This post is brought to you by my experiences of recent weeks, in which I’ve thought and spoken frequently about both hiking and Colorado. My husband Will is just back from an off-the-grid backpacking trip in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge; I have a surprising number of friends planning trips to Colorado or returning from those trips right now.
Will came home with stories from the trail that got me thinking about a particular hike my own family of six took almost exactly two years ago when we were visiting Rocky Mountain National Park for the first time. I wrote about that experience for my newsletter, but never here on the blog. Today I’m pulling that story from the archive and sharing it with you here (with a light edit for context).
I hope you’ll enjoy my tale from the trail (though of course it’s about more than that), and invite you to share your own thoughts and stories in the comments section.
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This is the full text of the original piece, which first ran on July 17, 2022.
My family and I are recently returned from a week in Colorado. We love Colorado, and have visited family there often these past ten years. This time, we traveled to attend a memorial service near Colorado Springs, then headed north to experience new-to-us parts of the state.
This is not (yet!) a travel blog, so I’ll gloss over the details about our stop in Boulder (where I wrote my first yelp review, really), slowly taking in the Peak to Peak Scenic Byway, and finally arriving in the small town of Estes Park, where we rented a cabin for a few days near the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.
We wanted to spend a lot of time in the park, driving and hiking and taking it all in. Will had pinpointed a promising hike for us: just under six miles, tons to explore, and three(!!) waterfalls along the way—if we made it all the way to Ouzel Falls. We knew it was a stretch: the route is almost six miles, at elevation, and—the kicker—four of the six of us are suffering a foot-related annoyance, injury, or ongoing surgical rehabilitation. It was out and back, so knowing we could turn around at any point would be a comfort. But we were hoping we wouldn’t have to.
We set out on an unspeakably gorgeous July morning. It was crowded—it’s peak season, after all—but not overly so. As we hiked, we exchanged hellos and good mornings with our fellow hikers. I’m typically happy to exchange a friendly hello with someone I pass on the street (or the trail). And besides—I wonder if this changed things, that morning—I’d begun my day by reading an editorial by Anne Lamott in the New York Times. She’d written, “To make eye contact and smile is a kind of prayer, and it changes you.”
I was thinking of that on the trail that morning, and I think those words maybe changed me, at least for that morning, because I did exactly that, with more-than-usual intention.
There are six people in my family; sometimes we spread out on the trail. When the important conversation happened, I’d paused at the top of a long climb to wait for my people, because somehow I’d gotten ahead and out of sight of them all. Another man had paused at the same spot, traversing my route in reverse, waiting for his partner to descend. We exchanged our smiles and hellos and, because I was in a friendly mood, I asked him how far he’d been.
He’d been to Ouzel Falls, he said. What about me, how far was I going?
I don’t know, I told him, which baffled him. Baffled! What do you mean you don’t know?, he said.
I told him that, well, it depends. I told him (briefly, I promise) about our injuries and ailments. I told him I was hopeful but scared. I told him that—as an ailment-free parent to my four (12- to 19-year-old) babies and wife of my injured husband—I felt a duty to guard everyone’s health and happiness.
I told him that we might push for it, if we had reason to believe it would be worth it.
He proceeded to convince me it would definitely be worth it, with details. By then his partner had caught up to him and joined our conversation. They were already walking away when he turned around and called back to me, I almost forgot: you have to go left!
I had no idea what he was talking about, and (very nicely, I hope) told him as much and asked for details.
He told me the trail would take us to the general area of the waterfall, but we wouldn’t be able to really see it from the trail—so he described the exact path we needed to take once we got to our actual intended destination to actually see the thing we were hiking all that way to see.
The stranger and his partner took off, and my family caught up to me. (I do not usually get that far ahead, I promise!) We had a family chat about our hike-in-progress. I told them what he’d said. We agreed that we’d hold it loosely, but that we’d aim to go the whole way.
I’m going to skip over the interlude that is basically tears, on a big rock, after a grueling climb, at a spot that turned out to be four minutes from our destination—but we didn’t know we were that close so it felt pretty grim.
And then … we got there. We saw it from the trail, and it was beautiful, from a distance. So beautiful, in fact, we wouldn’t have realized there was more to see, except that the stranger had told us there was more.
We looked for anything that looked somewhat like a break in the rocks and the trees, and we went left, and got oh-so-close to an enormous waterfall (I’ve never been to Niagara or Victoria or anything close, so cut me some slack here), and the spray covered us, and we took a zillion photos, and sat and rested in the breezy shade.
And when we felt properly refreshed and restored, we started our descent.
When we got back to the proper trail, we crossed paths with a duo that had set down their bags to take pictures of the falls from the less-impressive vantage point. And before I even had a chance my husband Will said to them, I’m probably just being nosy, but do you know to go left for a better view?
They had no idea what he was talking about, and so he told them the same thing the stranger had told us, and they thanked him, saying they never would have known had he not said something, because nobody else had said, and the guidebooks hadn’t mentioned it.
And Will said, I know, because he understood exactly. He wouldn’t have known, either, but for the kindness of strangers.
We were grateful to that stranger, of course we were. I was glad (and more than a little relieved) that the reward at the top of our three-mile climb was something to behold. But also, from the moment we started our descent to right this very second, I’ve been thinking—with a mix of joy and terror—about the other things in this life that you can’t learn on your own or from a book or in a class but only from your fellow journeyers.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that hike, or what came after.
I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture for you. Real talk: we made it to our destination and saw something great. But once we were safely back at the bottom one kid said they loved the middle fall best (that’s Calypso Cascades; here’s my video) and Will’s favorite was the first, barely ten minutes into our hike. But my heart will always be with the one we worked for, that we found through stranger’s kindness wrapped in a chance comment, that made me notice something about this life I’ll never forget.
Does this bring to mind something you didn’t learn on your own, but from someone else on the journey? Perhaps you’re thinking of your own experiences on the trails, in Colorado, or Estes Park? How do you feel about talking to strangers? This is your moment to tell us in the comments section.
4 comments
This reminds me of an experience my family had last summer while visiting Crater Lake National Park. We had pretty thoroughly explored the beautiful park and were camping just a little outside the park. We headed to a nearby town to fill up on gas, but that “town” basically ended up just being a dusty, old fuel station with a single pump that still had analog numbers that flipped as it calculated your gas. My husband struck up a friendly conversation with the pump attendant. He told my husband, “You know, if you go right across the street here and park, there’s a couple hikes, one from either end of the parking lot, that go to waterfalls.”
We thought, “Let’s do it!” and, like Anne, choose to go left. After maybe a mile, we encountered a lush, peaceful, amazing spot with a gorgeous waterfall. Walking just 5 feet off the trail, the temperature cooled by 20 degrees. I declared it a Garden of Eden, and that’s how we refer to that hike now. It was easily the highlight of an already breathtakingly spectacular trip! And that we got there through human connection only made it all the sweeter.
Thank you for sharing this – it really resonates with me. Talking to strangers is hard for me, but like you, I’ve found that it can be very beneficial. I’m a little more likely to offer a friendly greeting than I used to be, and more open to providing a genuine response to someone else’s greeting, rather than a generic “fine thanks”. I’ve learned to ask open ended questions that invite the person to share whatever they like, and to really listen when they respond. Sometimes there is more there than the surface comment, and that can inform whether and how I respond to their comment. And sometimes they’re not available for interaction, and that’s ok too. Even in small interactions, if I approach with a spirit of friendliness and wishing others well, I find that I often get that back in return. And I hope that spirit comes across to people who aren’t in the headspace to respond in kind. That’s the goal, anyway.
The quote from Anne Lamott is what I needed to read this morning! My family visited Hawaii last year to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. While there, my sister and I hiked a path near our hotel in the Kona area of the Big Island to see the petroglyphs we had read about. The hike was through this other-worldly forest? woods? and it was spooky and hot and the large tree roots covered the ground everywhere. The path was barely a path. We passed a couple heading back and they encouraged us, letting us know that we did not have far to go and that the petroglyphs were well worth the effort. And they were!! Without the encouragement from the people we passed and spent a moment with on that path, we would not have continued. But we did and are glad for it.
I’m an introvert. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of my head. When out and about I’m often reminded how much better the world could be, by a strangers smile and greeting.It gives me a reason to be friendly.
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