Today, my husband and I went for a walk at high elevation. In this case, it was a short trip up to Loveland Pass, where a trail takes you up to the continental divide. 

 

We're hitting the point where the tundra foliage is beginning to turn. The aspens below have a few points where they're beginning to turn yellow, but we're not yet at full fall foliage yet. This was more of an exploratory run so that we could keep an eye on things.

 

This tea is lovely: sweet and a little bit mild, and probably the perfect counterpoint for cool wind and clouds scudding along at about 12,000 feet.

 

There is a special joy in gong-fu style tea in high, empty, wild places. The water inevitably spills as you pour and soaks into dry ground, nourishing plants coming to the end of the growing season. Every sip is taken looking out over long vistas of great mountains. Pikas squeak; some of them, a little too familiar with the gentle hikers a place like this get, venture in close, noses twitching, as if they too want to inhale the sweetness of a raw pu-erh.

 

Mountains are old: you get a sense of that at the top of them, clouds so close you feel like they are just within your reach. The continental divide is the literal spine of America, the highest place in the land, and from it, the world is beautiful.

 

On the way up to the mountains, we saw a stream of cars: police cars, ambulances. The ambulances went blaring by, lights and sirens, in both directions. We thought that perhaps there might be a car accident but we never saw anything on the road that looked like it. Perhaps, we said in the car,  it was an accident just off I-70.

 

When we got home, we found out that three people had been shot at Evergreen High School: those were the ambulances we had seen.

 

I try not to let myself become inured to school shootings. I try not to let myself think that it is normal that children must be shot, that this is a thing we must endure. I try to let myself feel the horror and grief every time, because this is not okay. It will never be okay. Our children should never have to endure this.

 

The tea becomes ever more appropriate to the time. I assume that the name is a reference to a Wendell Berry poem called “The Peace of Wild Things.”

 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Day-blind stars is a tea from white2tea.

I learned something about my body this week. (Actually, three somethings, but I'm only going to talk about one in the moment.)

 

This Tuesday, we found out at the last minute that Killian Jornet was going to be speaking at the Denver REI. For those of you who do not know, which is probably many of you, because many of you do not have husbands who like to run hundred mile races, Killian is the GOAT of trail running. He has won every major trail race, some of them many times. He has broken course records. He is also mountaineer who has broken course records on most of the world's biggest mountains.

 

He is in the United States right now because he is doing a project called “States of Elevation” to call attention to our need to care for wild places. In this project, he is attempting to summit every single peak in the lower 48 states that is higher than 14,000 feet. That alone would be a record-breaking feat, but he is linking the summits with only human power, by running or walking or biking between the summits. Along the way, he will stop to raise awareness for local groups that are caring for the land they live on, nurture community trail restoration, and have community runs. It's an amazing project and in most times, this would be a tale for the ages. (Right now I worry that his biggest hurdles are things like not getting hit with a car or kidnapped by ICE because he's a slightly dark-skinned guy with a Spanish-sounding accent.)

 

In any event, we had already gone on a walk, but we hustled over to light rail, then walked from Union Station to the REI. We got there a quarter of an hour before what we thought was the start of the event. 

 

It turns out the start of the event was a 5K run. I'm not a runner, but I looked at the time allotted in the schedule for it and said, “I can't run that, but I sure can walk that.” So I did. Then we listened to Killian talk, walked back to Union Station, took light rail, and headed back home.

 

All in all, it ended up being around an eleven mile day for me.

 

My knee felt amazing. This was encouraging. My knee is still in a process of healing from the last injury, and I had realized that movement was good for it, but I didn't realize exactly how good. This last week I have been trying to get out more and more, simply because the more I do, the better my knee feels. In one week I've regained more range of motion than I got in the prior two months. 

 

It feels very encouraging. I strongly suspect that I will have to keep this up for a while: knees heal very, very slowly (if at all) so I will be considering strategies to make this work with the other things I need to do.

 

But I have averaged around seven miles a day for the last week, including the low-energy post-vaccine Sunday, and it's helping.

I have apparently forgotten to include the tip jar for months on end.

 

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