This past year was a clusterfuck for me, and that’s not using the term lightly. Losing a job in 2022, the year of our lord 2023 held many different hardships that I’d face without really knowing how to face them, seemingly drowning in sorrow and alcohol. The beginning of the year I was fortunate enough to pick up a job that I loved, but beyond that, everything else I had was still falling apart; Dungeons & Dragons campaigns coming to a grinding halt as personal tensions brewed, a relationship I thought to be “the one” fell through my fingers like ashes left after forest fire, and to top it all off, starting in June, I found myself homeless. A far cry from where I was the year before, ontop of the world and feeling like I was living a dream come true.
It’s funny how quickly you can fall from those summits in life. The places where the wine is remarkable, the touch of a loved one is tender, or even signing in to your 9:00am-10:00pm career-defining job is all you need to blast your day into excellence. I thought these things could last forever, or at the very least longer than the span of, in July of 2022, over 7 months. But as piece by piece I fell apart into a puddle of sorrow and self-disdain, sinking to the lowest and most lonesome place I’d ever experienced in the early winter of ‘23, I felt a determination wash over me that this year I would do something big.
I had several options to choose from, a hike to Red Castle, a trip out of state to fish for goldens on the California highlands, or even heading up to Montana for a solo trip to something meaningfully soul-searching. The first big thing that happened in my life in 2023 was when I found the brightest smile on this side of the milky way on the other end of a Himalayan Resturaunt’s jet black table, a date that’d turn out to be something so much more than anything I’d experienced in the past. I was still technically “homeless” at this time, living with friends in a spare room they offered to rent me, and I don’t know how or why this goofy universe decided to bless me with such a beautiful and charming woman to believe in me as much as she does, but my girlfriend Taylor along with a few other online friends encouraged me to shoot for something taller: The tallest point in Utah, King’s Peak.
I set out on my 3 day excursion first camping along Mirror Lake Highway with a friend from work who happened to be in the area and offered to let me pitch my hammock there for the night. Moving from there down the road, I found myself in a bit of a daydrunk daze, fishing cold streams and attempting to sober up so I could get back to the task at hand of driving into Wyoming, up and around to the Northern Slope of the Uintas.
From here, I’ve got a few journal entries that catalogue the adventure so much better than I can now so many months after the trip. But to say it was anything short of transcendant would be a miserable lie; Achieving the hike to King’s Peak was something that helped me find the kindness of strangers, courage and strength from within myself to draw from, and finally realizing that the sense of loneliness I had earlier in the year was at last beginning to mend. I still look back on the things I had throughout 2022 with a fondness I don’t think I will ever forget; My 30th trip around the sun was one to be remember, and my 31st was one that brought me very much back down to earth, perhaps a little too fast and hard.
Standing at the top of that peak, I felt the same sensation of being on top of the earth, but in a completely different and completely tangible sense that left my previous experience feeling like a plastic production which could only imitate what it really means to be alive, what actually matters here. The only sad part about all that is that I can’t tell you what it is that matters most here; It’s something we all need to find for ourselves and define without an outside interpreter telling you this way of life or that method of thought is the way.
Simply put, the way is up. Climb the mountain, find yourself.
