Finding Meaning in Little Mill Creek

May is a difficult month in the central Rocky Mountains. Even on a year such as this, where the prevailing winds elected to deny snow to those who love it (the intermountain West) and deliver it to those that hate it and have no use for it (Northern Michigan and New York City), inevitably there is a spring day where what remains of winter gets in your way. Today was that day. 

Mill Creek is one of the crown jewels of the Gunnison Valley. There are no bad views here, it is eminently accessible, the perfect place to take your out of town visitors who aren’t quite used to the altitude yet. The enormous rock pillars of the Castles loom over this valley within the valley, its towers and spires jutting regally out from the pines and aspens. A formation out of Tolkien, deep shadows darken its walls, adding a level of grandeur that is at once breathtaking and superfluous. In the winter, cross country ski trails wind around and in the fall, the place is ablaze in orange. Mill Creek is Instagram ready, to say the least. 

As many family photos as I have here, sky and rock behind smiling groups of four or so people, I don’t come to these parts often anymore. I have looped the loops, forded the creek at multiple points and at multiple water levels, tread over and over again Mill Creek’s hillsides and valleys. Heart archingly picturesque as it may be, there are simply too many roads on my map to spend much time hanging around territory so familiar that I can unscientifically measure the snowpack by fallen aspens that I have skied over, climbed under, and straddled.

I have also been up and down Steers Gulch multiple times. Not as often as Mill Creek, but I know it’s grassy hillsides and cottonwood oases well. 

But I have, as of yet, not connected the two. 

Little Mill Creek trail connects the deep trench of Mill Creek to the top of Steers Gulch. It is steep and keeps being steep the further you follow it. I park at the bottom, climb up and out, making sure to correct for my goal oriented nature by consciously attuning to the audible signs of life as spring stretches her wings. I leave the main trail, heading north and following the creek for which the trail is named.

Hopping across the small, muddy waterways that drain into the Ohio Valley, I amuse myself by thinking of metaphors. I allow Mill Creek to represent the long chapter of family life that is closing for me. Our family with its glorious busy-ness, the golden hour memories of those perfect, messy haired children, now grown, with their round eyes and deep hugs, the heightened meaning of it all. Like the castles, I defined myself by my presence in their lives. 

Playing pictures in my mind, like Mill Creek, we are ever popular, ever beautiful, ever green. 

My aging knees whine a bit. Coming up the trail, the pines gradually break, an open hillside appears to my right, an expansive view to the north. A lichen covered rock provides a natural perch, right along the trail no less. Unwrapping my cold burrito, batting the dogs away, I indulge the metaphor just a little more.

Unless you are at its bottom, Steers Gulch provides uninterrupted views in every direction from the onset. The open meadows offer themselves as places to consider the view. Although strikingly deep, nothing there is distinct or outlandish enough to name. It is gradual, wide, quiet. 

I imagine today’s adventure as a stand-in for the journey between the first and the second halves of my life. The transition from a full to an empty nest. A chance to embrace a different kind of beauty. My youngest child will graduate from high school in two weeks and I am here, connecting two places. 

The metaphor is now so extended that it pulls at its seams, and I can’t help but laugh at myself. Drown me in the shallow waters before I get too deep. Tell me about it, Edie.   

Patches of snow are becoming bigger, the way around less obvious. Although the wet spring snow holds our weight, the walking is awkward and the trail harder and harder to find. The elder dog’s generous posterior keeps sinking. Finally, after a half an hour of wandering this way and that, our tracks like a rabbit on the run, we come to what I think is the last steep pitch. It is hard to tell as fallen trees have tangled the way through the thick blanket of snow. Even though I know I am within a half of a mile of my goal, I decide that this last little bit will need to be connected on another day. 

I guess, as the fortune cookie says, the seasons have not changed just yet.