What possesses a girl to abandon everything she’s ever know for a crazy man and an unknown land? I am still discovering the answer to that question. At the end of a long day’s drive, butt sore and jarred after a journey of 1200 miles across three states, I question my sanity. When I wake up to the sun rising over the mountains in a haze of gold and hear alpine water singing over stones outside my window, I question why it took me so long to get here. Each moment is a balance of fear and joy, like dark and light, yin and yang – contradictory, complementary, inseparable.

Westward my heart has always yearned, towards the mountains. As a child of the Minnesota prairies, I’d never seen the Rockies until this past May, when my man Jesse drove me over the Great Divide into Montana. Once there, I knew I’d found my…