I was convinced I would meet God in the mountains.
A few weeks ago, I booked a flight out west and endured the stale-peanut smell and cramped quarters of a commercial airplane, hoping to put as many miles as possible between me and my desk job in winter-stricken Michigan, where the seasonal blues seemed to have sunk deep in my soul. I carried with me what most travelers do: shoes, underwear, two pairs of pants, a few sticks of gum and a handful of granola bars, and an attitude of hope that this trip would change my life.
I touched down in Las Vegas—the last place I would go if I wanted self-reflection and reconnection with God—and spent just long enough in the constantly beeping and blaring Sin City to pick up a rental car and a sandwich. Then I traveled north on I-15 for Zion National Park, a federally protected haven where, I thought, it would be impossible not to run into God. Sure enough, I felt my spirits lighten as I-25 led away from Nevada, a barren valley-land populated by scruffy sage bushes and solar panels, into the northwest corner of Arizona, where the mountains began to rise, red and rocky. Of course, mountains don’t move for interstate highways. I-15 loops and lifts according to where the mountains stand.
Twenty miles away from Zion National Park, I stopped at a Walmart in a small town in Utah. The grocery store faced a snow-capped mountain. Walking out of the automatic doors, toting bags of bread and potato chips and deli meat, I stared at the glorious mountain and did not feel the hoped-for peace wash over me.
The mountain ahead of me was lordly, lofty, and looming. It had all the permanence and grandeur I could want in a God. But the mountain just sat there, watching the small town and its residents without reaching out a hand. If I was going to find God in the mountains, I was going to have to find Him. I had to climb.
So I laced up my neon-orange trail running shoes and climbed. For the next four days, I climbed the steep red cliffs of the Zion Canyon, alternating my eyes from the path in front of me to the towering rocks above me. I hiked the Emerald Pools trail, steadily inching up the side of a mountain while passing green-tinted pools and icy waterfalls. I stepped over small button-shaped cacti and gray-green grasses.
I was getting nothing. Whatever happened to “the mountains and the fields will break forth in singing?” Where were the trees clapping their hands in joy? Utah has plenty of rocks—but not a single pebble seemed to be crying out. And I was running out of time.
Once, standing on a ledge where archeologists had uncovered fossilized dinosaur footprints, I could look out over a valley and see for miles. Here I was, I thought. Like Moses on Mt. Sinai, I had sought God in the mountains and would be coming back with rocks. Mine, however, didn’t have any magic commandments.
I gave up and just sat there next to the dinosaur prints, which just looked like claw-shaped indents in the sandstone. I watched the mountains in the distance, and I stopped expecting the cliffs to speak for God. It was my last day in Utah, so I just soaked in the view.
The next day, I headed back on I-15 towards the Las Vegas airport. On the two-hour drive, I passed the same mountains that had surrounded me on my way in. Nothing in the range had moved even an inch, not in the past week nor in the past millennium. Every peak was as epic and beautiful as it had been for ages.
On the plane back to cold, gray Michigan, I peered through the porthole and watched the fringes of the Rocky Mountains from a bird’s eye view. There was some small comfort, knowing the mountains would exist regardless of my ability to see or experience them back in the Midwest. They’d still stand, permanent and sublime but always somewhat unknowable.
It’s not the full picture of God, I thought, but it was a marvelous view.
Hannah Riffell has landed in Lansing, Michigan twenty-three years after she was born there, nineteen years after she moved to Mississippi, seven years after she moved to Northern Michigan, and two years after she graduated from a university in Grand Rapids. You probably can’t find her because she’s either exploring the state, wandering around her city, or just lost in her own head.
Loved your writing here … we have family in Utah, specifically, Moab – know those vistas well … I kept thinking: God hides when we seek, God finds when we least expect it. Thanks for sharing your journey. It’s a beautiful state – thank God for our national parks.