Pike National Forest, Colorado
Every night outside my living room window, at the top of what the Ute Indians called the ‘Great Peak’ one lone light flickers. Across miles of foothills, above tundra and timberline, a single white light shines visibly in the distance. It hangs just above the highest point of the peak like a far off lighthouse suspended 14,000 feet above sea level. The tiny mountain nightlight is actually a gift shop full of tourist t-shirts, Pikes Peak mugs, and warm cake donuts that leave grease rings on napkins every morning. Above the single dot of light, hangs the galaxy.
Barr Camp
I’ve hiked Barr Trail to the donut shop on top of Pikes Peak. Half way up the 12 mile ascent trail, a very rustic Barr Camp welcomes experienced mountain bikers, marathon runners, and everyday backpackers. The camp is an outpost oddity, with bunkhouse beds and make-shift wooden lean-to’s available for overnighters. Bookshelves hold a makeshift library for travelers to take and exchange. Scrabble, big pine tables, and names scratched into the wood are various 1970’s remnants of communal hippie life. Breakfast is always pancakes. Dinner is usually spaghetti with mushrooms whether you like them or not. And the caretakers sleep in a makeshift loft, up the ladder, over the spare camp kitchen.
I rented a camp bed on my way to the top and witnessed the most violent episode of vomiting altitude sickness. A very optimistic woman from Nashville had arrived in Colorado that morning, skipped a period of acclimatizing, and made straight for the trail with some friends. That night, her body seized and gushed. All color drained from her face from altitude sickness. After a long rounds of wet coughing fits, the defeated hiker leaned limp over the porch rail of Barr Camp. Her friends walked her back down the mountain.
Search and Rescue
People go missing every year on the mountain. The caretakers at Barr Camp have plenty of stories about tourists who drive to the top and think the adventure looks “easy enough”. One year Search and Rescue crews had to locate and load an overweight man in shorts and leather loafers into a helicopter gurney. He was lost and dangerously dehydrated. Hours before, he had waved off his midwestern friends up top and said, “Just pick me up at the bottom.” There’s more to it than that.
Life above timberline feels fragile, exposed to a gaping sky and sharp air. Summer thunderstorms roll through most days with deadly lightning and without warning. Fall snows threaten to disorient or cause hypothermia. The final ascent of Pikes Peak is a section called ‘The Golden Stairs’ which maybe got its name because those steps feel like a heart-exploding slow plodding hike toward death or heaven.
Fourteeners can be dangerous, life threatening. But the God’s eye view from the top is worth it. Thousands make their way to the top by way of a spectacularly nerve wracking tollway drive each year. In buses and cars, they unload and stand in awe, shiver, peer over the fearsome edge. They read the words to “America the Beautiful” on a plaque honoring Katherine Lee Bates’ lyrics about spacious skies and purple mountains’ majesty. As though Americans discovered and claimed it all.
This is also picture of my culture, my people, American Christians painted with the broadest brush. We climb to the top of places long known by wiser people and claim our “discoveries” with collegiate names. We use disposable coffee cups, write ourselves into legends, build our own gift shops, and make a profit in the process. We claim all truth and beauty as our own, as though we could mark off God’s mystery and own it. We are the fat white-priveleged tourists wearing shorts and impractical shoes in gas guzzling cars at the top of the world. This reality makes me want to ditch the culture altogether.
But I am still searching, still following the single thread of a trail. Maybe, hidden deep in the forest recesses, under canopies less seen, we are also pockets of something authentically communal and quirky, like distant cousins from the same family. Beneath those branches of the family tree, there is shared food, humility, generosity, hospitality, and lean muscular offerings of true search and rescue.
I used to be a part of the church with donuts and Styrofoam coffee cups and all the right answers and a sense of American political conquest. That was my choice for a long time. I’ve left that path. Now, I am on a different trail with a lot of questions about how to be more the forest refuge hiker and less the tourist in the SUV. Right now, I feel a bit lost in the community part of my spiritual journey — looking for the camp fireside and fellow travelers on their way to the top. But I do still believe, even in my season of questions, humans are meant to travel together.
Shop Lights and Stars
I don’t think Americans discovered the correct version of Christianity or the mountain outside my window. And I do think a whole lot more of us desperately need a full out search and rescue — more profoundly than our religious behaviors indicate.
But I do still believe, even in my season of questions, we are built to point to hope. To walk with the people around us through addiction and abuse. To cry over unexpected deaths and rub each other’s backs when we vomit in shocking ways. To offer food and shelter. To tell the truth about our joys and fears, and spill the mess of our intimacy all over each other so that the highest hope and rescue can be found, together.
And I don’t think I am very good at much of it. But I’m still on the path. And I’m inviting you to join me. We are all meant to be a beacon light in a dangerous dark world of thin air. Together, with or without the donuts.