This post was written a couple weeks back, but I mistakenly saved it as a draft rather than publishing it. So, here it is, belatedly!

Yesterday, I pored over photos from a decade ago, high in the remote, wild Picket Range of Washington State, stitching together a 350-degree panorama of these magnificent mountains from Luna Col.

I was in there with good friends back in 2014, hoping to attempt the second ascent of the Mongo Ridge (we didn’t), and to find some peace, solace, beauty in arguably the remotest spot in the Lower 48 (we did).

As I worked on the panorama, I was transported back to that moment, that evening, the abject sublimity of solitude it afforded us all: no roads, no people, a few critters, not a sound but the whistle of wind, clatter of rock, mysterious glacial rumbles far below.

It’s quite the rarity these days to find - and access - such a place. Increasingly, our wild zones are tamed, roads cutting and gutting forests, dirtbikes, 4x4s, and side-by-sides plying once-wild lands, landscapes pocked by human presence and persistence. And, the situation will likely get worse, with the Trump Administration determined to sell off millions of acres of public lands to the oil and gas, mining, and timber industries.

So what? some may ask. We’ve got millions of acres, and what good is empty, wild land?

In his always-inspiring book Desert Solitaire, Ed Abbey dug into this with his signature, blunt eloquence:

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

Wilderness, wilderness.… We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination…

Suppose we say that wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit…
But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need—if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us—if only we were worthy of it.
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (library or Archive.org)

The past and the unknown, something lost and still present… I felt all of that sitting on Luna Col, a feeling of innate kinship with the unknown, untamed wild about me. It’s a feeling I’ve had before in the remote wilderness, from the Wind Rivers to the White Mountains, deep in an unmarked and untrailed drainage in Colorado or off the beaten track in the Hunku: a sense of absolute serenity, an undefinable feeling of - knowledge of - our human connection to the earth, our reliance upon it, our need to protect it and care for it (despite Biblical misinterpretation to the contrary) not for its well being and survival, but for our own.

And, I’ve felt the same not just where I’ve actually plopped my but on a rock and taken the time to sit, observe, take it in. It’s hit me strongly countless times as I’ve gazed at pockets of wild I’ll never visit, and few others have or will. Central Asian deserts and corners of Colombian Chiribiquete will never feel my footfall, yet knowledge of their unknown existence is enough to placate and inspire, my ignorance of their realities affording comfort that all is not lost, some wild remains (relatively) untouched by the soil of humanity.

As I sat those many years ago atop Luna Col, gazing in wonder at nothing and everything, at peaks and passes and places that I’d never visit and scant few others have or will, I was reminded of Nan Shepherd’s similar thoughts of a remote loch in the Cairngorms:

The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest number is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness.
- Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (library or Archive.org)