When I was 10, I rode my buddy’s Suzuki JR50. I can still remember twisting the throttle and feeling the thrill of the seemingly unlimited power that propelled me forward over the grassy lawn. I was gliding without a care in the world, trying to keep my eyes open as wind rushed past me until I slipped on the grass and seared my bare calf on the exhaust pipe. That’s something I love about riding dirt bikes. There’s a point while I’m riding when the world dissolves around me and there’s nothing in the universe except the bike and the trail in front of me.

The Copper Triangle is a route that weaves and climbs its way through the Colorado Rockies, from the Copper ski resort up and over Fremont Pass to Leadville, then over Tennessee Pass and Battle Mountain to Minturn, and finally skirting Vail and the 18-wheelers blasting along I-70 to the top of Vail Pass, ultimately, like any good triangular shape, back to the dirt parking lots of Copper. It’s beautiful, sometimes terrifying, certainly punishing on the underprepared, and our chosen way to spend the day.

As the wind kicks up, the footprints ahead of us wash away in a matter of seconds, and the lone alpinist ahead fades into shadow. His footsteps are all but gone by the time we reach them. The feeling is eerie—we walk on the spine of the mountain, a drop-off to the valley below on our left, white void of a slope to our right, and in front the ever-rising face of all that is yet to be done.

“How long, oh Lord? Will you utterly forget me? How long will you hide your face from me?” - (Ps. 13:1)

We’ve all felt it. Or at least those of us open to the movements of our hearts have felt it. That deep, heavy ache that sits like a 500-pound gorilla on your soul. I call it “The Longing.”

My life feels cluttered, or, rather, my brain does. You know that feeling when you borrow your friend’s iPhone and their apps are cluttered with unread notifications? You were only trying to use their Google Maps, but you can’t help but notice that they have 2,365 unread emails, 73 notifications from Instagram, Strava, and Podcasts combined, and now you can’t remember where you were trying to go with the maps because you’re so distracted by the notifications. You just want to go in to each app and click everything and clear it all out. Just me?

Halfway up the verdant mountainside of the Sentinel by the Sea (a hill by comparison to the Rockies, but glorious by Irish standards as it rises from the North Atlantic) my wife Susie looked back at me, and I saw a familiar gleam in her eyes. Though she was raised in a flat place, Susie has the soul of a peak-bagger—a term we use in Colorado in reference to those people who aim to reach the summit of as many mountains as their legs will carry them up.

Well, it’s finally summer. With that comes gloriously long days, board shorts that don’t fit quite right after a winter of hearty meals, and the call of water. Here in Minnesota, we’ve got lakes galore (way more than 10,000), but at the moment, I’m missing the tide. There’s something about the ocean. Something about salty air and the endless horizon that has hooked men for thousands of years—it pulls us out into deep water to hunt for food, explore new lands, and test ourselves in an environment quite indifferent to our fate. Water so often symbolizes life. The ocean has the vastness of God about it.

Alex Burton is both friend and coworker and was telling us stories from a backcountry ski trip he took last year through the mountains of Colorado. He was in the midst of prepping for another trip this year when we knew we had to grab him and hear some more about this story.

Something I like about wild pigs: The first hogs to run wild in America escaped from Hernando de Soto’s expedition, something it’s hard to blame them for doing. They flourished in the swamps and—like most animals living in swamps—kept to themselves. Five hundred years went by.

Within the bowels of the internet we discovered a unicycling video we couldn’t stop watching. It showed a man on a unicycle, riding that unicycle down a mountain. He wasn’t just riding the unicycle down the mountain—he was careening down mountain biking trails, over logs and drops, as if the unicycle were made for it, as if he were made for it.