Alpenglow in the Rockies

We walked to Bear Lake. The glacier-fed lake lay cradled by firs. The sun had long disappeared beyond the horizon, but the mountains glowed pink. Alpenglow in the Rocky Mountains. I was perplexed. They even called it that—Alpenglow.

Above us rose the Front Range peaks, including Longs Peak—4,346 meters high, a table mountain with an almost vertical southeast face. For the Arapaho, it was Neníisótoyóú’u, “the rock that holds the world.”

A bald eagle circled overhead. In a natural amphitheater, I lectured on glacial origins… the Pleistocene, terminal moraines, the Andrews Glacier Basin. You remained silent, reverent, a pilgrim in a mineral world far older and more resilient than any organic connection.

“We should start moving again soon,” you said at breakfast the next morning. It was too cold to sit on the porch. I noted this with a small pang of regret. You set the table. This too was a ritual, part of our love. When we had made love in the morning, I lingered a moment, dawdling, while you opened the day’s official door.

“Three weeks in the Rockies is fine. But we need a plan to keep us on track.”

I nodded. I was in my element—and in yours.

“Maybe finally tackle that essay collection on the postcolonial geography of national parks?”

“Too dry.”

“Or something with voice. Narrative interviews. Self-portraits of landscapes in human form.”

“That sounds good.”

Brainstorming—I loved it. We were not just a couple; we were an operating system. And our system was permeable to lust, order, intellect, and economy.

“What would be your approach?”

I didn’t hesitate.

“Voices and places. People who dream of regions they’ve never visited. Or those who go every summer to the same campground because their father did. Biographies mapped along geographical anchors.”

You leaned back. Your gaze sharpened.

“We need a bracket. A filter. Otherwise, the project will blur.”

I nodded. When you looked at me like that, my thinking cleared.

We were accredited here and there and had enough references to secure an interview with a ranger at a moment’s notice. We met Abigail Moss in the Sheep Lakes Area in Moraine Park Valley on the eastern flank of Rocky Mountain National Park. The area was a wetland, where elk calved in spring and wapiti bugled in late summer.

Abigail, in her early forties, divorced, mother of a daughter, and daughter of a first-generation ranger, specialized in geoscience education formats, with a focus on plateau stability and periglacial zones. I could follow her subjects. You could not. I wore a beige shirtdress I had bought with the thought of seeing you again in a dress. You liked seeing me in skirts and dresses. My shorts served as a substitute in our endless game.

Abigail wore the full NPS kit: olive pants, gray shirt, Stetson. She spoke quietly and articulated herself in the tone of someone exercising full oversight.

“I grew up in Estes Park,” she said. “My father was a surveyor. Long before GPS was common.”

“How did that work?”

“With patience.”

I asked about childhood memories. Abigail pointed to a ridge, the Fern Lake Trail.

“Up there, he explained how a terminal moraine forms. I was seven.”

She did not laugh.

“See the flattened edge? That was the last glacier push. Before I was ten, I knew Moraine Park was glacial soil. The status quo is called a transitional habitat. Freeze-thaw cycles work at the surface. We are standing on moving ground.”

“What does that mean for your everyday life?”

She looked at me appraisingly.

“That I should not presume anything about my own stability.”

I suppressed the urge to hug Abigail.

“I don’t think the park needs me,” she said, almost as if talking to herself. “But I need it. To orient myself. I am not a storyteller. I see myself as a point in the terrain.”

A colleague of Abigail’s appeared. Helen Katchen, thirty, half White River Ute, half Finnish. She surpassed Abigail in clarity, restraint, and pragmatism. With her, ethnically informed geology could have been a field of study.

“I grew up between mountains and prairie. The Ute call the highest rock masses Tavakiev—Sun Mountains. We read the seasons in the cycles of ponderosa pines and fir cones. At Grand Lake, my ancestors set up camp where water and wood met.”

Helen spoke of the Ute trails, paths that had traversed the Rockies for centuries.

“My work is not limited to protection. It is memory and continuation.”