Sheer rock walls rise, snow-covered up top with patches of limestone shining out. Nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level—11,752 to be exact—but, more importantly, seven thousand feet above where the young man stands and stares. Soon he is not just staring.
He is and always will be a creature of movement and before he knows it his feet are taking the lead, rushing forward, climbing upward, wanting to somehow create an intimacy with this giant. He cuts through a meadow of sage and sumac and finds himself in a field below a wall of rock that blazes with aspen, a yellow closing in on orange. He is hiking faster now, almost running.
He stops and watches cloud shadows migrate across the mountain’s face. His mood lifts with the land. He notices movement in the rock wall and as he gets closer he sees it for what it is.
A constant torrent and spray down the rock’s cleavage, splattering below. He stares at the various shelves which the water is flowing over and falling off of and dropping down from, trying to memorize the sight. The white rock is stained orange where it is forever wet.
He listens to the pure cold music of falling water. When his head is down while hiking its song is a steady almost industrial roar, but with his head up it takes on a higher pitch. He will discover that the mountain is called Timpanogos and that people of that name lived nearby five hundred years ago.
The name means, roughly, “rock” or maybe “river” or, in some translations, the combined “rock river” or “rocky torrent.” Soon enough he will learn the meaning of the word, but it will take a while to understand what Timpanogos will mean to him. His life is spread out uncertainly before him. He feels some vague intuition that this place will be important but nothing more.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
