Veil

It is 2:30 in the morning. I can’t sleep because I kept thinking of this picture I took during a weekend trip to Mt. Evans—one of Colorado’s 51 mountain peaks over 14,000 feet above sea level.

We drove up there this past Sunday. It was cold and stark. The only thing that grows up there are hearty wildflowers and docile flies. Snow never melts. Don’t step on the ancient lichen and listen for pica. It’s exotic.

Fog hugged the cliffs and obscured our view. We knew, if the fog simply lifted, we’d see some of the most breathtaking vistas in the world. But it persitted, sometimes erasing the road in front of us. With sheer drop-off cliffs thousands of feet down the drive was tense at times. No guardrails. There was no place to turn around. We had to keep moving forward slowly.

The road was worn, heaved, sunk, hairpinned, rough, indignantly narrow. Suddenly we’d come around a bend and see a spot where the fog hadn’t crept. Latching on to one such moment, we stopped here, at a small lake. According to the timestamp on my camera, this photo was taken at 12:03pm:

At 12:16 pm, the exact same view (note the same people and the photographer on the lower right side) was this:

It is amazing how quickly clarity caves to uncertainty. I wanted to pluck the fog off the snowy rock face like a scarf, but then I considered the obscured view has a beauty of its own. It requires trust and the belief in permanence. I couldn’t see the mountain, but I knew it was there.