This Be the Place: Door in the Mountain 

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

The winter of 2022-2023 was huge in Colorado’s Elk Mountains. Over the course of seven months, more than 300 inches of snow fell in Crested Butte, where I reside. Drifts reached to the sky, pulled down powder, reached higher. “Will it ever stop?” At the supermarket and the gas station, the cafe and the tavern, that question eventually replaced “Hello.”

When spring arrived in June and the white valley floor began showing patches of brown, then green, I kept one eye peeled for flowers and one eye trained on the wilderness west of town, a chain of backcountry peaks buried the previous November. In particular, a corniced ridge on 13,535-foot Treasure Mountain—a hulking massif about 10 miles off—drew my gaze.

Fat chance that thing’s gonna melt. Too beefy. Must be 20 feet thick and a thousand feet long. I’ll bet good money it’s around this autumn.

Technically, a rind or wedge or plug of snow that survives a single summer isn’t a glacier. But this is how I conceived of the cornice—as a glacier being born, a bright shining infant swaddled in blankets of sunlight, dreaming of cooler temperatures and an opportunity to grow. Like an adoring parent, I doted and fussed, peering through binoculars at dawn, noon, and dusk, day after day, week after week.

Maybe this obsession had to do with the warming globe, the photos of haggard icefields and icecaps, the grim stories relentlessly emerging from Greenland and Antarctica, the Alps and Himalaya. OK. Or maybe I just really enjoy looking at mountains, studying their details, the beautiful parts that comprise the mysterious whole. As Jean Valentine once wrote: “Door in the mountain / let me in.” Continuous observation is, I guess, my version of knock, knock, knocking.

The cornice seemed not to shrink in July. During August, it assumed odd shapes, mutated in response to driving rains and gnawing winds and routine bombardments of violent solar radiation, but still stood proud of the surrounding tundra gardens and polished granite slabs. Come early September, the dribs and drabs of snow that had lingered on shadowy north faces elsewhere in the range were officially finished, ablated into oblivion, whereas the gleaming crescent on Treasure Mountain persevered. By the middle of October, I was ready for a visit.

I’d hiked the ridge twice in the past and knew what to expect: a faint path to an obscure lake, a choose-your-own-adventure climb on steep talus, a shaggy goat guarding the summit. Sure enough, following a big sweaty morning of huffing and puffing—a sweet mesmerizing morning of humming solitude—I was greeted by an old cud-chewing nanny bedded in a nest of brittle grass. “Pardon me,” I whispered, veering to the right, giving her a wide berth. “Don’t mean to intrude. Here to check on my would-be glacier. Couple hours and I’ll skedaddle. That acceptable?”

I found it nearby, tucked below the lip of the ridge, welded to a cirque’s plunging headwall. Not the fresh newborn cornice, but the wizened, pockmarked, dust-flecked carcass. It wasn’t a beluga. It wasn’t an albino giant’s severed tongue. It wasn’t a pale dinosaur or a bleached Roman ruin or a lost piece of the moon or a marbled vein in the mountain’s flesh. Rather, it was a combination of these and a dozen other fumbling metaphors.

Crouching, touching it with my fingertips, a sizzle of electric cold raced through my nervous system. It was, I realized, abiotic and animate. 

Deadalive.

***

A decade ago, backpacking in California’s Emigrant Wilderness, deep in the creases of the map, I happened upon a grizzled dude dangling his legs over the edge of a cliff, exhaling smoke. “Grab a chair,” he said, thumbing more weed into the bowl of a little purple bong. He was a professional geomorphologist from Santa Cruz who trekked the Emigrant annually, always solo. “A vacation from my family and job and responsibilities and whatever. A sacred trip.” Exhale.

We hit it off and bushwhacked together until late that afternoon, exploring domes and gullies, meadows and creeks. Though our immediate attention was fixed on the micro—the ankle-rolling cobbles and toe-catching roots especially—the grizzled dude’s running commentary stayed stunningly macro throughout the aimless ramble. He talked of earthquakes, ocean currents, sediments, feedback loops, heat masses, hurricanes, cycles within cycles within cycles. “It all flows, man.” This was his favorite phrase, an ellipsis loosely linking subjects. Nodding at twisted branches, waving at thin cirrus clouds, tapping his chest, pointing at mine: “It all flows, man.”

Atop Treasure Mountain, I thought of that extremely intelligent, extremely stoned, extremely flow-aware and flow-keen scientist as I touched my cornice (sizzle of electric cold), crawled on it (slippery), jumped on it (solid), sniffed and tasted it (clean, clean), pressed an ear to it (like a conch shell that’s taken a vow of silence), and lounged beside it for two, three, four hours (ahh).

And I also thought of the Biblical prophetess Deborah testifying via song that “the mountains flowed before the Lord.” And of a provocative sentence from the “Mountains and Waters Sutra” by Zen master Eihei Dogen: “When your learning is immature, you are shocked by the words ‘flowing mountains.’” And of that Jean Valentine couplet my heart regularly and unabashedly plagiarizes: “Door in the mountain / let me in.”

This cornice is a door, undoubtedly, but a weird type of door insofar as it provides passage to flux, to transience, to change itself. 

I grinned at the almost tautological simplicity of the thought. 

This cornice is a portal that leads to this cornice!

Thinking. Bad habit? Useful tool for engaging our environs? I thought of pizza and beer, and I thought of random work-related stresses, and I thought of leaving, starting the homeward descent, but didn’t budge, and I thought of November’s imminent blizzards, how this bewitching cryo-creature—abiotic and animate, insistently deadalive—would soon resume growing, delicate snowflake by delicate snowflake, crushed crystal by crushed crystal, and just might, if the coming winter proved huge, invite me to visit again next autumn: same time, same place, different time, different place.

Finally, my thinking was paused by a flock of Brown-capped Rosy Finches, denizens of the alpine zone sweeping across the surface of my cornice, their cornice, our cornice, Treasure Mountain’s cornice. A divided yet indivisible avian presence. A momentary yet eternal hunger. Five minutes. Forever. Finches gleaning tiny black insects. Finches flying, suddenly, away.