Summer: Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from an essay titled Summer.

The landscape opens in a welcoming display of vibrant homecoming as the sun returns from its  southern sojourn. The mountains weep as the snow breaks and warms and melts into streams and rivers, trickling and flowing through meadows and canyons and dripping from pine boughs and thick, wooded glades of Wasatch fern. Flowers find themselves breaking through rapidly softening soil and opening in dramatic bursts of color toward the sun. They splash purple and yellow and pink and red across mountain meadows, offsetting the monotonous green and brown. They soak up the rain and the melted, flowing snows of winter, reminders of the joy and optimism inherent in the season.

Slowly, the singletrack and the high altitude trails start to crawl out from under the snow, flexing in a joyous display of tacky, sticky dirt, smooth and fast and wonderful. The unfettered whooping and hollering of skiers that echoed off the rocky cirques and among the treed ridges throughout the winter has been replaced with the cries and jubilant excesses of mountain bikers, speeding around switchbacks and through the tall, wet, green meadows.

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of singletrack.