Nearly every single time that I wake up for the sunrise, the cold hits me.

I guess it’s the cold of ten or twelve hours without the sun, the last desperate punch of the fading night. Nearly every single time, it surprises me how much of a difference the sun makes. It sounds dumb, but nothing is that dumb at 5:45 AM. I was cold.

We heated water for hot chocolate mixed with instant coffee and pulled onto the road, headlights on. As we reached Mesa Arch Trailhead, the sky was growing lighter in the east. We kept on our layers, held tightly to our mugs and started on the trail.

In every one of these places, there were other people whom I ought to acknowledge. And yet I will make a choice here. I could write about the loud foreign languages, the lined-up tripods, the blinking lights of electronics. But instead, I will say we were there, in that moment, together. We were day-breakers, horizon-seekers, gathered on the edge of an isolated cliff to somehow become, in that distant mesa, closer to nature.

A young, resentful part of me nearly hated them. Instead, I loved the blue air and fading stars, and loved those people for placing any small part of that into their hearts.

The fjords of Norway

The light of the Faroes

The highlands of Iceland