The Bugaboos
As we rounded the bend of switchbacks comprising the last kilometre from the Kain Hut up to Applebee, the coliseum of spires—Snowpatch, Bugaboo, Crescent, and East Post—rose into view like stone sentinels, carved by time and crowned by sky, their jagged silhouettes etched against the thinning veil of cloud. After two days of torrential rain drumming on the hut roof and pooling along the path, the storm finally broke, and with it, so did we—spilling out into the alpine.
Time and space—the currencies in life we often take for granted.
Time to reflect and connect.
Space to dream and expand.
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As we rounded the bend of switchbacks comprising the last kilometre from the Kain Hut up to Applebee, the coliseum of spires—Snowpatch, Bugaboo, Crescent, and East Post—rose into view like stone sentinels, carved by time and crowned by sky, their jagged silhouettes etched against the thinning veil of cloud. After two days of torrential rain drumming on the hut roof and pooling along the path, the storm finally broke, and with it, so did we—spilling out into the alpine.
Nearing the campground, each step up the slick granite trail felt like a return, not just to the landscape, but to ourselves. Looking far up to our left, a silvery sheen glistened across the snow-covered couloir, where the rain-slicked slope now shimmered under the fresh gleam of late-morning sun. With each passing hour, the sun’s warmth, fierce and inexorable, loosened the fragile snowpack. Thin rivulets began carving through the surface, signaling the couloir’s slow collapse into instability. The BS col was unraveling in real time, shedding its winter skin. All of it unfair, fleeting, and yet beautiful. Loose scree tumbled into view, soft soil heaving beneath the snow, the ice, the wind. Here, in the wild cathedral of stone and sky, time slowed. Space opened. And we—shaped by rain, renewed by sun, cradled by the mountain’s ancient breath—were folded into its slow unfurling. Stone by stone, thaw by thaw.
Sometimes the hardest work is in the listening, in attuning to the quiet, distant call of who to be, and how to be—in all our states and with abandon—in golden hours and easy warmth, in raging tempests, blazing heat and coldest nights. Even then, when all is still and unsure, something within begins to reach toward the light. So let this be with me: to summon the weightless faith of knowing that the storm may open up its maw again, but golden dawn is that much quicker. What waits will ripen in its own time, like a mango swelling with sun, keen to go and just as sweet. A quiet sygil of what’s stirring just beneath the surface: brighter days, and brighter days, and brighter days to come.