“She looks different,” I said, staring at the mountain. My boyfriend, Adam, and I were sitting in a rocky meadow dotted with miniature bluebells of Alpine gentian and eating ham, cheese, and cornichon sandwiches we’d packed that morning. We were at the Col de Balme, a 7,228-foot pass that marks the transition from Switzerland to France. Before us was Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe. We’d left Chamonix nine days earlier to complete the Tour du Mont Blanc, one of the most popular treks in the world—100 miles through France, Italy, and Switzerland, with 30,000 feet of cumulative elevation gain.
“You can’t get the scope of her when you’re in the valley,” Adam agreed. From here, the mountain, which had acquired a feminine pronoun during our hike, was broader and softer but also larger and surrounded by jagged aiguilles and compact glaciers. In one more day we’d be done circumnavigating Mont Blanc.
Until recently a 10-day trek through the Alps felt impossible to me. Not because I don’t like treks. I love them. I grew up backpacking in the Rockies. After my first divorce I walked the Camino de Santiago alone. No, a trek like this was actually very “me,” but an older—and by that I mean younger—version of me. But then I became the married mother of two small children. “Maybe someday I’ll walk like that again,” I’d say to myself. Then life changed. Suddenly I was no longer married and had my children only half the time. Last summer my coparent and I agreed to give each other two weeks off. Two weeks when he would take the children on a daddy vacation, and I could…do whatever I wanted.
After the tumult of the previous few years, I could have lain on a beach. But I wanted to walk. I wasn’t after catharsis, exactly, but I was after a connection: with nature and with myself. An alignment in rhythm between my body and mind. Eleven years ago, at 30, I walked across Spain, wondering what the next decade would bring. Now, at 41, I was asking the question again.
