My mom was Catholic, I lived with a Presbyterian minister and his wife my senior year of high school, I went to a Jesuit college, and spent all of my 20s living with an atheist. Suffice it to say, religion and I haven’t exactly found each other, so you might be surprised that I chose the poem below to describe our next stop in the Yukon – Tombstone Provincial Park.
God Made the Mountains Very High
God made the mountain very high
So we could climb up near the sky
And look and see what we thought tall
Were very small things after all.
-Annette Wynne
What I love about the sentiment is that regardless of your belief system, she describes so perfectly that universal feeling when we’re standing at the top of a mountain and looking out over vast wilderness. We aren’t just in awe of the beauty, we are humbled. We are acutely aware of that our lives are short when compared to the lifetime of a mountain and thus, our problems are small or at least with this perspective, they appear smaller, which means surmountable and finite. This in turn, fills us with hope.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself so let me start at the beginning.
When turning onto the Dempster Highway that leads to Tombstone Provincial Park, there’s a sign that warns
“There are no emergency medical services on the Yukon section of the Dempster Highway. ‘Drive with Care’”.
Not long after, in the opposite direction, we see a truck pulling his 5th wheel along the gravel with no back tire – just dragging the metal wheel down the dusty, washboard dirt road and I’m beginning to wonder why we’re taking this risk.
We have to get pretty far into the drive before we’re rewarded for our risk with the mountains in Tombstone Provincial Park. They are gigantic and highly varied, but like any phenomenal composition, what holds them together is that they’re cloaked in perfectly matched watercolor shades – slate, deep blue, pine, sage, and light grey with bright pops of pink, white and yellow wildflowers. Some of the mountains are high and sharp with long smooth slopes, some are pinnacles and spires, some are volcanic, some are syenite, and some are slate, but all are mesmerizing.
2024 hasn’t been the easiest of years. That doesn’t mean it’s been a bad, but for many reasons, it’s been a while since we’ve hiked any switchbacks, and the trail we’d picked to hike had several. It didn’t help that I’d been on edge since a ranger knocked on our door the prior evening to warn us that a bear had been spotted in our campground just hours before our arrival. I was feeling out of shape. I was also feeling irrationally uncertain about sections of the trail with very tall and thick vegetation. We weren’t even hiking near the campground, I just had bears on my mind.
Overcoming these thoughts and reaching the top of just this small / very moderate Goldensides Trail, reminded me that I’ve done hard things before, and I can do them again. Start small, keep going, build strength, gain stamina, and soon enough what once was hard will be easier. There’s that hope I’m talking about.
Here are some photos from the hike and the drive we did that went a bit further north into the park.
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Thanks Tombstone, for your natural beauty. Thanks for making the reward worth the risk and thanks for instilling hope.
