The Lights Below...

I think it was sometime in 1981 or so, it was a cold (very) winter night and Stu and I were climbing up the mountain in my truck. My truck wasn’t much, but it would get up the hill if need be. It was just an old Ford ’71 pickup with a six cylinder and a crappy 3 speed tranny, but we were going up the hill.

The “hill” was no small hill, in fact it was “White Mountain” in SW Wyoming and it was a pretty fearsome climb by any standard. We’d ridden our motorcycles on this mountain for years, and no one could make it to the top…but we were going anyway.

It wasn’t a great truck, I’d bought it off this older gentleman who’d used it to haul a camper all over the west. He’d taken care of it, but it was nothing in comparison to the super-trucks which were being born in those days. It was just a pickup, just me and Stu.

We didn’t take the route we normally took with our bikes (which had not been summited), but rather a more tame way up some seriously steep switchbacks. It was still very difficult, with sand and loose rock all over the top 25% of the mountain. One missed turn, one spin-out, and it was over a cliff 3,000 feet to the bottom. White Mountain was no easy climb, not even during the day…and this was at night.

Well, we made it to the top. There was a radio tower near the summit where the road came out. There was a flat spot with some gravel they’d made up there. It was pretty cold, well below zero as I recall. You could see the heat vapor and steam from civilization below. But, there was something more important…the lights below were just magical. Aside from the lights on the radio tower just above us, it was dark, nearly pitch black; you could see for miles and miles (maybe 50 miles even).

I remember feeling like we were on top of the World that night. No matter what, we were safe, the heater in the truck worked and we had plenty of fuel. We’d make it back down…but, it was only us that night…where no one else was. There was just something to it. Some piece of mind.
(and there’s more…but it’s probably left for later)

I stood there that night, in the cold, and looked down; it was really something, looking down...at the lights below.