Exit / Salida

I hate to fly, but I love to see other places, so planes are a necessary evil. Things had been rough both personally and professionally for weeks, and I was ready to do just about anything for a break from my life anyway; I felt tight and angry as a fist in need of some kind of release. It isn’t often a vacation happens to be planned at exactly the right time, but thankfully this one was.

The sun broke through a blanket of clouds casting God rays as I approached Denver. My friend Jena picked me up at the airport after a reasonable flight (at least it was non-stop, only 30 minutes late, and had turbulence merely half of the way), and in waning light, we drove almost three hours south to the town of Salida. Even as the night darkened, we oohed and aahed at the mountains and sky around us, profoundly different from either of our homes in Massachusetts and Texas, grateful to be together, to be elsewhere, to be surrounded by an enchanting landscape. When we finally opened the car doors in the gravelly driveway of the yurt we had booked on AirBnB, cool night air perfumed by the local junipers and sage brush washed over us. I looked up at the inky sky glittering with a multitude of stars and exhaled.

The trip had started when, months before, Jena said, “I’ll go back to the mountain with you.”

The mountain in question was the one on which my brother David died nearly 16 years ago. I told her it had felt somehow wrong not having been there on the 15th anniversary of his fatal fall, having visited on the 10th and it being one of those round-number kind of years again. Some of the people in my life (maybe most of them) think it’s strange I wanted to go where the worst thing in my life happened even once, and this was my third foray. But I’ve developed a surprising affection for the Sangre de Cristo mountain range over time, despite what it stole from me. It’s become imbued with the gravitas of a grave while being emblematic of what my brother loved: nature, exploration, awe.

As I wrote in my book about losing David, facing the peak he climbed on his last day — and specifically the behemoth 14,000-foot Little Bear, from which he fell — had been a vital part of my grieving process. Jena knew the importance, and I was deeply touched that she was open, even enthusiastic, about seeing the place I’d talked about for years. We built our get-away around this point.

The town of Salida is positioned at the northernmost point of the Sangre de Cristos. Near the end of our journey, we would be 75 miles away at the southernmost point, in Santa Fe, having continually hugged the edge of the range during our travels, which I found comforting. I hadn’t been to Salida before, but it was only an hour and a half from Little Bear, and another friend had recommended it to us for its art community, good restaurants, and access to lots of fun places to visit. I loved it immediately.

The people were warm and welcoming everywhere we went. We ate amazing brunches and sandwiches and pizza, washed down with local beers. We stopped for a cherry lime rickey (me) and rootbeer float (Jena) at an old fashioned soda counter. Deer strolled through people’s front yards nibbling grass. A wide rainbow arced over on day. At a hipster coffee/gift shop, I bought a pack of “Colorado 14ers” playing cards, and when I opened them, the first three cards I saw were for the last three David summitted: Blanca, Ellingwood, and Little Bear. Nearby, we trammed up Monarch Mountain for views at 12,000 feet; walked through the mining ghost town of St. Elmo feeding chipmunks and watching hummingbirds; watched kayakers in the dangerously high Arkansas River; and I learned Jena’s favorite exclamation when she wanted to stop for a hike: “Trailhead!”

We drove to the San Luis Valley on the day before my birthday. The area near the base of the mountain there is largely flat, expansive, mostly empty of signs of civilization, and crossed with just a few dirt roads that feel like they’ll go on forever. You can’t exactly map to the spot I wanted to get, but I knew it by memory, and Jena sat patiently in the passenger’s seat as I ambled my way there, the rocky terrain making us slower and slower on approach. At last, we ditched the car among the paddle cacti and yucca to walk further. She went off to explore an artistically abandoned railroad car (or shipping container?) that had been dragged there since my last visit while I followed the road up toward the mountain.

I had hoped to find the small cairn my then-husband and I built on the side of the path nearly six years ago where we had released some of David’s ashes, though I knew it was unlikely to have withstood all the time and weather. Instead, I came across a different familiar sight: a couple dozen ancient beer cans, the kind that had the old pull tabs, rusted to oblivion. They told me I was in mostly the same place, my brother’s ashes nearby. I spent a few minutes sort of meditating in the relentless midday sun, staring up at the behemoth with its dark trees covering the lower two thirds and the bare gray crags up top where nothing grows, small patches of snow still clinging, feeling infinitesimally small, yet oddly happy.

When I rejoined Jena by the car, I said sincerely, “Thank you for coming to my church.” I hadn’t been conscious of the sense of pilgrimage until that moment. She said her mom had asked whether being there made me sad. “No,” I told her. “For the first time, it actually doesn’t. It’s emotional, to be sure, but I think David would be thrilled that we’re on an adventure.”

Our adventure continued with magical trips to Great Sand Dunes National Park, a waterfall, a roadside hot spring, the Indigenous community at Taos Pueblo, a Japanese spa in Santa Fe, a trek into the Rio Grande River Gorge, and El Santuario de Chimayó — a church and significant traditional pilgrimage site for Catholics which boasts “holy dirt” for blessing and healing — though I would suggest that all the dirt we traversed was, in its way, both blessed and healing for us.

Each night, Jena and I would sit outside and reflect on our day with a glass of wine in hand and a view of the mountains. In some directions, they were so plentiful and so majestic that they did that gorgeous layered thing of seeming to go on forever in waves of softening blues. We saw sunsets that blew our minds. The eight-day excursion had given my nervous system a reset I desperately needed. Our bodies were tanned and nourished, our spirits high, our friendship closer than ever.

It wasn’t until I was on my (significantly delayed and massively turbulent) flight home from Denver that I realized, looking up (slightly desperately) at the sign above the exit row in front of me that “Salida” is Spanish for “exit,” the two words illuminated together. I had done a good job exiting my “normal” life for a spell in a lovely town named just for it, embraced what’s really important to me.

Reentry from a great trip is always hard, and this one was downright amazing. Bracing for landing…