It was clear as well that he hoped I would say no. The chain of command discouraged direct communication between a ranger district and the regional office staff, and with his phone call Norm revealed the breach of protocol that he was trying to repair. I understood the offer as a necessary gesture, acknowledgment that someone representing the supervisor’s office should be included whenever the regional trail coordinator from Missoula was invited to the forest. My boss was not available that week, so Norm, the district’s trail manager, called to ask if I wanted to join them. As it happened, the local ranger district had arranged a tour of the Gallatin Crest Trail. I meant to come to Windy Pass alone, but my final weeks in Montana were filled with packing boxes and attempting to sell the house that neither I nor my husband, Don, could bear to leave. After years of believing I had loved my job as well as that magnificent wild land, I saw the truth: I did not belong. When I looked across the valley again the beauty was overwhelming, but something in me slammed shut like a metal door. I dropped to my knees and forearms and pressed my forehead into the soft, forgiving earth, clutching tufts of alpine rush as if their wiry strength would hold me there. I turned from the mountains to focus on immediate surroundings: the sweet floral scent that came in waves from the lupine the native grasses, like horses’ manes finely combed by a gentle wind. I was moving away and I knew I would never climb those peaks again. Memories-of backpacking trips and day hikes and ski tours-lay heavy in my heart. The kind of day that should have made my heart swell as I reached the crest of the Gallatin Range.īut the scenery only deepened my sorrow as I looked across Paradise Valley to the corona of summits of the northern Absarokas. The air was crystalline that first week in July, too early in the season for the wildfires of 1988 to erase the view of mountains on all horizons. I climbed into the thinning air and the forest gave way to meadows and scattered clumps of whitebark pine. A gap along the crest of the Gallatin Range, surrounded by mountains and perfumed by wild phlox and lupine, it was among the places that offered refuge during the past six years, one that could be counted on to bring me clarity and solace.
One task was left to me before leaving Montana, to bid farewell to Windy Pass.
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