Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak. I’m in a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, this is the April Fool’s day edition of the Mountain Ear and I’m tempted to concoct a story so fantastically bizarre it sneaks into your brain and has you questioning the very nature of truth itself. But on the other hand, this Mountain Folk Tale column is actually and truly—like, really really—the very last Mountain Folk Tales as I am moving South to sunny New Mexico. So, I guess the joke’s on me because I thought I’d live in these hills forever, I thought a life in Gilpin County spent writing about a column about mountain life was my destiny—the Continental Divide rising up as if an extension of the landscape of my soul.

But destiny is a funny idea, isn’t it? Fate the kind of concept that, tempting as it is, begs to be defied, making it impossible to know for sure if it’s freewill or predetermination at play. Even worse, the confusing likelihood that it’s both.

I remember the first week I moved up to Black Hawk almost two years ago. Having been a flatlander all my life I’d spent many a country day looking longingly up at the mountains, imagining snow gently falling over wildflowers that, in my perfect imagination, never died but just tucked away to make room for winter. When I finally arrived to call Black Hawk my home, I remember meeting a few locals who were as quick to welcome me as they were to ask, “but have you done a winter up here? How do you think you’ll do?”

I shrugged away the question all too quickly. Having spent many a day skiing in mountains much snowier than these, I figured I’d accumulated enough experience to endure any alpine season. But after just two winters, buried on the north side of the street in four feet of snow, I raised a white flag and watched as the wind whipped it into shreds.

Ah surrender, you placeless place you, where freewill and predetermination call a draw and new direction arises like a calling. I had no choice but to give in to goodbye, the most massive letting go of my life—letting go of home, of family, of trees that felt like family, of routine, of future plans, but most importantly of the Mountain Folk who told me their stories and let me turn them into print. I knew I could say goodbye to everything else but could I really say goodbye to Jessie, Kodiak, Barbara, Dusty, Linda, Lorraine, Sibyl, Summer, Stevie, Andrea, Virginia, Jack, Jason, Fanny, Captain Colorado, Greg, AJ, Carol, Kenny, Bette, Casey, Jen, Steve, Brigette, Clyde, Michele, Koley, Carrie, Bob, Anjaneya, Terry, Eric, Steve, Wade, and the hundreds more I’d expected to meet? Could I really say goodbye to you, the wonderful readers who turn mere stories into living, breathing relationships?

When I first started writing Mountain Folk Tales, I’d hoped to turn mountain living inside out with the simple power of story, not the big, flashy stories, but the hidden ones we might not otherwise know. The mission was two-fold: first, to get to know you all and second, in sharing your stories, to preserve the story of our community at large. Back then it was all wishful thinking, a bizarre and fantastical sort of attempt to try-out a new angle on “news,” but through the generosity of all who have touched this column, I saw the best version of humanity rise up and claim the front page of our attention, sometimes the front page of the Mountain Ear, and even statewide and national outlets, too. By all accounts your stories have been deemed not just interesting, but important. In today’s news climate, so dominated by the battle of opposites, stories that sought to build goodwill rose up as imperative.

And yet we must say goodbye because, well, destiny intervened. My fiancé and I were set on finding a sunnier Gilpin County lot but struggled to find land we could afford. Mile-by-mile we expanded the parameters of our search until we chanced on a lot so perfect (and so affordable) albeit three hundred miles South. My fiancé had already found work and I found hope in the new beginnings offered by a light-filtered writing desk. The town we are moving to is small, technically a village, and isn’t lucky enough to have a paper all it’s own and even though I spend almost overnight dreaming of the desert now, I wake up worrying if I will ever again find stories as magnificent as yours to tell.

But if there is one lesson to takeaway from Mountain Folk Tales it must be that everybody has a magnificent story, one that deserves to be drawn out, listened to, and shared. Yes—it’s hard to say goodbye—but I know, deep deep down, that Mountain Folk Tales is only the beginning for both you and I. In less than a week I’ll be off, just as the snow starts to melt and the wildflowers start to claim there place among the sun but by then I’ll be walking through pinyon forests collecting red clay on my shoes. The landscape of the next chapter.

I am forever grateful for the open-heartedness I had the privilege to experience over the last year of writing for the Mountain Ear as dozens of you opened your lives, homes, and stories to the mind of a prying stranger. Thank you for trusting me, thank you for believing in my fantastically bizarre project, and most of all thank you for being so generous with your lives. Destiny or fate, we have only each other in the end and I couldn’t have asked for better company.

(Originally published in the March 28, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)