A photo of me, taken by either Mike or Jesse, a couple of fellow hikers I met on the unnamed pass dividing the Hellroaring and Yellowbelly drainages. That's Imogene Lake behind me. We admired the views from here for about 30 minutes before going our separate ways. They were headed to Hellroaring Lake, where I'd been the day before, and I was bound for Hidden Lake via two more high passes.

How does one begin to tell the tale of nearly a month away, experiencing the wonders of this world on foot and by car, a sprawling epic covering nearly 150 miles of trail and 5,400 miles of road? Which of the more than 2,500 photographs should start the story? What moments, whether of sweeping grandeur or intimate discovery, are the proper ones to summarize the totality of the experience? I’ve no idea.

It has not gone without pondering. Many, many miles of pondering, in fact, beginning from the moment my car rolled out of its parking spot at Grandjean, stirring for the first time in 10 days. The enormity of the trek is overwhelming, incapable of easy or effortless translation, unmoved by the desire to provide an instant answer to “How was your trip?” There were so many moments, so many images stamped indelibly onto my memory, from joyous to humbling to scary to serene, so many places and people and things.

It does not begin with the departure from Austin, a long, tedious day’s drive to Tucumcari, New Mexico, a downpayment of 596 miles toward the more than 2,500 to the trailhead at the base of the Sawtooths.

No, this tale will surely shrug off structure and order, as surely as the carefully planned itinerary seldom came to pass. It shall unfold like an unruly map, spilling its contents here and there and denying efforts to fold it neatly to a precise place of interest. It shall be long in the telling, befitting the length of its coming and going, filling almost an entire month and pushing away all other parts of the world. Mercurial like the weather, stately like the mountains, rambling like the streams, bursting in dazzling colors like the wildflowers, coyly hiding like the wildlife, these it should be.

So it begins with a single photo, taken in a single moment, atop an unnamed pass, at 9,290 feet, wedged along the knife edge running between Pt. 9,955 and Pt. 9,934, high above Imogene Lake, on whose spectacular shore I had spent the night before. It begins with a chance meeting of two locals, whose love of these mountains was clear and true. It begins on the 7th day of the backpack, the 14th day of the trip, at 10:50 a.m. MDT, at 9,290 feet in elevation, with this single photo, a downpayment for the epic to come.

Portrait in the Sawtooths, SW09-0818-5820R, Sawtooth Wilderness, Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho | ©2009 Jeff Blaylock | Photo by Mike or Jesse of Hailey, Idaho