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| Rocky Mountain National Park |
I met Sarah when I lived in Kazakhstan in the
mid-1990s. She was fresh out of
college with a degree in Russian studies and had taken some job down in
Almaty. Like every one of our good
friends there – local or expat – she was in love with the mountains. Almaty sits in the foothills of the
Tien Shan range, which rises above the steppe to heights of 12,000
feet. The range marks the southern
border, the boundary with Kirghizstan.
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| Mills Lake |
Almarasan, Medeu, Chimbulak, Talgar, Aksu – we did our best to
explore.
Now, a couple of decades later, she's in different mountains. Her husband is a park ranger in Rocky Mountain National
Park, and for her children, elk are are more common than pigeons.
A research trip brought me to Colorado and I took the opportunity to pay them a visit in Estes
Park.
On Tuesday, while the kids were in
school we snowshoed up from Bear Lake – to Nymph Lake,
Dream Lake, and finally to Emerald Lake, which nestles in its little, snowy
cirque 10,000 feet above sea level.
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| Short cut across Dream Lake |
The next day Sarah and I hiked to Mills Lake up in Glacier
Gorge. The snow was marked with
tracks of rabbits and hares and squirrels.
No one was at the frozen lake but the two of us, and the valley
was silent. You could almost hear
the snow gently falling. We drank
hot cider from a thermos and were happy.
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| Glacier Gorge |
