More than three years have passed since I dialed 911 and declared Ian (my partner at the time) as a missing person. He went for a run in the La Plata mountains in southwestern Colorado and climbed to the summit of Hesperus, a mountain over 13,000 feet. 

When the sun set and he wasn’t back at camp, my friends and I began the arduous tasks of searching through the night. We crossed gushing rivers, bushwhacked off trail up to the alpine and found his footprint in the mud a few hours after sunrise. 

After that first footprint, nothing. Not a single clue for sixteen days. 

What started as a five person search swelled to hundreds of volunteers on foot, who camped alongside us for two weeks in the meadow below Hesperus. 

Ultrarunners hit the trail, covering up to thirty miles in a day. Technical climbing teams descended into basins of loose scree. Swift water rescuers probed the swollen river. ATVs shuttled hikers in and out of steep terrain. Drones and helicopters searched from the sky. Trained search and rescue horses and dogs worked all day long.

For sixteen days, I stayed in the mountains, waiting for some semblance of closure. I left without any. Two months later, his body was recovered in the river.

At this time three years ago, I was camping in the meadow below Hesperus again, preparing for Ian’s memorial. Summer’s daisies were long gone and in their place, the aspen leaves were turning into a crisp yellow. 

My niece helped me string up photos of Ian, tied around the watching eyes of the aspen bark. Easels were set up for Plein air painting. Bikes rode up and down the dirt roads. A fire was built with juniper logs that Ian cut himself.

For two days I watched the meadow come alive again with vans, trucks, bikes, and ATVs. Tents filled in the gaps between spruce and fir. Fingers strummed guitars and worlds collided. Friends from different pockets of his, mine and our lives mixed. New bonds seeped into the cracks of loss. 

We gathered to celebrate Ian’s life. 

I returned to the meadow the next summer to summit Hesperus, and after that I stayed away.

Two summers passed before I returned to camp below Hesperus. Two weeks ago I started that familiar drive from the Mancos valley up to 10,000 feet. I bit my lip as I passed full campsite after full campsite. I worried the meadow would be full of RVs and hunters. I’d never seen the forest so busy.

I smirked when I arrived and the meadow was the only empty campsite on the entire road.

How is it that every time I’ve ever wanted to camp there it’s been open? It feels like Ian’s looking out for me.

Friends arrived and we wandered through the woods, never on trail. We looked for mushrooms while our dogs ran off leash. We laughed when they zoomed by us, jumping over logs and racing to splash in mud pits.

Memories of searching for Ian flooded back to us with each step into the dense forest. We hardly looked at a map yet could recognize where we were from our weeks of searching. I don’t think I’ll ever know another place so intimately. 

We walked in the creek, ate burgers, steak, and leftover wedding cake. We laid awake listening to rain hit our tents. We sat around a propane fire because the National Forest was still under a fire ban and told stories about Ian. 

My memories of that meadow continue to soften with each new experience there. 

An obvious, but painful, truth is that we can never control when we lose our loved ones. We can only control how we remember and honor them. 

Ian left us with a lot to remember. In my too short time with him, we traveled thousands of miles in the backcountry of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, and California by foot and by bike. He showed me a way of living outside that most never attempt.

His thirst for exploring is something I constantly strive to carry on into my life without him. 

Like the red rock desert I call home, we’ll continue to weather floods of grief throughout our lives. Luckily, we’ve learned how to do it together, in community.  

Great grief and loss often feels like it takes everything away. My life’s plans, which felt sturdy as stone crumbled into grains of sand when Ian died. This is the nature of the sandstone I love. The desert teaches me that everything beautiful follows the cycle of destruction and rebirth. 

Grief takes but it also gives. Grief took Ian and gave me new friends, more love, closer connections and a deeper appreciation for the ones left behind. 

Grief gave me a calm tenacity to accept what’s in front of me, even if I didn’t ask for it and don’t want it. Experiencing that kind of loss gave me a shrinking tolerance for bullshit and the confidence to walk away and not waste my time. Grief gave me a deeper well of emotion and compassion for the choices people make when their life erodes. 

Grief has given me motivation to live a really fun, impactful, adventurous life. That didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t magically appear the second Ian was gone, in fact it was the opposite. 

Grief shattered my nervous system. It gave me sleepless nights and long teary days. Every morning I laid in bed confused because it took months for the prediction circuit in my brain to rewrite itself, to stop expecting Ian to be there when I woke up. 

Grief’s gifts aren’t a drizzle, they’re a downpour. 

I learned to swim in the torrent and ride the waves that surge suddenly throughout the years. I learned not to judge waves of grief as regression but have come to understand that my amygdala fires unpredictably as it continues to detect the absence of someone it was wired to expect. 

Grief in our body and brains have their own timeline, just as our loved ones have their own timeline on earth. 

Grieving Ian has given me a closer connection to the ways we can connect with the other side. I feel Ian’s presence surge in moments when I’m outside. 

Sometimes a raven visits me and looks at me in a way I’ve never seen a bird look at me before. Certain ravens have appeared the moment I think of Ian, and follow me from rock to rock, holding eye contact for so long that the hairs on my arm raise and before I know what I’m doing, I’m talking to Ian. Call it stupid, call me crazy, I don’t care. 

Two months ago I got a text from Travis, one of Ian’s buddies from college. He said he was thinking of Ian and sent me a picture of a rubber chicken in the redwoods.

(If you don’t know, Ian used to carry a foot long rubber chicken with him into the backcountry and for those of us who carry a chicken with us, it’s become a symbol of living like Ian).

I smiled, remembering how Ian always had this notion that “there was nothing to see in stupid California.” 

I never hesitated to tell him just how wrong he was. 

Three weeks before Ian died, I took him on a road trip to see stupid California.

I lived in northern CA before Ian and I met in Colorado, so I took him to all my favorite spots. We swam in the emerald pools of the Yuba River, slept in a treehouse at a summer camp in the foothills outside of Tahoe National Forest, slid around in the snow on Mount Shasta, walked through Fern Canyon and hugged a lot of redwoods. 

Ian fell in love with sequoias and redwoods. He was 6’7” and kept remarking how the redwoods made him feel small. He kept saying, “I’m not used to feeling small.”

We traveled and camped for several weeks and I only have a few photos from that trip. I picked a random one of Ian hugging a redwood and sent it to Travis. He responded with something that had my mouth hanging open for several minutes.

Travis sent me a picture back of him and his mom hugging the exact same tree.

Travis told me that they walked past the tree and his mom decided to turn around. She said that the tree was calling to her, so they went back and hung out for a bit, and took a picture.

Out of all the trees Ian hugged that I didn’t take a photo of, how is it that Travis found the exact tree and took a photo standing in nearly the same spot as Ian?

My first thought was, Oh, cool! Ian can talk through the trees!

It got me thinking about all kinds of things. Perhaps we leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we go that can be detected long after we are gone. Grief has given me the gift of wondering about the afterlife without fear or worry. 

When I tell people it’s been over 3 years since Ian passed, most say, “Already?!”

Yes, already. Though for me, it feels like, “Only?!”

Grief distorts time. It never has moved in the same way since he disappeared.

Here’s to Ian, who’s looking out for us on the other side.

And here’s to you, thank you for reading. Thank you to the whole community who helped with the search and stuck together through times of grief. Thank you to all who still think, miss, and love Ian. There’s a lot of us scattered across the world.

I hope reading this helped you feel less alone in your grief or perhaps put a smile on your face as you thought of Ian.

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In honor of Ian, I am training for my first 55k and raising money for local kids in Page to go on outdoor adventures. This will be the 4th annual run for Ian and we have carried on the tradition of taking charity bibs like Ian did. He was training for the Antelope 100 when he passed. If you can donate $5-10, every bit helps!

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