in the bitter cold as he got drone footage for a documentary he’s making. Through chattering teeth, we shared bits and pieces of our stories with one another and we agreed we’d be friends for a long time.

“I think it’s brave that you’re here,” he told me. “I think it’s brave the way you harnessed the negative and turned it into something beautiful, that you were okay with coming here by yourself.”

Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought of the dark places I had been earlier this year. I thought of a friend who recently told me about the way her life had spiraled after her divorce and how I had been on the brink of a similar tale. I thought of my initial decision to drag myself out of bed and drive to the mountains last December and then my decision to walk across Spain in April. I thought of a Bianca Sparacino quote I recently read. I thought of the lie I had begun to re-believe that I was alone.

I thought of the people I wouldn’t have met had I not taken those steps away from the ledge; had I not resolved to run up all of these mountains instead of tumble down them.

I thought of my 77 year-old hostel friend and his senior of the year award. The sixteen year old who is climbing all of the 14ers and is more knowledgeable about mountains than anyone I’ve ever met. The olympic wrestler. The soldier. The guy who owns a nutrition company and generously sends me meal plans and his incredible product for free. The friend I used to lifeguard with and reconnected with after eight years of not talking, thanks to mountains. The girl I met through instagram who has walked a path parallel to the one I’m on. The guy who spontaneously spent four hours driving through the night to hike with me, when unbeknownst to him my anxiety had snuck in and I dreaded hiking alone. The one with an epic platform and the most beautiful vision for creating a space for others to find healing through adventure. And the friend who traveled from Delaware to Leadville Colorado, by foot, looked me in the eye and reminded me life is allowed to be difficult, but resiliency means you were made to recover, to bounce back.

So, here’s what I’m embracing.

You don’t have to stay where you are. You have two feet and a story to tell to a world filled with people who want to hear it; people who want to be found, people who have their own story to tell. Go find them and love them hard. You’ll know you found them because their beauty is contagious and it will grow your capacity to be one of them in the life of someone else.

This part is important, too: when you find them, tell them what they mean to you. If you already have, remind them again and again, it’s never too much. Tell them they showed up when you needed them most. Tell them they bring out your shine, that they make your world and the world that surrounds them brighter everywhere they go because that’s who they are and because you never know when you won’t be able to tell them that.

I stopped to visit a friend on my drive back home later that day. We had been introduced earlier this summer by a mutual friend who isn’t here anymore, one of the three I mentioned earlier in this post. We’ve talked regularly but hadn’t found a time to meet in person. Almost too fittingly, this day was that time. We walked to a nearby lake and talked about life and adventure and we reminisced about our mutual friend and what he meant to each of us. We spoke of his legacy and smiled about the fact that part of that legacy is that we now knew each other.

“Happiness is only real when shared.” – Christopher McCandless