Hope in the Mountains

I hate to give the blog title away in the first sentence but something tells me it’s not much of a thriller anyways; my good friend, Hope, came to visit me in Montana! It was all too exciting to

have a friend from back home tag along to get a load of my new homestead. Hope had just begun a month-long journey across the country in a van that she personally converted. A tenacious and daunting solo trip as adventurous an idea as her personality. Her bright white rig pulled into the parking lot and before I knew it, we were dragging the poor girl uphill on a mountain path just rocky enough to justify the name of the mountains themselves. We were headed for an alpine lake Hope had her eye on long before arriving and every person we flagged down as we passed them assured us, we were almost there. At long last the van cleared one last dip in the road and we saw the turquoise water glistening between staggered and thin ponderosa pines. Hope and I methodically unloaded my kayak and her paddleboard from the top of the van and began the trek down the trail to the shore.

Hope’s head spun like an owl as she tried to capture the stiff peaks, layers of evergreen, and the fluorescent lake all in one moment. I let the peace of the white afternoon sun scintillating on the blue lake settle into my skin then dragged my kayak over the water. We paddled around the small, amiable lake until intermittent gusts of winds encouraged us to hang on shore where Hope hung a bright orange hammock and I fished. I laughed as every panther martin and rooster tail with a treble hook would get lodged between rocks no matter how I jigged it in each time and I decided I would catch more snags than fish after having to play my line like a guitar to get each lure loose. The best part about not catching fish is realizing you don’t have to at all to still thoroughly enjoy whizzing a brand-new spoon speckled with hope across a brand-new body of water begging to be fished. I’d be lying if I said catching fish doesn’t make it a hell of a lot more fun though. At any rate, we kept our whistles wet with lukewarm beer and caught up on life as the sun lowered over the mountain range and I pretended that each snag was, in fact, a monster rainbow trout or elusive grayling.

The next day quickly came around and the next one after that. Hope spent a total of five days hanging out and graciously let me assist in putting some road under the van’s tires. We made our way to Yellowstone National Park where a brief hike revealed a golden canyon sliced in half by a pressure roiled river and raging waterfall. The sun had struck the canyon just right that day that a rainbow stretched across the gorge. We both agreed that God wasn’t humble about this handy work of his. The orange leaves of the quaking aspens shivered in the wind, their branches like jazz hands. Those trees in the fall are hypnotical. I stared as a single cantaloupe colored leaf raced to the bottom of the gorge and swirled in the powerful mist that bursts from the falls. Hope and I made our way across rivers and roads, by van and by foot. We visited Wade Lake and Lava Lake and chatted with fly fisherman about the pretty views as they stopped in just to get a closer look on their way home from the rivers. We hiked miles upward and questioned our lungs capabilities. At the top of the hikes looking over wide mountain ranges painted in late September colors, we came to appreciate our lungs capabilities. We put back beers in between and Hope even tried and thoroughly enjoyed the elk burgers I whipped up from meat I was lucky enough to snag at work from a hunter I admire that generously gave some away.

Hope is a longtime friend of mine from home and to be able to let the river turn our aching feet numb between subranges of the Rockies in the middle of Montana while laughing about how our friendship blossomed in high school classes, despite the fact that I had busted lip and black eye from missing a catch at softball practice (not my sport, after all) was a blessing in its finest form.

To have the ability to escape screens, and cellphone service, and traffic in a short twenty minutes feels undeserving as I sit here in my little apartment tapping away at my keyboard. To have a friend who likes me enough to drive her newly converted van with as much ground clearance as a corgi an hour uphill and let me get back in the car afterwards: equally undeserving. I have both though and for that I just have to say thanks, to God, to nature, and to my friend Hope – three things that are all great to have. Happy trails on the remainder of your trip, pal. You are undeterred, hilarious, and a great driver – thanks for adding Montana to your list of stops along the way. Hope in the mountains ain’t a bad thing to have, and maybe a fly rod next time instead of the spinning rod. Deepwater rock snags are brutal.