The Inner Voice
Reading time: 4 minutes
Themes: Adventure, overcoming, friendship
“Placing ourselves in environments of lower sensory input allows us to hear the call of our inner voice more prominently. We can hear our thoughts more clearly and feel the tug of our hearts yearning for more or fewer of things.”
Adventure has always seemed, to me, to be straightforward. Planning a road trip, a night camping, or a hike seems like a first-class ticket to a good time - and oftentimes, it is. Over the past couple of years, ‘adventure’ has become more enigmatic to me. Speaking from personal experience, it’s challenging to tap into the more profound form of consciousness that comes with true adventure-seeking and spontaneity. As modern humans, living in the most prosperous time in history, it can be difficult to cast aside creature comforts and listen to what our hearts need. I travel often, but many of my adventures have been inspired more by a preconceived idea of the glory of the destination versus the journey. I’ve spent many nights bunked up in my trunk on some beautiful vista, wholly enraptured by Netflix on my iPad. I’ve spent several road trips with the seat reclined and the ETA provided by Google Maps buzzing in my subconscious, unable to be altered for any sudden spark of inspiration along the way. I’ve also fought a constant battle between being present and anxiously trying to photograph and document everything I encounter. Conversely, many of my most fantastic memories have come from moments that involved zero planning.
The dichotomy in photography concerning being present in a moment and capturing a moment that will transcend time is hard to balance, but that is a topic for another time. I include this to illustrate a point: our inner voice is engaged with a force much more significant than our intellectual minds. There is no fault in planning an adventure based on our preconceived notions of how it will be; however, I have significantly benefited by becoming intimate with my inner voice, so much so that my only option is to follow its call and buckle up for the ride. This past weekend, I had a chance to be guided in such a way, and I chose to listen. Friday afternoon arrived as @conner.baldwin, @zwiegs, and I packed up the 4Runner to head to the Twin Lakes area and set up a quick camp the night before making a winter ascent of La Plata Peak.
We arrived at our campsite, got everything set up, practiced our hatchet-throwing skills, and sat on the ground laughing and talking about the early morning ahead of us. As we looked upon the golden-hour mountains that lay in front of us, there was a nagging in the air - one that I’ve felt many times before. This time the nag whispered, “why not go for the summit now”? My ego was quick to object with thoughts regarding the difficulty of route finding in darkness, the lack of sleep, and a barrage of other objections. Fortunately for us, the thought had been spoken aloud, giving it far more power than solely existing in our minds, where the inner voice often goes to die. We went through the list of reasons not to go until we realized none were valid enough to overcome the call we all felt. Any of them could have been, but we collectively decided they weren’t. The shift in mindset that accompanies the decision to step into the unknown and follow your heart quickly goes from nerve-racking to intense excitement. 30 minutes later, our camp was packed up, and we were cruising to the trailhead with Odesza and Illenium blasting, unable to wipe the smiles from our faces.
It’s rare that a group can collectively tap into the spontaneity of an adventure, and we all knew it. It was apparent that we all couldn’t help but continue to verbalize that it “felt right.” There were no wary feelings or moments of hesitation. It was clear to all of us that was exactly what we were supposed to be doing at that moment. We knew it was going to be a brutal hike, and it was. We had a hard time route finding the trail that night. For several miles, we ascended steep terrain in waist-deep snow doing all we could to avoid the inevitable post-hole. If a reality TV crew were following us, they might’ve gotten a kick out of the mood swings we endured. I can speak for us all when I say there was joy, anger, and exhaustion in large quantity throughout those 7 hours.
At 12,000 feet, we broke through the trees after the most grueling part of the hike, avoiding avalanche terrain. The summit of La Plata Peak towered over us. Given our exhausted condition, it was discouraging to see all that we still had to do, but in front of us lay a small hill that we decided to ascend and assess the rest of the summit. The moon was low in the sky, and the stars were dancing in all their glory over the snow-blanketed peaks. Each step we took felt like walking through a portal into another dimension. As the three of us stood on that hill overlooking the Sawatch mountains, it was clear that we weren’t called to the summit that evening; we were called to that overlook to behold the profound beauty and bask in the enormity of our world and the finiteness of our existence.
My heart felt complete and nourished. It had pleaded with me to meet it on that overlook that night - and I did. It rewarded me profoundly in a spectacle I will never forget. We decided to call it there as we set up our cameras and captured photo after photo of immense beauty. The hike back down brought challenges and the mood swings endured. Back at the trailhead, the three of us lay in the middle of Independence Pass, seemingly paralyzed by the night sky above. It was 03:00 in the morning, but the buzz of the adventure we’d returned from made time feel redundant. That journey provided me with the realization that listening to my heart is not easy it was one of the most challenging experiences I’ve had in the mountains. The difficulty of following our inner voice is not the point - what remains true is that despite the difficulty of the call, if answered, growth, prosperity, and joy are sure to come. For that, I’m grateful. Thank you for reading, and much love.
