Back in the Day

It started, like most of these things do, with a phone call at four in the morning and a forecast nobody believed. The wind had finally laid down somewhere east of Valdez, and the snow that had been falling for three weeks straight was, for one impossible day, going to sit still long enough to be ridden.

We loaded the truck in the dark. Two boards, three lenses, a thermos of coffee that tasted like motor oil. By sunrise we were at the trailhead with a sky so bright it hurt to look at, and the only sound for a hundred miles was our boots compressing the crust.

I. The Approach

There's a particular silence to the Chugach in February. Not absence — silence as a presence, dense and physical, the kind of quiet you can lean against. We hiked for two hours without speaking. The only thing moving was the shadow of the ridge as the sun climbed over it.

Tomas dropped first. He always drops first. I had the camera braced against a rock and watched him through the viewfinder, this small dark shape carving across an ocean of white, leaving a wake that the wind would erase within the hour.

II. What Stays

We don't take many photos anymore. Phones, mostly, for the friends who weren't there. But that morning I shot a roll of Tri-X and didn't develop it for almost a year. When I finally did, sitting in a darkroom in Anchorage with the safelight on and the smell of fixer in the air, the first frame came up and I started to cry. Not because it was good. Because it was true.

That's the thing about this place. It doesn't owe you anything. It doesn't perform. You show up with whatever you brought and it gives you back exactly what you were willing to see.