Email this article

Breathing Space

By Mary Nowotny

Found in: | Outside | Climbing | Hiking |

Up here, the air doesn't get any cleaner than this. Don't believe me? Researchers monitor the air over Molas Pass in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado and report that it has fewer chemicals, dust particles and pollen than any other place in the U.S. Of course, it's a bit thinner at 11,000 feet above sea level so take in as much as you need without overtaxing your lungs.
Take it in and let it irrigate those countless alveoli - those honeycombed shapes encased deep in the chest that show up half-blackened in mass transit cards that beg their riding readers to stop smoking. Feel this crystal cool air race through your nostrils like distilled water sucked through a straw with nary an impediment to its progress.

What is this place? The quiet stuttering of a small stream introduced me to this spot just above a limestone outcropping - a perfect place to sit and contemplate. As if by magic, a private rivulet springs from the mountainside and takes off on a personal mission toward its precipitous descent. Along its route, this freshet changes its tune many times.
The steady tumbling of water, sent forth as a signal from its source deep within the San Juan Dome, sounds a refreshing note. The constant pouring washes the air clean like the classroom chalkboard at the start of a school day. Now the ears are awakened to other sounds that add their mark - the erratic crescendo and decrescendo of flies as they dive in and out of earshot punctuated by the rhythmic thwaps of an encroaching grasshopper that sound as if a Venetian blind has just dropped open.
Having recovered from its fall down the steep embankment, the streamlet settles in for a smoother course among the rocks, arching as it skirts larger stones and then spreading out in a latticework of sparkling sunshine over flatter stones. Here it's barely audible until it reaches a bracken thicket where it must be taking some invisible tumbles, setting up a noisy racket like a small child hiding in a closet betrayed by the sound of clattering shoes.
Back in the sunlight it sparkles once again in its flat repose over a broad stone only to give in to a series of droplets into a narrowing current below. At this point it twists and tightens like braided vinyl lanyard ribbons so it can hurry through its mossy tunnel. It scoots over a log rubbed smooth by its passage and then backs up for a quiet repose in a hollowed bowl whose porous basin lets enough water through to set up another race below.
Go ahead, pull your hand from its PolarTec cuff and drop it in the water. It's so clear you see more of your cuticle than any close inspection. The cold is so numbing that for a moment you experience life with no hand.
Now a dual spout dives into a deeper pool, setting off a cacophony of bursting baby bubbles. And then, as miraculously as it appeared, the speeding stream takes off into another dense clump of brambleberry, ultimately to lose its identity in a larger stream at lower altitude.

My seat's grown stiff from sitting in this sculpted carapace. Its smooth worn surface belies its comfort but its solidity is somewhat reassuring. Somehow its permanence creates a space that's hard to leave. The tiny animal skeletons embedded in an ancient limestone sea have slept so soundly over the past 300 million years that their regular shapes are still perfectly intact, like the unmussed curls of a young girl who's dreamed so deeply not a hair is out of place next morning. And precious little could disturb this stable chair perched more than two miles high - neither worldly woes nor personal predicaments could topple this stately throne.
But rise you must. Take in the ring of jagged peaks, jutting intrusively into the billowing clouds that promise more moisture - and more falling water. And take just one more breath of this day while the sounds and colors wash over all those sensations that may have grown so calloused in the chaos of contemporary daily life.

Mary Nowotny is a freelance writer who fled corporate America to revel in the wilderness of Southwest Colorado.