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Into the Mountains II 

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?

And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart,

I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence.  

—Rainer Maria Rilke, First Elegy, Duino Elegies

…. That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

—Willa Cather, My Antonia 

            The summer of 2017 I recorded my hikes into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of South-Central Colorado beginning the first week of June, and ending with a three-day backpack from the North Fork to the Rito Alto trailhead in September. I write about birds and animals, flowers and trees, and the weather and geology. But I also write about the awesome nature of the terrain I am walking through, the tragic effects of climate change and the fear and euphoria I experience when I walk into the back country. As a seventy-two-year-old woman I was also preoccupied with my own aging and mortality. I wondered for how long I could keep hiking. I had difficulty resolving my own relationship to the landscape: resistance or surrender? The following essay records a kind of resistance where I exult in my triumph over the landscape. But other hikes lead me to a more sober response: one of humility and surrender.

From Walking the Stations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains :

Venable    September 6, 2017

“But when I look ahead up the white road/ There is always another one walking beside you.” —T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

It is September and I am finally able to do the fifteen-mile, 4,000-foot elevation gain hike to Venable Pass, a long climb into the sky and back. Except for the first time I hiked with the Salida Skikers, or last year when I hiked with a friend from Evergreen, I do it with only my dog, Sarah. But because of Sarah’s recent bout with heat exhaustion, I decide to do it alone and leave Sarah with a friend. I drop her off the night before and am at the trailhead at five when it is still dark. I am always afraid to do this hike, of what might happen high up and far away. Last month, a friend wrote an article in the Eagle about mountain lions and their crepuscular habits. So, starting out this morning at dawn is like swimming in the ocean with the soundtrack of Jaws thrumming through my head. I keep a wary eye on the slope above me and periodically twirl around to check the trail behind me: a neurotic at large without her service dog.

Pretty soon there is sunlight as the trail levels out, and I can see up the valley to the mountains that surround North Crestone Lake. But at the fork, I will be taking the North Fork Trail, and the mountains on the east side of the valley will block and eclipse the sun’s light as they, like the moon, move across the sun with each step I take. I must cross the North Fork Creek three times, the same crossings with the raging currents I crossed last spring. But now the water is low, and I can walk across rocks laid as stepping stone bridges.

I was up here on Saturday with Sarah doing trail maintenance—mostly trimming aspens and willows that had encroached into the path. It was a trial run to see if the heat would get to Sarah again. And it did. Even with an infusion of chicken soup, I had to dunk her every time we crossed a creek to keep her from overheating. I miss her. She’s my constant companion, and I don’t like the feel of life without her.

As I cross the last big crossing and start a steep ascent, I suddenly feel chilled, and my hands grow cold. As I pull on my gloves, my shadow bursts upon the trail in front of me, and the rising sun warms my neck.  My ears fill with the sound of birds, chipmunks, and squirrels beeping, and squeaking, and chirping, and greeting the day. Then the sun disappears again as I move back into the next mountains’ shadow and the silence returns. Up ahead, the high peaks are bright in the hazy light, shimmering in the smoke from fires a thousand miles to the west. I can even smell the smoke as I climb. I come upon beautiful blue evergreens, possibly white fir growing up the steep creek banks. They seem to like it here and be more resistant to bark beetle if not the budworm that has blighted some of their new growth. Up ahead is a grove of trees where I will cross a diminished version of the creek and a seep that never goes dry. The grove is lovely despite the fact that the big old-growth Engelmann spruce are now dead; they’ve been dying over the years I’ve passed here. But higher up, younger healthy trees are thriving, and I can only hope they’ll make it. Winter temperatures in the San Luis Valley historically used to go down to the minus forties and fifties. The warming earth and longer summer seasons coupled with years of implacable drought and diminished snowfall have weakened the trees and left them vulnerable. You don’t see living trees anymore as big as these dead Engelmann spruce, with diameters over four feet. I’ve never seen living trees this big anywhere I have hiked in the Sangres or the San Juans. Even the dying forests of today are new growth. I doubt we can ever go back to the ways things used to be. The big trees, those that Suzanne Simard would call “mother trees” are in the past.

At the foot of the big trees, someone has set up camp. The tent and cooking implements surrounding a fire ring augment my loneliness and I wonder where the campers have gone on this smoky morning. Through the trees, the mountains appear blue. As I climb the ascending trail, it takes me above tree line and into the Venable cirque. Twelve-and thirteen-thousand-foot peaks circle round a bowl of low willows turning ochre and rust and the clear blue of a tiny lake that feeds into North Crestone Creek below.

Up ahead, I see two riders on horseback; a man and his son are bringing back a mule deer they’ve killed and butchered. The boy, maybe ten, looks proud enough to burst. They both, despite their sun- and soot-darkened faces, have a glow that being in mountains imparts. I congratulate the man on spending this time with his son, and we wish each other well. Headed back to the camp I passed, they soon melt away into the vastness of the landscape, and I am alone again. In all the years I’ve hiked this trail, I hardly ever encounter another human being.

On my way up the trail, I pass a group of mountain or alpine thistles, plants that look like the vegetable kingdom’s equivalent of the lion fish; backlit by the sun, their white hair on fire, they become stationary comets that have parked themselves by the trail. These and Parry’s gentian are the only blooms this time of year; the gentian’s exquisite celestial blue rivals even that of blue columbine and sky pilots.

The ascent to Venable Pass is a series of switchbacks that, over the past three years, have left me breathless and feeling like my heart is being painfully squeezed right out of my chest. I have started swimming for aerobic exercise, and who would think that my lackluster performance in a pool twice a week could make such a difference, but this year I walk up to the pass with nary a twinge. Ravens circle behind me in the wide sky over the valley. Vocalizing to one another, they sound like airborne bullfrogs croaking and gurgling, the didgeridoo players of the mountain sky. Their circles are so wide, and the sky so big that I lose track of them. I wonder if they are moving in on the mule deer carcass somewhere below.

Overcoming my chest pain problem is huge. I feel elated and now only have to overcome my fear of heights as I pass across Phantom Terrace. I reach the top of Venable Pass at eleven in the morning. Hungry and tired, I decide that this year I will indulge in resting and eating part of my lunch before setting out across Phantom. The sky is cloudless, so there are no looming thunderstorms to beat. A third of this hike is above tree line so that is always a concern. I find a flat rock off the narrow crest of the pass facing east, out of the wind and overlooking two glacial lakes hanging above a vertical drop to the Wet Mountain Valley below and the Wet Mountains to the east.

At the top of the pass a hawk wheels into view, rides the updrafts from the valley, pivots, and air slides down the other side into the raven’s territory. I think he is gone but think again: at bullet speed, in a rush of air and wings that almost touch my face, the hawk races down the mountain only inches from the ground with a raven on top of him in pursuit. They seem to collide at the bottom of the trail, and then the hawk throttles up into the sky. Perhaps the raven has made his point because next I see the hawk making lazy circles; unencumbered by the raven bully, he rides the up draft over the lake. But this time he’s keeping to his side of the pass.

When I finish my meal, I set out on the trail to Phantom Terrace. The trail drops precipitously before it slowly begins an ascent to a second pass at the end of Phantom. Perhaps because I’ve allowed myself to stop and rest and eat, and because there is no ferocious wind this year, and because I make frequent stops to take pictures, I don’t feel my usual panic and vertigo as I cross the Terrace. The trail is narrow and at times it seems to disappear altogether, with only the faces of flat vertical rocks to scramble up. But as it enters an inclining rift, it becomes more defined just at the moment when, to my left, there is only a slim margin between the trail and a vertical drop of a thousand feet.

Across the way, layers of sedimentary rock lift up in frightening angles. According to geologist James McCalpin, this is evidence of the forces of earth at work, a rift mountain range created by the collision and separation of plates we cannot see. The upward thrust of the Sangres exceeds even the forces of erosion, forces mitigated by a skin of hard granite and gneiss that has been pushed over softer sedimentary layers. I am elated again as I reach the end of Phantom; the trail, like the hawk, seems to rise up and pivot on the crest of the mountain, the crest of the world, a crest so narrow as it recedes into space, it hardly contains the width of a footstep.

 I have finished the two most difficult passages of this hike: the ascent to Venable Pass and crossing Phantom Terrace. Now I am ready to begin the long descent. Walking this part of the trail I always mentally celebrate my effort and my triumph over fear. The trail runs for a horizontal mile as it connects two mountains, Venable with Comanche. Up ahead, the southern part of the Sangre de Cristo Range stretches out before me like a Chinese painting—streams and mountains without end. Peaks move into peaks, folds fold into folds, and recesses of water and mystery hallow the sound of empty space. I am walking on top of the world. If I called out there would be no one to answer, but I do not feel alone. If I am embraced by angels, I do not fade away. I am my father’s daughter, my mother’s child, my child’s mother. I am here walking on the earth, and it is enough.

At the foot of Comanche, the path begins its gentle descent. The grade so easy and the bed so smooth, I can watch the mountains instead of my feet. When I reach tree line, I stop and eat a bunch of grapes I have saved.

Later, I pick up Sarah and head for home. Making dinner, I look out into the garden and see a Cooper’s hawk devouring a small brown bird. He tears and tears and gulps and gulps; he devours portions of red flesh and feathers alike until he eats the whole bird down to its last wing bone and then flies away. As I watch him go, I know what it is like to fly.

The following essay is taken from my book, Walking the Stations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

On Making Art

It’s not at all,” landscape artist Irene Buszco responds to people who ask if painting is relaxing. People commenting that my work is serene also leap to a similar conclusion. They imagine that I must be serene, and therefore, making art must be relaxing. It’s not unlike the common misconception that meditation is relaxing. It is, if you like wrestling with snakes. And sure, once you’ve practiced a good while, meditation can produce habits of mind that can offer serenity, but I wouldn’t equate it with a nap in the hammock. I can’t speak for other artists, but, for me, making art can be frustrating and challenging. While it indeed involves playfulness, intuition, and spontaneity, it also involves making choices, decisions, and constant reference to what I know about color, materials, application, composition, and what works and doesn’t. All this is true, but making art, at its best, is also an act of faith.  

I started to teach myself to draw when I was a senior in college, following the instructions in Kimon Nicolaïdes’ book, The Natural Way to Draw. I still consider this to be the most organic and useful instruction I ever received, and it supports what I have come to know: you may have a talent for drawing and painting, but without constant practice, your skills will never develop. Being an artist isn’t much different from playing the piano. You don’t get good at playing the piano by not playing the piano.

It has taken me years to become the artist I am today, and even now, I don’t consider that I have arrived where I want to be. My progress has had frequent interruptions and setbacks, but I have found, even from these, I can learn and grow.

For a long time after my divorce, I didn’t have the space or time to make art. When I finally did, I picked up a medium I’d never used before: pastels. I began making large abstract drawings based on the expressionist principals of movement and making authentic and unstudied marks. I had an array of gorgeous colors to choose from, and I drew with these colors as I imagine a composer creates with sound, listening to each chord and color for how it anticipates the next. It was a thrilling breakthrough.

Another breakthrough came out of not having to mix the colors. So, while I usually started with the landscape colors I loved, I found myself reaching for the burnt oranges, magentas, and deep purples in order to add depth and soul to the greens, blues, and greys.

In contrast to breakthroughs, we artists can also back ourselves into corners. We can copy what worked before and fail to challenge ourselves by trying something new. Or harder still, to keep working when we hit rough patches. When at its most satisfying, our work can pick up old strands and inquiries that we’ve abandoned, and we discover that they were valid after all. What was past can become present and reinvigorate our current efforts.

There is a loneliness about my Colorado paintings. As artists, we are often asked for a statement explicating our work. I would usually offer that my work explored the relationship between landscape, solitude, contemplation, and spiritual encounter with absence and presence. A bit high-flown. Often, we artists don’t have a clue what our work is about until we’ve been doing it awhile. We are the folks who read the directions after we’ve put the desk or table together. But if I were to elaborate further on absence and presence in my landscape paintings, I would ask the viewer to consider that the presence of God isn’t in the landscape at all. God becomes present in the exchange and communion between me (the painter and observer), and you (the viewer), and the empty land.

To anyone asking, I would also mention that my work included plein air studies of barns, fences, corrals, and cattle chutes at the old Baca Ranch that is now a National Wildlife Refuge. These structures had a haunted quality derived from the absolute silence that surrounded them and the absence of any human or domestic animal presence in their midst. Frequently my colleague Beatris would join me, and because we could rely on calm weather in autumn, we often worked next to the broad-leafed cottonwoods as they turned gold.

I was fascinated by how these abandoned human structures rested within a context of the natural ones: earth, sky, and mountains. The natural gestures are extravagant, the human work-a-day. The human ones express what is best about our best gestures: functionality, ingenuity, optimism, hard work, and humility.

Within the barnyard and sight of the fences and chutes, there is a palpable spirit presence, probably of all the animals that have passed through. I once encountered a group of U.S. Forest Service mules corralled behind the barn for the summer. These beautiful animals who stand at seventeen hands, had been loaned for packing the Field Institute into Willow Lake and were idling there until they would be called upon to bring the trail builders out again. On meeting these gentle and intelligent creatures, I couldn’t help but break into a smile as they breathed their collective blessing over the landscape and me. Who in the world would understand if I told them my paintings of this place are about animal souls?

The following in an essay from my book, Walking the Stations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Landscape and Sacred Ground

I think of landscape as both a subject in art as well as a place to walk in and explore. Landscape was slow to be celebrated in Western art while the great Song artists in China were painting “streams and mountains without end” as early as the 1200s.[1] The English painter John Constable is generally acknowledged to be the first Western painter to look at clouds, skies, hills, and trees as subjects worthy in themselves. I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by landscape that was, for the most part, empty of human presence. Also, as a child, I had access to one of the great museums of the world with its treasure of French landscape paintings. There is a small Monet in the National Gallery of a lake with rushes, goldenrod, clouds, and blue sky, which I credit for my becoming a landscape painter.

Landscape has always held for me an allure and sense of mystery, a longing I associate with the wail of the train whistle that edged the farms and forests of my first childhood home. To walk across landscape as Wilfred Thesiger did across Arabia’s Empty Quarter, or to live and work in landscape like Thoreau, is to achieve communion and consummation. The ground we walk across is always sacred. It is the ground of creation itself, and millions of years of geologic—and millennia of human, plant, and animal history—repeat that holy act. Columbian mammoth and bison bones lie in the earth at the foot of the Sangres south of Crestone at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and humans have been hunting, meeting, trading, and living in the San Luis Valley for thousands of years. This background of footsteps even included a friend’s grandfather’s, who herded sheep up Dimick Gulch before the land was closed by the Wilderness Act in 1964.

Walking in the landscape of the Sangre de Cristo requires a rhythm, an entering and a leaving, a physical engagement, a preparedness and mental alertness, a respect and, perhaps more than anything else, senses of wonder, humility, and gratitude. Walking in such a place becomes a metaphor for spiritual practice. Walking begins at the same rate as the resting heart.

Thesiger said if there had been roads across the Empty Quarter, his walking across it would have been nothing more than a stunt.[2] But there were no roads, and always there was the real possibility he would die, either at the hands of the people who lived there, or from thirst and exposure. There are few roads into the Sangres; the mountains are steep, and the trails are difficult. Two paved roads bracketed my section of the Sangres: Poncha Pass at the northern terminus of the range and La Veta Pass at its midpoint. In between there were only two, four-wheel-drive, high-clearance roads: Hayden Pass and Medano Pass Primitive Road. There are no continuous trails that run north to south along the range. Most trails are vertical, east to west or west to east, and most trails do not cross the range but end in glacial cirques, often at an alpine lake.

When I first began walking in the Sangre de Cristo, I didn’t know why I was called to do so, called to walk into a place of absence, a desert and alien place, a place of stark and terrible beauty. Whatever our landscape, the language we create when we are truly present to place can offer us a deeper intimacy with mystery. And—however futile—the search for a language that can enter into that mystery is itself an act of prayer.