My first run after moving to California’s Eastern Sierra was up a steep trail in the Pine Creek Canyon. Over the years, I would return to it again and again. It was my heartbreak trail; it was my good news trail; it was the trail I went to when I wasn’t sure how I was doing and wanted so badly to know. Without thinking, I’d hop in my car, and suddenly there I’d be, standing in the shadow of the trail’s three thousand vertical feet of switchbacks.
I had probably ran it fifty times before the rains came that washed away more than a quarter-mile of trail. It was a summer of relentless, monsoonal storms—unusual for that liminal space where the Great Basin rises to meet the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
That summer, the first landslide ripped down from a gully in Lundy Canyon. Not even a week had passed since a trail crew rebuilt the rock walls that held the trail in place before another storm came to rebury those hours of labor under ten feet of muddy rubble.
It’s no wonder that I run when the world feels uncertain, as the body in motion can indeed change the physical expression of…
