I am lost when people discuss the tenets and stories of organized religions. My immigrant Czech parents never went to church when they settled in America. The only religion we followed was working seven days a week. I, however, have found my religion. I have dedicated myself to the traditional spiritual quest called “going to the mountains.” People rely on traditional religion for spiritual guidance, but for me, it’s much simpler. I am lost unless I see a mountain every day.

Like traditional religions, the spirituality found in the mountains has ancient roots. Mountains have always been “a place sacred above all.” Holy mountains dot the world, such as Mount in Armenia, Mount Kunlon in China, Mount Kailash in Tibet, and Uluru in Australia. As well, mountains are an “axis mundi,” which is a symbolic representation of a vertical axis that connects the heavenly and earthly realms. Spirits and angels are said to travel up and down an axis mundi.

I first “went to the mountains” after college. As a twenty-something in the late 70s and early 80s, I lived in tiny Silverton, Colorado, for eight years. Silverton is surrounded by 12,000 foot peaks, but Kendall Mountain dominated the town. Its inescapable power frightened me for years until the sunny summer day when I gathered my courage and climbed up a gully that ran down its face. Perhaps it was the tribute of my blood, sweat, and tears that fell as I slowly crawled upwards, but Kendall seemed to soften its grip over me after that climb. The mountain became more of a friend than a stern watchman.

After a wrong turn took me back to the Midwest for a decade, I returned to Colorado and landed in Evergreen. I lived walking distance to Bergen Peak. Although not exactly a majestic snow- capped mountain, its forested trails were my refuge during a tumultuous 15 years of working as a lawyer in Denver, raising children, and dealing with a wayward and generally absent husband. When I needed to move, each house I visited was missing something that eluded me. Standing outside yet another house, it hit me like a brick. I was looking for Bergen Peak. I found a condo across the street from Bergen Peak and again “went to the mountains” for a happy five years.

A new marriage took me to a house in South Boulder under the majestic and mysterious Flatirons, home to peregrine falcons and golden eagles and breathtakingly beautiful every day. I sought solace among those truly spiritual spires as that marriage later broke up. And one late October full-moon night, the lights of climbers appeared on the Flatirons, like spirits using the axis mundi! (The boundary between the earthly and spiritual realms is thinnest during October.) I felt as if I had been let in on a secret. The Flatirons’ magical spell will hold me forever.

And now, I continue to practice my “going to the mountains” religion in a home in the lee of Mount Meeker and the majesty of Wild Basin in Rocky Mountain National Park. Wild Basin! Just the name stirs my adventurous heart. The impossibly dark nights, the winds that roar like an angry ocean, the lakes and creeks that flow from that massive drainage. As I walk in this Eden, I remember a line from Shine, Perishing Republic, a poem by Robinson Jeffers, that has guided my spiritual journey: “. . . when the cities lie at the monster’s feet, there are left the mountains.”