It seems like Colorado is foaming at the mouth.
As I drove from Aspen to Durango last weekend, the landscape looked oddly unfamiliar. Sheaths of green clung to steep hillsides like velvet, a lush and vibrant blanket covering the gray, rocky dirt
underneath. Turbulent rivers plowed through narrow canyons, exploding against the rocks like chocolate milk in the belly of a kid who mixed it with
too much candy.
Nowhere was this more evident than on the lower Animas River in downtown Durango last Saturday afternoon, where we watched kayakers put themselves in the middle of some of the biggest rapids the area has seen in years. As they flipped and spun and rolled, the brown water looked like a toilet bowl, mid-flush. Every 10 minutes or so, another commercial raft would fly by, the hoots and hollers of its passengers echoing in its wake. A guy with nothing but a boogie board and flippers followed, looking curiously at ease holding onto nothing but a square foot of Styrofoam. A tan woman in oversized sunglasses watched her boyfriend from the banks, as her dog, a chunky yellow Lab, howled with concern. I stood beside them wondering why the dog was the only one who seemed worried.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a little adrenaline rush. I love getting close to the forces of nature as much as the next guy, whether it’s dropping into a wave that’s above my comfort zone or letting go of my brakes on a sketchy steep section of a mountain-bike ride. But this year’s ample snowfall and subsequent runoff make me wonder if it might be too much of a good thing. It feels volatile, overflowing, bursting at the seams with uncontainable energy. I’m just waiting for this huge mouth to open and swallow people whole. It seems hungry.
And it has partaken. Last Friday night, a Durango man, Timothy White, 34, died jumping off Baker’s Bridge into the Animas for fun, as reported by The Durango Herald. On June 17, a guide and a tourist were killed in a commercial rafting accident on the upper Animas.
What were these people thinking? Why was a commercial raft guide taking inexperienced clients into potentially fatal rapids? Why would someone jump off a bridge into a wild, cold river? Why would someone jump off a bridge, period? Mom used to say, “If so-and-so jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?”
That was my very thought the other morning when my boyfriend, Tim, popped out of bed at 4 a.m. to ski Grizzly Peak, an almost-fourteener (at 13,988 feet) just east of Aspen. Half awake, my mind spun with disjointed thoughts as he clanked around the house, loading up his gear for the day. Was the snowpack stable? How quickly would it heat up? Was there danger of a wet slide? Was it a good group of people? Would they be cautious or ambitious? It wasn’t like he was going to summit Everest, I reasoned. It was just a day climb on a local peak to do a little skiing, no big deal.
I know Tim has good judgment. He has taken avalanche classes and mountaineering classes and spent the past year hiking and skiing the local terrain. He was with a group of experienced backcountry skiers, I reminded myself, though that was the piece that frightened me most. It seems the more time people spend in the backcountry, the higher the odds something’s going to happen. The more comfortable they get, the more likely they are to take chances, to rely on their skills and experience in the face of risk.
When he arrived home later that afternoon, his sunburned face was illuminated with life and joy and the thrill of the day. The experience enhanced every cell of his being, filling it with some kind of magic you’re not going to find in stasis.
That night at a bar, I grilled his partner, Tom, about risk-taking. I asked him a million questions. We talked about accident scenarios, recent deaths and friends who had put themselves in dangerous situations and walked away unscathed.
“Look, I’m not going to sit inside my house just because I’m afraid of these inherent risks,” he said, annoyed by having to state the obvious. “It’s just part of being out there. But you do your best to deal with it.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if those recent victims had similar conversations with their friends and loved ones. I guess it’s like those velvet-green hillsides – true beauty can’t exist without some level of danger, the forces that brought it to life. The question is: How close can you get to it before it gets you? I guess to some, not knowing is like not living at all.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
