The morning I fell there were clouds gathering in the sky. This was not unusual or unexpected; afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains are a well-understood hazard for hikers and backpackers. It’s why most hikes and summit attempts above the tree line happen early in the morning, so that everyone can be a safe distance down the slope by the time the lightning starts. At this time, we were decidedly still above the tree line, the only landmarks around us being rocks and boulders and slushy summer snow. This made our group of 12 campers and counselors the 12 tallest objects in the area, which meant that we were precariously close to having a problem if the clouds darkened and rumbled. The reason we were still above the tree line at all was due to another problem – me.

We were about three or four days into a six-day long backpacking trip through the Rocky Mountains, and for the entire trip thus far, I had been leading the group. This was not because I was an exceptional hiker, far from it. I was the slowest member of the group, and so I was the one who set the pace for everyone else. I was hilariously and hopelessly out of shape, which combined with the altitude and the weight of my backpack, meant that I wheezed along one agonizingly slow step at a time. Everyone else in the group was quite sick of it, though some were kind enough not to vocalize it. The others – mainly the teen boys in the group, assholery written into their DNA, would yell at me from the back to go faster. I didn’t answer their taunts, usually because I couldn’t get enough air in to get a response out.

Contrary to what everyone seemed to think, I didn’t want to go so slow. In my daydreams I saw myself running up the slopes with my arms spread wide by my sides, the weight of my backpack an afterthought. In reality, though, I never felt like I had enough air in my lungs. I was certain that I was eventually going to keel over to one side, pulled down by the weight of my pack, where I would then lie forever. I took my body’s betrayal very seriously. I was born in Colorado, and at this point in my teenage life had never lived anywhere else. Shouldn’t this have granted me some inherent biological advantage in these mountains, my mountains? Apparently not.

The kicker was that I had chosen to be here, a two-week summer camp nestled in the Colorado Rockies with activities as varied as archery and paddleboarding and sailing. The pinnacle of the camp experience was the six-day backpacking trip through Rocky Mountain National Park. I had successfully completed this trip once before during the prior summer, grueling and horrible as it had been. When I returned home after camp was over, I had resolved to never do anything like it ever again, and yet here I was, one year later. I think it was the mountains that called me back.

Though it had been a painful and miserable experience, it had also been an achingly beautiful experience too. It was the first time I had ever been somewhere that felt like true wilderness, a place where humans were an afterthought. Some of my favorite moments were the times when I had to step off the trail to go relieve myself in a hole against a tree, and I would lean against the tree and fill my eyes with the forest around me. I had been an avid reader of the Warriors series as a kid, my imagination filled with wild woods populated by cats, and I had spent years with a deep yearning to see a “real” forest. Those times spent leaning against a tree, a spongey bed of pine needles beneath my feet, I knew that I had found it.

The following year, my second go at this backpacking endeavor, not long after we had set off on the trail and said goodbye to material comforts for six days, I saw a moose. Actually, two. I had stepped off the trail to pee and as I leaned against the tree, a female moose trotted by at a leisurely pace. For the first time I understood the phrase “a stone’s throw away”, because I certainly could have hit her on the flank with a rock lobbed her way. She was accompanied by a calf. One of my favorite childhood books was Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, and I remembered well the scene of thirteen-year-old Brian getting absolutely wrecked by a female moose. Even as this scene flashed through my mind, I felt no fear. I simply watched with awe as mama and baby moose went on their way. These were the sorts of experiences that backpacking could provide, the sights that could only be seen marching deep into the mountains by your own power alone.

As we trudged slowly but surely into the wild, my snail’s pace didn’t prove a real issue, even if it made us arrive at a couple of our camping sites a little later than intended. When it became an issue was that morning, above the tree line, clouds swirling right above our heads, a promise, not a threat, to quote Lana Del Rey. We weren’t descending fast enough, and it was entirely my fault. As we rested, and I tried to remember how to breathe, I heard one of our counselors talking to the two girls who were my closest friends at camp that year. I no longer remember their names, just that they both started with an A – Anna? Arianna? Adrien? Anyways, our counselor was telling A1 and A2 that they needed to try and help me go faster with encouraging words. I think they thought I couldn’t hear this conversation going on, even though they were only a few feet away from me. A1 and A2 were told to encourage me along any way they could, because the situation was growing dangerous. I felt pretty badly about the whole thing. I didn’t want anyone to be struck by lightning because I was too slow and chubby and uncoordinated. So, as we descended, I strived for speed.

Descending a mountain is actually much harder than the ascent, as backwards as that may seem. Climbing up is a lot of work, but climbing down requires precision and sure-footedness. Your body, laden with the extra weight of your pack, wants to follow gravity down, and slipping and falling is a real risk. At the front of the group, I had no mind for precision or caution. I just knew that we needed to get down fast before the rain and lightning came. The irony of what follows is that as we descended, I actually started, for the first time in my life, to feel kind of good while backpacking. Like a runner’s high but for hiking. The pain started to disappear, and I felt a newfound energy I didn’t think I was capable of. I felt like I could keep going, and going. This frenzied energy is certainly the antithesis of precision, of caution.

It wasn’t long after that we arrived at the place of my undoing. It was a long stretch of trail completely buried in melting summer slush. Picture a trail carved into the steep side of the mountain, and then pile enough slush on top to make it look like there was never even a trail there to begin with. That was the situation we were faced with. I had stopped, unsure of how to proceed. One of our counselors went ahead and trudged through the slush, carving a path for us. He stopped at the other side of the snowy expanse and told us to walk where he had walked, to put our feet in the prints he had left behind. As the leader of the group, I was the first lamb to the slaughter. I think I made it about halfway before I slipped and fell.

As I slid down the slush, pulled down by the weight of my pack and lubricated by the snowmelt beneath me, my counselor yelled down to me to dig my hands and feet into the slush, to try and get a hold. “I’m trying!” I yelled back. I was trying. I shoved both of my hands into the snow up to my wrists, and still I continued to slide down, the melty snow offering no resistance. As I slid further away from the group, further down the mountain towards the edge of a drop-off, I found that I was speeding up. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. I slid off the edge and fell.

I’m not actually sure how long I fell. Time moves differently in moments like these, becoming stretchy and malleable like slime. It could have been only a few seconds, or maybe it was for a minute or longer. However long it lasted, I was completely certain that I was about to die. I was no longer in control of my body. I bounced and tumbled down the slope, thrown around like clothes in a dryer. Images flashed by too fast for me to absorb. I eventually closed my eyes altogether, not brave enough to face death with eyes wide open. I waited for the moment it would all end, when my head would smash against a rock and I would become nothing. Before I fell, I’d had a song stuck in my head from the Homestuck soundtrack called “Umbral Ultimatum”. It’s a frenetic electronic track, and it still played in my head as I fell. I realized that the last song that would ever play in my head was a song from the Homestuck soundtrack, and I thought about how pathetic that was.

Everything that is in motion must eventually stop, and so I eventually tumbled to a stop somewhere far down the mountain. For a moment I wondered if I had broken my spine in the fall, because I couldn’t move at first. Then I remembered the giant pack on my back that had certainly cushioned my fall, and it occurred to me that it was probably shock keeping me paralyzed. I managed to sit up and began to take stock of things. My prescription sunglasses that I had been wearing were long gone. So was my water bottle, a deep red Hydro Flask. I loved that water bottle. I would later buy another red Hydro Flask a few months later, but it wasn’t the same shade of red, and I would feel deeply grieved by this. In the present, I also realized that my retainer was gone. Somewhere in the violence of the fall it had been ripped out of my mouth. I felt truly battered in a way that I have never felt before or since. I felt that I should be crying in a situation like this, so I tried it out a little, letting out a couple of wails. It didn’t seem to be doing it for me though, so I stopped. This probably also had something to do with shock.

An indeterminate amount of time later, a pair of hikers materialized and started to try to help me. I recognized them, because earlier that morning we had arrived at an outlook on the trail that they were already admiring, and our noisy teenage boisterousness made them leave. I supposed that they had seen me tumble by. One of them told me it looked like I needed stitches in my head, and I told him that my sunglasses were gone. Not long after, my counselor made it down to me, and seemed very relieved to find me alive. I told him that I had checked and my digital camera was okay. Nobody seemed to be very receptive to these important pieces of information that I offered. I must have looked a fright.

The rest of our group eventually made it down to where I was. I never did hear how everyone else fared crossing the expanse of slush, but since nobody else looked like they’d fallen down the mountain I guess they did alright. A1, one of my A-named friends, looked like she’d been crying. She’d been right behind me, and I later heard that she had been inconsolable during those minutes before I was found because, from her perspective, she’d just seen me fall to my death right in front of her. I wish I could remember her name.

It was determined that I could still walk fine, though someone else carried my pack for me, which I thought was very kind. It was decided that we would venture the rest of the way to our designated campsite for the night, and that I was possibly going to be evacuated in a helicopter. This didn’t end up happening, and I was kind of disappointed. I’d never been in a helicopter before, and I still haven’t to this day. As we trudged down, our mood significantly dampened, the long-threatened rain finally began to fall. The drops felt nice and cool on my battered and bleeding face. Nobody got struck by lightning.

As I was situated in a tent and everyone else prepared in a frenzy for the arrival of a medic sent by the park service – for instance, hiding the food that was not supposed to be kept in our tents but which we had been keeping in our tents anyway – I felt worried, not about my physical state, but about what my parents would do or say when they heard about what had happened. As an only child, I did everything in my power to avoid the attention of my parents, while my parents had nothing to do but shower me with their attention. I had no idea how they would respond to a situation like this. The response came in a message texted to my counselor’s satellite phone, where they told me they loved me and were glad I was okay and that they would be seeing me soon. This finally made me cry for real.

My injuries were not severe. Nothing was broken. I didn’t end up needing stitches in my head. It turns out that head wounds just bleed a lot. I came out pretty lucky, with no massively obvious scars. The scar from the laceration on my head lies right on my hairline, and no hair has grown in that tiny spot ever since. It’s not noticeable unless I point it out, which I do occasionally as a supplement to the story I tell at parties, the story of how I fell down a mountain and off a cliff.

My feelings about this incident are complex, and it’s taken me many years to grapple with them. I’ve never written much about it, even though it is probably the single defining moment of my life. Now that it’s been about ten years since then, I feel enough distance to try.

The first thing I feel is anger. I felt it then, and I feel it still. I’m angry that I was made to push myself beyond my limits, angry that I was guilted into putting myself in harm’s way, angry that I was put in an unsafe situation that I was hopelessly unprepared for. Everyone treated me differently after I fell. The same kids who had yelled at me to go faster and snickered about my slow pace behind my back now came to see me in my tent with big sad eyes. I wanted to tell them to keep their pity, that it wouldn’t give me my water bottle back, but I didn’t voice anything of the sort. What good would it do?

Now, separated by years and a lot of time to think, I feel a different sort of anger. The fall took the mountains away from me, my mountains that I love so much. I haven’t ever been backpacking again, and I’m not sure if I have it in me to try again. Even if I were given some guarantee that I wouldn’t encounter the circumstances of my fall again, the memory of it would still plague my mind too much to ever try again. My senior year of high school, I was meant to take a backpacking trip with my graduating class, and I grossly exaggerated an injury to get out of it. I will be moving back to Colorado this fall after several years of living elsewhere, and my dad asked me if I would want to do any hiking. I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t. The hesitancy I felt hurt my heart.

In spite of everything, however, beneath the anger, the feeling I cling to after all these years is the euphoria I felt as I descended that day, before we reached the slush field, those moments when I finally felt myself standing strong beneath the weight of my pack, when I felt like I could walk the entire rest of the trail in one go. I think of that hard-earned sensation, and I think of the moose, and the feeling of being surrounded by a “real” forest, and I think to myself that I surely have a lot of life left to live, and that there will be a day, maybe not this fall or this year, but somewhere down the line when the mountains call me back and I am brave enough to answer.