The road was every bit as rough as I remembered: steep, narrow, granite boulders to climb over, deep ruts. I was in my new Jeep Wrangler, the first off-road trek I’d made with it. What a perfect place, the old Anthony Lakes lookout. I’d been there once before with my parents and brother, probably fifteen years earlier, when I was a teenager with much more important things on my mind than a mountain trek, like girls.

My parents and brother are still around, but my older brother, Tom, he’d gotten Multiple Sclerosis not long after that trip and was totally disabled in a wheelchair. Tom had been the family’s athlete in school; he still holds three records in track at our high school: High jump (6’6”) and the high and low hurdles. He also held the long jump record until an Olympics-caliber kid broke it three years ago. His portrait is also on the school wall, basketball Hall of Fame.

One of Tom’s favorite memories that he talked about often is this mountain, that trip fifteen years ago. He wanted me to come up here and bring him pictures, but until I bought the Jeep, there was no way, not without a seven-mile hike up this road and back – just to get to the hiking trail.

I’m divorced now, finalized six months, nine days earlier, January 2nd. I’ve always been a country boy, love the outdoors, especially the mountains. JoAnn was the exact opposite ─ a city girl, through and through. We stuck it out together for seven years. The beginning was terrific, JoAnn was drop-dead gorgeous, sexy didn’t even begin to describe her – she still is, but after a few years, that wasn’t enough. Our different personalities started injecting more and more into our relationship, and the memories and her gorgeous looks just weren’t a strong enough glue.

Hence, the Jeep. It had been a sore spot for a long time, I’ve wanted to buy one for years and JoAnn wasn’t about to let me spend ‘one dime’ on such a waste. She was probably right, but still ... A much bigger point of contention, the final straw, was kids, I wanted and she didn’t, adamantly didn’t want, refused to go off birth control. ‘It would despoil her figure’, she kept telling me.

It was a long, steep, rough seven miles up that road, much of it low-range crawling, over an hour of driving. Once I finally reached the summit, I could look down on Anthony, Grande Ronde, and Hoffer Lakes on the other side. The ridge was the top of the Anthony Ski area. The summit of the ski lift was a couple-hundred yards off to the left. I wished I’d learned to ski, imagining what the view must be like from here covered with snow in the winter. The elevation at this summit is 8,408 feet. The side of the mountain I’d just come up is part of the John Day River drainage, mostly wilderness area, and the opposite side of the ridge, the ski slope side, is the Baker Valley far below. What an incredible view in any direction!

The reason for the trip was to bring home pictures for Tom. He’d been asking for a long time, and now that I had the Jeep ... I’d taken several on the way up and more from the ridge. But my real destination was to the right, up the ridge and the granite stone peaks another thousand feet higher. There used to be a fire lookout, long abandoned and gone now. I faintly remembered that there were still some old wooden timbers from the lookout and was anxious to see if there was anything still there.

I followed the road another quarter mile around the ridge to the base of the hiking trail where it started climbing. I was a little disappointed that there was a four-wheeler at the road’s end. I was hoping for seclusion on this hike. I was hopeful that whoever it was may have taken the trail down to Crawfish Lake, instead.

I’d waited until evening because I knew the sunset would be spectacular – and more likely to see wildlife. I was wearing my photo vest with both wide-angle and telephoto lenses, tripod, a headlamp in case it got dark, binoculars, and lots of water. It was late July, hot. Even so, there were still snowdrifts on the North facing slopes of the granite peaks above.

JoAnn would never have come up here with me. Not that we could have, without the Jeep, but mountains were toxic to her. I think she was allergic to clean air, at least thought she was. I could say that I wondered why we ever married, but I knew. Like I said, the girl was so fuckin’ gorgeous and a young man’s, probably even an old man’s, brain sort of malfunctions around a girl like JoAnn. I guess the real mystery was why she married me. I think I’m fairly good-looking, and I guess she saw me as a ‘project’. Whatever, it didn’t work. The last six months have been so much more pleasant. It was depressing that it didn’t work, though, I had loved her, even thought she’d loved me in the beginning. Giving up on our marriage wasn’t easy, a lot of tears were shed, but after our divorce was finalized, it seemed a lot like Roy Clark’s song, ‘Thank God and Greyhound She’s Gone’.

I took off hiking. The first part of the trail was straight and steep, lots of ancient-looking, windblown Bristlecone Pines with the big irregular branches. It’s hard to believe the hardiness of trees to survive the wintery climate these must endure. I can’t even imagine what a winter storm must be like on this ridge. The trees were absolutely breathtaking.

And the air up there! Oh my God, it smelled so clean and good. I could see what seemed like hundreds of miles, every direction, across the Baker Valley to the far-away Elkhorn Mountains on one side, and nearly the entire John Day River watershed on the other.

The trail flattened out a little and Crawfish Lake came into view down in the little valley on my right. Way back when we were kids, we’d even walked into it once, too. That would be a hike for another day, Tom would enjoy those pictures, too.

I’m a reasonably fit, thirty-year-old, but the thin air and the beautiful view necessitated lots of stops. The sun was low and the colors of the sky and mountains were so vivid, perfect for pictures. I only wished Tom could have been here with me. He loved the outdoors just like me before that damned MS hit him.

Near the old lookout, the trail began to switch back, over and over again up a rocky, granite-strewn, near-vertical slope. Places along the trail were literally hands-and-feet crawling. I had to stop several times to catch my breath and just enjoy the view and snap pictures.

Then it leveled out again, passing through two vertical granite pillars, a natural framing for pictures. I remember how we’d stopped here and stood between them taking portraits of each other, the granite peak of the lookout in the background. It almost made me cry, remembering Tom proudly standing between the pillars so long ago.

Beyond the pillars, a new vista opened up. Down in the valley above Crawfish Lake, there’s a huge green meadow, a meandering little stream running through it ─ and this evening, it was full of elk, hundreds it seemed like. I got out my binoculars to look at them and was transfixed. The calves were running, playing, their mommas patiently eating. Scattered through the herd were several bulls, some small ─ spikes, and several granddaddies, some with huge racks of antlers.

I could have stayed and watched forever, but my goal was the old lookout on top of a flat slab at the summit of the peak. From here on, a slip could be deadly. The trail pretty much ended and just turned into climbing up and over giant granite boulders with deep drop-offs on both sides. Around one more bend, six mountain goats were walking across the face of a several-hundred-foot-high, vertical cliff. I scanned them with the binoculars and it looked like there was a little ledge, maybe a few inches wide. The elk were still going to be there, but these, I couldn’t pass over the picture. I put on my 400mm telephoto and began snapping, probably two dozen pictures. Bless digital!

With the excitement from the goats, I hadn’t noticed, but there was a person, a woman, presumably the owner of the four-wheeler sitting on top of the peak. I couldn’t help but stop and snap her picture sitting on top of that granite boulder.

I became alarmed as I climbed closer to her, realizing that she was sitting there, crying. I climbed up beside her and asked, “You okay?”

She looked over at me, the tears streaming down her cheeks, wiped them with the back of her hands, and nodded, “Uhuh, I guess.”

She was nice-looking, not beautiful like JoAnn, but not many women were. Easy on the eyes, probably mid-thirties, but I’m a crappy judge of age. Funny how a guy’s first thoughts about a woman are her appearance and her age. I felt kind of guilty that they had even crossed my mind when she was obviously suffering.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked her.

She stared off in the distance. The meadow with the elk was our view from the perch on that rock. Wiping the tears from her cheeks, “I ... used to come up here with my husband, every summer. He loved this place more than any other...”

I knew there was more she wanted to say, so just sat quietly waiting. She wiped her cheeks again, the tears had seemed to slow. “He died ... almost three years ago ... leukemia.” Her breath caught, another little sob, “This is my first time back ... since.”

Ahh shit! I had no idea what to say. I thought I’d had it rough with the divorce. All I knew to do, and had no idea if it was right or not with a complete stranger, was to put my arm around her shoulders and hold her. I guess it was, she put her head on my shoulder and just let her tears flow.

After several minutes sitting like that, this strange woman crying on my shoulder, she gradually got control of herself, looked up at me with her tear-stained eyes, and said with a half-hearted smile on her face, “Thank you ... guess I needed that.”

She offered me her hand, “My name’s Stacy.”

I took her hand, noticing how soft it was, the first time I’d touched a woman’s skin since at least six months before our divorce, and told her my name, Jason, “Jase to my friends, I’d like it if you called me Jase if you want.”

Then she started talking, told me about her husband, Alex, or Lex, “As in Lex Luthor of Superman fame,” how he’d gotten sick, they’d rushed him to the cancer center at OHSU in Portland, but it was discovered too late. He was gone before she’d even had time to come to grips with him being sick. Two kids, a girl, twelve, and a boy, fifteen. “They were devastated, losing their dad.” I could tell the pride in her voice when she talked about her two kids. I couldn’t even imagine how that must have been for a couple pre-teen kids.