It’s -1 right now in Missoula, Montana. Without the windchill.

Luckily, I’m typing this up from a warm and snug hotel. My car and all my supplies however will be forced to face the abusive cold.

Today was the first day I’ve traveled to the deep southern Bitterroots in many years, into the Trapper Peak and Como Peaks country. The last time I was that far south was with an ex-girlfriend. Of course, the previous trip had been in much warmer weather, which seems like a fantasy from where I’m sitting now. I had forgotten how all those ponderosa pines looked, carpeting the slopes up to the twisted spires and outcroppings.

It was a joy to be back.

I have seen many mountain ranges across the Northern Rockies the last ten years, but it had been too long for the southern Bitterroots, which house one of the largest wilderness ecosystems in the lower 48 (the Selway-Bitterroot/Frank Church/River of No Return Complex). Other mountain ranges may be more showy, more chest-pumping. The Bitterroots sort of rise up, slothful like, unfurling their bare granite spines in predictable fashion one slope after the other. But once inside the rugged valleys the true scenery splays open for the onlooker, as if the formerly sheepish mountains were hiding something from busy Highway 93.

Ten years gone. Winter is here, harder and more brutal than usual. Girlfriends have come and gone. So have friendships. But it’s good to know I can always count on the Bitterroots being the Bitterroots, turning their cloaks of ponderosa pine to the travelers on 93 and hiding their spectacular innards.

It is -1 in Missoula. I look out the window to see a town paralyzed with cold. The sound of trucks along I-90 has faded with each passing hour. Winter has a way of cleansing all that came the season before. But if you listen carefully, you can hear a quiet stirring. For all things change. Even the Bitterroots, one day.

The Bitterroot Mountains are split by a sunrift in Montana.

No matter how much time I spend in the woods (particularly in mountain lion dense areas like Montana) I can never find one.

Most people wouldn’t want to find a mountain lion. I go out of my way to try and find them. But no luck. Yet. Usually what I find are signs warning of mountain lions. Maybe that’s the scariest thing of all…mountain lions as nothing more than a figment of our imagination, bolstered by signs such as these, like some passed down mythology.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time in the Rocky Mountains this fall. I have failed to glimpse even one mountain lion track. But I like to think they are up there in the higher country, peering down between juniper or ponderosa pine and wondering if I’d make an easy meal. Maybe this is why I look for them. I like the idea of not being at the top of the food chain. There’s humility, ego-check and adventure in this. I emerge from the Rockies knowing that there are things beyond my desires between the strip malls which can knock me off that tired path with the swipe of a paw.

There’s a mountain lion around. Sure there is. Sure.

I’m writing from a charming yet empty campground in Glacier National Park. It’s been 30 days on the road. 30 days and nights of outdoor activity in sub 40 temps and sleeping amongst wild animals. It’s amazing how the cold can whittle your energy reserves, day by day. I picked up the flu, and now perform the zombie shuffle quite well. After a certain time sleeping outdoors, you start to meld with all you hear, see, and smell. I am no longer a marketplace robot, head buried in a smartphone between strip malls and office parks and red-faced people in traffic. There is something out here in this mountain range, something else entirely, a fleeting thing out of the corner of your eye in an aspen patch. It’s a playful thing that tries to pull you in deeper, into the core of nature. All you have to do is promise to stay a little longer, and more wonders will reveal themselves. But it will not last, sadly. I can feel that other thing, the strip mall-tollway-concrete thing tugging at me even now in this million acre park. And soon I will have no choice but to turn my back on that aspen patch. We can never be a bear. But damn it, we can try.

A black bear in the cliffs of Glacier National Park.

It’s been eight days of camping in the magnificent Gallatin National Forest of Montana. What I was before this trip I am not anymore. Instead, I am some conglomeration of smooth river rock, jade pools, moss, twisted roots, wind-blasted cliffs and numerous other attributes of this environment.

I could always stay, I suppose. And always be this new thing.