Trail good for taking look at some of life’s mountains
I think a lot about mountains. When I’m in a meeting that seems to have no end, I think not just about hiking but mountains as a whole. About a life shaped by mountains.
I grew up and lived in a place where a mountain, or a hint of one, shaped you. We may not think of Albany as a mountain town, but if you’re stuck in traffic on 787 on a clear day, you can see the Blackhead Range of the Catskills. From other places around us, you can spot the Helderbergs, or the Green Mountains of Vermont, or to the north, the foothills that make an appetizer to the Adirondacks.
They are so present, we take them for granted until they’re not around. This may be part of my unease with Florida, which lacks a hint of anything higher than the ground you’re standing on.
I thought about mountains when my dog, Cooper, and I snowshoed along the Long Path in the Helderbergs above Altamont. A previous day’s storm left the trees coated in ice and shimmering in the March sun.
There are mountains all over the Bible. Muhammed received his revelations on Mount Hira and Moses received the commandments from Mount Sinai. The Norse, Greeks, Hindu, Shinto, and Buddhists, just to name a few, have forms of
sacred mountains. We all look up for guidance.
As Cooper and I walked, gentle breezes blew the ice-encased branches together and the woods became a wind chime. Occasionally there was a crash as blocks of ice fell and hit the ground. Cooper carries the brave blood of his wolf ancestors but was unsettled by the noise.
We reached the ledge at High Point. We looked east across the river valley to the small peaks warming up to become the Green Mountains of Vermont. Closer by, the rock layers of the escarpment were topped with snow like a frosted cake.
The Long Path led us toward John Boyd Thacher State Park. The trees were closer together and formed spider webs of ice backlit by brilliant sunshine. There were no other
people and no other sounds except for the gentle chimes of the icy branches as we walked through a cold heaven.
There were more views at Handglider Point. The frosty ridge to our north was spectacular and, in vain, I tried to capture an image of it. The camera or my skills were insufficient, or maybe some things just need to be witnessed instead of captured.
A week before my trip to the Long Path, my wife and I sat with mother-inlaw with a book of her photos. She was an Austrian refugee after World War II and the photos were black and white and taken when people still dressed up when they went out. The people in them, my in-laws, look like movie stars.
We stopped at certain pages because, while I
didn’t recognize the people, I recognized the place. They were sitting by the cliffs of Thacher, sharing the same view Cooper and I would have 50 years later on a snowy March day.
I didn’t know about the pictures of Thacher when my wife, Gillian, decided to celebrate our wedding there more than 20 years ago. I didn’t know how fitting things were, how right our decisions were without us even fully knowing why.
I wanted to push on from Hanglider Point but Cooper was tired from breaking trail so we turned back. The Helderbergs are an escarpment, and not officially mountains, but on that day, they were what we had. I turned west and felt the warm, spring sun on my face and knew that it was enough.