Day 4: Memory

 

What Memory Are You Grateful For?

I am grateful for the memory of hiking up Mt. Blanca.  There was a group of about 10 of, with various levels of hiking experience and physical fitness.  Mt. Blanca is a fifteenish mile (round trip) hike up a 14,000 foot mountain.  Most of the hike is climbing over rocks rather than a smooth dirt path.  Because it's so long, we carried backpacks with tents and food so that we could camp out at the lake on our way back down.  Since many of us (including me) were newbies to this whole endeavor, we got all of our gear - backpacks, sleeping bags, tents - at the local thrift store.  We did have a couple people in the group who knew how to do things like navigate the route, set up the tents, start a fire, and filter water (in case any of you reading this are experienced outdoors people and are starting to panic for us, haha).  

When you hike a fourteener, you leave your house in the middle of the night and hit the trail at the crack of dawn.  We started our hike on schedule, but with the wide variety in our group, it took longer than expected to get to the campsite, longer than expected to set up camp, and by the time we were preparing to do the last couple miles up to the summit, it was noon and clouds were starting to roll in.  The wise thing to do at that point would've been to heed the weather, stick around the campsite, and wait to try to summit until the next morning.  But we had already put in the hard work of rising early, struggling up the long road to the lake, pitching camp, and getting so close, and we all wanted to reach the summit that same day, so we decided to go ahead and keep going to the peak.  

At this point of the hike, the ridge was getting narrower, the boulders were getting bigger, there were ice patches, and the visibility was getting foggier and foggier.  And then, we started to see lightning.  In the cloud that we were right in the middle of, while climbing the narrow, icy ridge near the peak of a mountain.  We all understood that we were in serious danger and needed to turn around immediately, and we all started scrambling down as fast as we could.  There was no visibility in this thundercloud, there were tons of places where we could've taken calamitous falls, and there was the ever-present threat of the lightning.  I'd never been so scared in my whole life.  But somehow, we all made it back that mile and a half to camp alive and without so much as a sprained ankle.

Why am I grateful for this memory?  Because it felt to me like a powerful encounter with God.  I had been struggling with some faith questions and was kind of in a wandering / doubting phase, spiritually.  Being in the literal middle of a storm reminded me of the power of God, and seeing us all be completely delivered from that grave danger, against the odds, reminded me of the gift of salvation.  And it made the things I had been wondering about seem really minor and insignificant, in the face of those big things.  I'm grateful for this adventure, grateful that we all made it through, and grateful for the spiritual clarity that came from the experience.