This is why I’m headed to the High Country this weekend.  It’s about time…

(From “The High Country” by Bernard DeVoto):

I wish that everyone could know the high country….[where] summer is, like all brief seasons, passionate and intense.  The crest has passed by the middle of August, and then there comes a period which I find the most poignant of all.  A new brightness comes into the air and the colors.  The underbrush is splashed with scarlet, poplar and cottonwood leaves are gold, and the aspens have reached a high, shining silver.  Mist hangs blue and lavender gauzes across the canyons and the distances almost till noon; twilights are early and long.  There is a hush, an expectancy in the air–a portent of winter, a premonition of death, but the world is resolved to reach its fulness first.  There is an illusion that no one is here but you, and you respond to it with a delight so deep, so moving, so complete that it is wrapped round with sadness.  Above all others, this is the time to visit the high country.