Not quite night and no longer day, not quite spring and no longer winter… I step outside into crisp mountain air, greeted by the faint sound of running water somewhere down slope from my cabin.  Running water?!  This is high desert; no water runs on my land.

But it was a “good” winter:  Over eleven feet of snow, all told.  The water table has risen and the springs which the Ute Indians relied upon only a century and a half ago are flowing again, having retreated underground for a multi-year drought that has only recently shown signs of abating.

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Morning.  Coffee.  Sometimes I wonder if my primary motivation for back country exploration is the morning joe.  Coffee tastes better out here.   It is my meditation.  Sitting in camp and sipping, present to the all-encompassing darkness while the rest of the world dreams their anxious pre-work dreams, my mind is renewed, unburdened and clear, a canvas swept clean with sleep upon which the sun will soon paint radiant hues of fresh inspiration.

First light slices through the crisp pre-dawn air.  A sliver of brilliance cracks the canopy of gray-blue over an eastern mesa, the sun’s warming rays shattering the few remaining vestiges of darkness, highlighting the desert’s starkness and reminding me of my own mortality.  Light and dark, night and day, life and death.  Our time is all too short, my days are numbered.  I hardly ever miss a sunrise anymore; there are far too few in any man’s lifetime to let even one pass willingly unnoticed.

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“This is it.”  My voice startles me, as though it’s not my own.  Any noise out here, any sound not native to the land seems a violence at worst, a disrespectful intrusion at best. There is a silence in the desert so profound, so deep, so far beyond an “absence of noise” that I’m certain it will swallow me whole if I let it.   So dense it’s palpable, so thick that any sound I muster is immediately enveloped by a nothingness so rich that I’m left doubting whether I had said anything at all.

I’ve come to the edge of the Great Basin desert, canyon country, to find something that first called to me two decades ago in the most unlikely of places, perched thirty-one stories above the canyon of materialism known as the “Magnificent Mile”, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.  A young commodity trader pursuing that most elusive prey, the Big Bucks, my newfound quest for Something More, something real led me to a series of spiritual writings centered in the southwestern desert.  There was magic out there for me, I could feel it.  But it’d be another twenty years before I’d have sufficiently bled myself of the Lust for Stuff, the artificial World of Man, and deemed myself worthy to trek through its polar opposite.

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