Andrea Lani - Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail

Andrea Lani has crafted a true story on many levels, and her apt depictions of the journey bring the reader along with her, exposing personal peaks and valleys along with actual ups and downs. The geology of the Rockies she and her family trek across is an engaging saga told with close-up precision and sweeping landscapes, and her candid vignettes of family dynamics add humor and realism. Uphill Both Ways weaves a complex fabric of time and placean adventure for anyone who treks through its pages.

Cloe Chunn, author of Fifty Hikes in the Maine Mountains

This lovely book manages to be a geological drama, an environmental history, a trail memoir, and a case for the protection of wild placesall while musing brilliantly on what it means to be a wife, a mother, and a person in the world. If you put Terry Tempest Williams and Cheryl Strayed and Kelly Corrigan in a room together, this is the book they would write. I loved it.

Catherine Newman, author of Catastrophic Happiness

Andrea Lani is an insightful guide as she takes readers on a fateful family hiking trip along the legendary Colorado Trail. In language both witty and lush, she vividly portrays this remarkable terrain while also sharing a personal story of self-examination and persistence. Uphill Both Ways gripped me from its hopeful start to its jubilant finish.

Aaron Hamburger, author of Nirvana Is Here

Andrea Lani seamlessly weaves history, geology, and ecology in Uphill Both Ways, a moving memoir about nature, family, and learning to live in the moment.... Lanis prose is lovely, even as she is examining the environmental cost of human error, misguided forest management, and ignoring climate change. In the end, Lani accomplishes what she set out to do, and she and her family learn that even sucky things can sometimes be awesome.

Kate Hopper, author of Ready for Air and Use Your Words

It was with great anticipation and pleasure that I read Andrea Lanis new book, Uphill Both Ways.... In my opinion, the trail is where the family belongs, and thanks to Lanis book, more families will become inspired to go to our countrys rich plethora of long distance wilderness trails and enjoy their gifts together. Well done, Andrea and the whole Lani family!

Cindy Ross, author of Scraping Heaven: A Familys Journey along the Continental Divide Trail

Andrea Lani

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2022 by Andrea Lani

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image is from the interior.

Author photo by Chip Dillon.

Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted material appear in , which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lani, Andrea, author.

Title: Uphill both ways: hiking toward happiness on the Colorado Trail / Andrea Lani.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021035831

ISBN 9781496229007 (paperback)

ISBN 9781496231598 (epub)

ISBN 9781496231604 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Lani, AndreaTravelColoradoColorado Trail. | HikingColoradoColorado Trail. | HikersColoradoColorado TrailBiography. | Women hikersUnited StatesBiography. | Nature writersUnited StatesBiography. | Colorado Trail (Colo.)Description and travel. | BISAC : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs | SPORTS & RECREATION / Hiking

Classification: LCC F 782. R 6 L 36 2022 | DDC 796.5109788dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035831

Frontispiece: Anglewing butterfly (Polygonia sp.)

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For my grandmothers:

Elsa Lani

19071991

and

Arlene Meyer

19232016

The Colorado Trail

Maybe the best journeys are the ones that are worth repeating and are repeated.

Rebecca Solnit

Figures

Map

Photographs

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

Barbara Kingsolver

Dark gray-brown clouds roil and churn low over the mountain meadow where I crouch among willow bushes with my husband and three children. Lightning licks at the snow-patched ridges surrounding the three-mile-long basin we were crossing when fluffy white clouds coalesced into thunderheads. Rain pummels our flimsy umbrellas and thin nylon jackets. My son Zephyr huddles next to me. His brothers, Emmet and Milo, crowd together in another gap in the bushes. My husband, Curry, hunkers around the corner.

We are eleven days and not quite 130 miles into a six-week, 489-mile hike from Denver to Durango on the Colorado Trail. We have already covered more miles each day than I ever thought possible for my kids or myself. Each night we scrunch into a single tent and each morning we eat bowls of cold oatmeal. Weve seen four moose, a herd of bighorn sheep, and the most stunning scenery. Weve hiked through scorching heat, wind, rain, and patches of last winters snow, but this is the first real thunderstorm weve encountered, and its a doozy.

Colorado blue columbine (Aquilegia coerulea)

I peer out beneath my yellow umbrella at the sodden meadow. The precipitation streaks so hard and fast I cant tell if its rain or hail. The pounding drops drown out all other sound. Mist shrouds the ridge. I can barely make out two hikers heading toward the saddle as black clouds roll over them and thunder echoes off the rimrock. I will them over the top and to safety on the other side.

As I was planning this journey, friends and relatives regaled us with a litany of dangers they feared wed face: rattlesnakes, bears, mountain lions, tick fever, rockslides, deranged people, overzealous rangers. They worried wed get lost, break a bone, fall off a cliff. People asked if we were taking emergency whistles, bear bells, bear spray, bear-proof food canisters, snakebite kits, a gun. They shared helpful news stories with headlines like: HERO MOM PRIES FIVE-YEAR-OLDS HEAD FROM THE MOUTH OF MOUNTAIN LION. HIKERS JOURNAL SHOWS SHE SURVIVED FOR CLOSE TO A MONTH AFTER GETTING LOST NEAR APPALACHIAN TRAIL. WHAT HAPPENED WHEN A COLORADO MOM LET HER ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD HIKE AHEAD BY HERSELF.

But I knew that the most dangerous thing we would face out here would be the weather: late- or early-season snow, hypothermia, lightning. Colorado has the highest lightning-strike-related fatality rate of any state because of daytime convective storms that occur at times when people are hiking on high, exposed trails. When Curry and I hiked the Colorado Trail twenty years earlier, the thunderstorms we dodged were scary enough. Now we have our children with us and so much more to lose. I nudge closer to Zephyr, peer around at Milo and Emmet in their clump of willow bushes.