It’s a 12-hour drive from Berkeley to Ketchum, and I’m dreading it. I fantasize about relocating Nevada to the other side of Colorado. I complain the whole state is “in the way of the good stuff.” I say this to people, out loud!
I’ve rarely been so wrong about a place or so glad about it.
The pleasant surprises start the moment I kick open the car door and stumble into the light of Water Canyon. I rolled in late, frazzled by gas-station coffee and hours winnowing through semis on dark desert highway. I didn’t know where I’d landed, but I certainly wasn’t expecting this: a crystalline morning, creekbed aspens rattling and fluttering in a fresh breeze as if animated by spirits à la “Colors of the Wind.” There’s nobody else here and the sky’s enormous. I feel drunk but need to keep driving.
In Elko some hours later, I found the Folklife Museum—contrary to its name—rather too slick for my taste. But across the street at J.M. Capriola Co. (“Rancher and Cowboy Headquarters Since 1929”) the same glass cases of bits and spurs are for sale and therefore, in America, real. I have lunch next door, in a dim diner with a low ceiling, between a construction foreman and an old man in baggy fatigues. There is a sweating gray slab of meatloaf behind the counter and this is exactly what I wanted. (For atmosphere, I mean, not to eat.)
I drive to Lamoille Canyon on the recommendation of a photographer who shot it for the cover of Via (of all things): to be clear, I’m saying I literally found this place on Instagram. Despite this, it is so outstanding and so empty that I confess my first impulse—raw hypocrisy—is to keep it a secret. It takes me nearly two hours to cover the 12 miles to the trailhead because I can’t pass a single turnout without stopping to gawk at new iterations of snow and sagebrush and granite and sky.
Consequently it’s late afternoon before I actually start hiking, and I quickly lose the trail in snow. Per usual, I’m solo, map-less, and paranoid; I’ve just given up—in fact, am scouting out a tent spot—when I spot mule tracks switchbacking up the slope. The sun drops below the cirque at the exact moment I glance down at my watch; the chill is immediate. I dither.
But in the end I make a run for it. I crest the pass snotty and wheezing, but the roar in my ears is angels singing, surely, because I am just in time for this:
When I get back to the parking lot the next morning, an older couple is packing up their rental car. They are the first people I’ve seen anywhere in the canyon not wearing head-to-toe camo and they approach me smiling instead of staring. “We saw your California plates,” they say, by way of introduction.”Would you like some pizza?”
e.alia.salim 