Sometimes you just don't climb.

This past Sunday I visited Pawtuckaway State Park. It had been a week since my last excursion there, but it felt much longer. My friends intended to go bouldering, braving the inch of ice and foot of snow covering every rock in the park. Normally I’d be psyched, but the idea of not being able to top anything out coupled with knowing my hands and feet would soon be numb wasn’t sounding quite as awesome as usual. I like being able to finish things, but more than that I like being able to feel the rock under my hands while I’m climbing. Just grabbing the starting holds when it’s twenty-three degrees turns my fingers white, and I have to rely on sight and the fact that I’m not on the ground to know that I’m successfully holding onto the rock. There is also the matter of taking off one’s warm boots and smart wool socks to change into twenty-three degree climbing shoes, which will likely become wet from the snow in the process. This is not the happiest thought, especially when I know I won’t be able to even get to the top of the rock I’m trying to climb. But I still go to “p-way” every weekend.

The previous weekend I didn’t climb. Brandon reached p-way before Tommy and I and decided to meet us on the pond, where he had been working on a project. It was about thirty degrees and had been cold for over the past month, but due to the currents caused by the stream running though the pond not all of the ice was solid. He fell in up to his navel. When Tommy and I arrived, he was just walking up to the parking lot, pants partially frozen.

Naturally ten minutes later Brandon had changed and was walking the downhill mile to the pond with Tommy and me. Something about p-way draws you in, whether or not you intend to climb its rocks.

When we arrived at the pond I followed the boys, not about to fall into the muddy water. Tommy took his chances and took a short dip into the cold, smelly liquid, but only a little over his knees. The boys stayed on the pond, having found an alternate, solid passage to their beloved rock. I decided to hike around alone while they took car brushes, toothbrushes, and a shovel to clear off the ice and snow encasing the rock.

P-way is beautiful. I followed a side path around one side of the lake that eventually leads to South Mountain. It had snowed that weekend, so there were several inches of powder covering the snowshoe-packed path beneath. I sunk in, only wearing my L. L. Bean hiking boots, but I didn’t mind getting my ankles a little wet. After all, it was warmer than putting on my climbing shoes. The only animals I saw were a few humans riding snowmobiles before I turned onto the path. It must have been quiet, as I don’t remember hearing any distinct sounds besides the occasional roar of a snowmobile.

As I often do when I’m wandering the woods alone, I quickly switched from admiring the nature around me to imagining life in the summer. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the winter months, but I like to look ahead in life, planning out possible scenarios and getting excited for what is to come. On this stroll the topic was the climbing I would be doing this summer when I live in Carbondale, Colorado. I imagined bouldering with my colleagues after work, letting the sun’s rays tan my pasty skin. I thought about getting into trail running and interviewing climbers I idolize as part of my internship at Rock and Ice Magazine. The internship is real; I learned I had been chosen as the magazine’s summer intern at the end of winter break, but the rest are just best-case scenarios. Every time I think about this summer I imagine something a little different, a twist on what will soon become a story to tell Tommy and my parents over the phone. It is the many possibilities that excite me, not a particular one.

The woods are my place to think. I forget that I have to write a twenty-five-page research paper for what I fondly call my “cabin class,” something that, as a sophomore, I have never done before. I forget that I live in one of the noisiest of the University of New Hampshire’s campus living options: the Gables. It’s party central from seven p.m. to one in the morning every night of every weekend, and I want the party to be over by nine p.m. so I can curl up under my three fuzzy blankets and sleep. I forget that I have work at eight in the morning the next day. I’m just Liz and my ideas for the future, excited about what life in the nature beyond Thompson Hall lawn and college woods holds.

When I returned to Tommy and Brandon they were finishing up on the pond. They hadn’t climbed either, and unlike me, they were cold from falling into the pond and hadn’t warmed up hiking partway up South Mountain. We decided to hike out and hope more snow wouldn’t re-cover the rock that week.

I didn’t reach the top of anything that day, not a mountain or a rock, but my mental state had risen. That’s why I returned this past Sunday, one week later. I hiked my climbing shoes, chalk bag, and crash pad into p-way, but I didn’t climb. I let the boys use my crash pad to work on the first two moves of a hard problem that they couldn’t finish due to snow and ice obscuring the top out, and I hiked up to the top of North mountain, again imagining life away from Durham, UNH, and school work obligations.

For me, going into the woods is getting out of the human world that my parents, professors, and prospective employers find greatly important and entering the real world of flora and occasional fauna that live around me. For them, life continues whether or not I get all A’s, finish my German homework, or eat with next years housemates at Hoco. I can be just Liz, not Liz the journalist, Liz the bee taxonomist, Liz the stressed-out overachiever, or Liz the skinny girl obsessed with climbing. I am excited about life and all the paths it could lead me down instead of overwhelmed by the lengthy, color-coded list in my assignment book. I’m never tired or stressed when I’m hiking around p-way. Hungry sometimes, but that’s what the dried blueberries in my daypack are for. And I’m happy always, even when on occasion I do manage to fall into a hidden body of water in February. That happened on my first trip to p-way last winter, and I still keep going back.