Horizon Walking by Leath Tonino

Note: A version of this essay originally appeared in the magazine 5280.

Anybody who has visited Crested Butte, Colorado knows that the mountains here form a ring, a hoop, a circle around the village. Turn left—there’s Whetstone holding up the sky’s blue emptiness. Turn right—there’s Gothic washed in peachy alpenglow. You can spin yourself dizzy counting the peaks and notches, tracing the Elk Range horizon with your eyes.

And know what else you can do? Walk that horizon, that wild line where earth meets open air. Or at the very least you can try to walk it. As my worn leather boots have discovered, this is far from a straightforward task.

For two years now—years of ptarmigans and marmots, flowery meadows and precarious pinnacles, electrical storms and double rainbows—I've been on an exhausting, enlivening, always unpredictable quest to ramble every ridge visible from town. The White Rock massif? Check. The band of woods bending southwest from Red Lady? Check. Season after season, weekend after weekend, I find myself drawn upward: no map, no plan beyond the topography itself. Who needs a trail when you’ve got the land offering directions, suggesting routes?

This obsession with what I call horizon walking began innocently enough. Following college on the Front Range and a footloose decade roaming the alphabetic West (AZ to CA to UT to WY), I returned to the Colorado Rockies, settling in Crested Butte. September is a famously cool, clear, golden month, so it was a no-brainer: I welcomed myself back with a stroll among aspens. Quite by accident, that stroll became a sweaty bushwhack through spruce thickets, which in turn became a huff-and-puff ascent of talus aprons, crumbly ledges, and finally some random summit block. I say “random” because at the time I wasn’t aware of toponyms, let alone how the expansive terrain jigsawed together.

Perched aloft in wind and bright light, bear-thick valleys and hawk-cut clouds reaching toward all compass points, my awareness was immediate, visceral—and it gave rise to inspiration. I’m new to this place, I thought, but I will learn its complex structure with my feet. Sure enough, a week later I was tiptoeing the knife edge between Augusta and Purple, graupel squalls threatening, my face cracked into a grin.

So it began. And this is the fun bit: so it continues, onward into the inexhaustible future.

You see, my quest is patently impossible. Shift an inch on the sidewalk and the horizon reveals secrets: cols and groves and snowfields and swaybacked spines. Better yet, cross the street and—whoa!—entire worlds of unnoticed geology appear. The landscape is finite but somehow infinite, forever expanding in the mind that would attempt to grasp it, label it understood, cinch it tight with a cute little bow. Therein lies the beautiful challenge and challenging beauty.

Recall the sculptor Rodin’s dictum, toujours travailler: “always work.” Likewise, recall the sculptor Henry Moore’s belief (cribbed from Rodin?) that the key to a fulfilling life is having a project you can’t complete, a project that keeps you hungry, active, springing from bed each morning, eager to try again, to engage anew. The impossible quest, these artists might say, is the only quest worth attempting. Defeat at the hands of the impossible is our sweetest success.

As the excursions layer in memory—squeaky pikas, chartreuse lichens, sketchy traverses of serrated granite—I come to realize that my initial goal of comprehensively “learning” the Elk Range has in fact been, from the outset, merely the means to a more satisfying end. The real goal is feeling your local environment as a continuously unfurling terrain, a mystery that pulls you into its fine-grained details, inviting you to explore and keep exploring.

That’s what I do. I explore. I keep exploring. I revel in the process, the unstoppable ticklist of this rugged, intricate, spin-you-dizzy skyline. Last weekend it was Anthracite to Baldy via an old mining road and an obscenely steep pitch of scree. Next weekend it will be, hmm, maybe Teocalli north toward Coffeepot Pass? I suspect my eager boots will make the decision for me when Saturday arrives. Meantime, I’m going to linger on a park bench, my gaze turned to the ring of home, the hoop of place, the circle of mountains that goes and goes and goes.

Finish the horizon walking for good? Cinch those mountains with a cute little bow?

Bah!

Toujours travailler, my friends, toujours travailler.

Leath Tonino was the recipient of the 2019 Desert Writers Award. He has published more than 135 articles and essays in a variety of journals and magazines. His work as a writer frequently takes him outdoors and into mountains, plains, and deserts across the U.S. He is predominately a writer of the wild back-country wherever he can find it.