For Wilshire Baptist Church
While hiking the Window Trail in Big Bend National Park recently, LeAnn said, “I have to keep remembering to look up so I don’t miss anything.” I found myself thinking the same thing.
She was stating a common problem for hikers, especially when the terrain is rugged and steep. You need to keep your eyes on the ground so you don’t misstep and twist an ankle or take a tumble, but you also want to see everything you came out on the trail to see, and that definitely isn’t the dusty ground. On the Window Trail, there’s plenty to see when you look up: towering cliffs and jagged uplifts of rock; green junipers, oaks and pinion pines; bright blue Mexican jays; the pink blossoms of Mexican buckeye and desert willow; spiked prickly pear and cholla cactus; and an amazing array of rugged succulents like agave, yucca, sotol and nolina.
The Window Trail is not especially difficult. It’s classified as “easy to moderate” on some of the hiking web sites. It’s only a 5.6-mile roundtrip hike through Oak Creek Canyon, but there is a 980-foot elevation gain that is made with natural terraces, switchbacks and steps built with stone and concrete. The trail is gritty-gravely or rock-strewn most of the way, but in the last tenth of a mile, the canyon narrows into almost a winding chute with floors and walls of igneous rock that have been polished to a glassy finish millions of years of rushing rainwater. Just past the end of the trail in the shade of the narrow canyon is a sudden and hidden 200-foot drop known as “the Window pour-off.” Basically, you’re standing at the top of a dry waterfall, and you’re tempted to inch out to the edge as far as you can to see what’s below, but you don’t dare because the footing is icy slick. So, you stand back a few yards and look out through the narrow window of the canyon to the mountains and ridges of the desert stretching all the way to Mexico.
Hiking the Window Trail is a lot like life, I think. We can get so focused on cautiously and purposefully making our way on our climb through the ups and downs of the journey that we fail to look up and enjoy the view. At 62, I’ve come to realize that perhaps I tramped through my middle years without stopping to look up. The time seems compressed — as in, how did it go by so fast? — and the memories of everyday events are long lost. And while the big moments are etched permanently into my memory, those little moments that I marched through without noticing were the stepping stones that got me to the big moments. In fact, I might not have had those big moments without the little ones.
On the Window Trail, the best way to get a good look was simply to just stop hiking and look up. That’s when we got our best pictures, watched the Mexican jays dancing in the trees, stopped to “smell the buckeye” in the absence of roses. As a practical matter, it was necessary to stop for breaks from the pour-off back to the trailhead because it was uphill all the way. Pausing to look around was a good excuse to let sore knees and hips rest, drink some water, move over so descending hikers could pass, and let our aching lungs draw in more of the thin, high-desert air.
Stopping to look on the journey of life is sometimes necessary, but it needs to be intentional too if you want to experience more. You have to plan to do it; you have to want to do it. It shouldn’t be something you do just out of exhaustion on your way back to the trailhead. It should be something you do to capture memories, gain perspective, set new goals and say a prayer of thanksgiving for the journey.
In many ways our trip to the desert itself was just such a stopping to look. After a year of pandemic and all its frustration, keeping up our work commitments including new projects, and racing to get everyone in our family bubble vaccinated, we needed to pull off to the side of the trail to catch our breath, look around, take stock. And nowadays, especially during the pandemic, you can’t just do anything like that spontaneously; you have to plan ahead with reservations and all that. But we got it planned and we took the trip, and while we drove 1,600 miles roundtrip to make this “stop” and look around, we came back to the trail of our daily lives rejuvenated.
By the way, you might have read in recent days about a wildfire at Big Bend that has closed down the Chisos Basin area of the park. That’s where we hiked the Window. I’m glad we put a pause on all our usual business here in town and went out there when we did to stop and enjoy the beauty, take some pictures and collect some memories. Based on other wildfire areas I’ve visited, it may not look as it did for a long, long time.