I’m super pumped to move to Oklahoma for many reasons—family, cost of living, QuikTrip. But I’m definitely going to miss L.A. I’ll miss many things—the weather, the fast pace, the diversity. But I think what I’ll miss most are mountains.
Surprisingly, I didn’t walk on a mountain until I was over twenty years old. Oklahoma has a beautiful horizon. The sunsets are killer. But those sunsets are at the cost of any variation in the land. I do love the rolling green hills. But I really love mountains.
Today, I hiked again up Mount Baldy. At over ten thousand feet, it’s the highest mountain in the nearby area. Lucky for me, it’s close to our house. I love to run/hike. The experience is really transcendent. I can understand why in ancient cultures temples were often built on higher land.
The journey up to those heights is rewarding, too. I crossed beautiful streams that led to waterfalls; I saw all sorts of wildlife (lucky for me, the two men ahead of me encountered and killed the rattlesnake before I came upon it!); the air thins, and noise fades. I even crossed snow.
Today, when I hit the summit, I was alone—a rare occurrence. I was alone for at least five minutes before another joker joined me. During those five minutes, it occurred to me that of twenty million people in the Southern California area, I was the highest (not in the Snoop Dogg sense). Cool thought.
I have become a mountain person. I get them. And they get me. They have been my sense of release, my place to think, the place where I have pushed myself physically and mentally beyond what I thought possible.
Having grown up here in the San Gabriel Valley mountains have always been a part of my landscape. I visited my cousins for a month one summer in Wisconsin and was totally lost without the mountains to orient myself. I never want to leave them again.