When I was still in college, a friend took me to Yosemite, a place he called "the cathedral.” He was an atheist so the phrase was an odd one for him to use. Yet seeing the park—the tall green conifers, cedars and sequoias, the rushing waterfalls and majestic granite cliffs—and walking some of its trails quickly made me realize why. The infinite and eternal had conspired to create Yosemite, endowing it with sacredness; and though I considered myself an atheist-leaning agnostic, the park still made me want to offer thanks at every turn to the forces that had created it, forces that I refused to equate with the God of organized religion for fear of tainting the cosmic immediacy of my experience.

My beliefs have not changed since then. I still go into nature to feel connected to something greater than myself and escape the chaos of the world. One recent getaway took me to Boulder, Colorado, my wishes were much simpler: what I wanted was to see snow. Not the accidental kind that sometimes falls in central Texas. But real high country snow that chilled your lungs, fogged your breath and made your muscles work and burn with every step you took.

I’d never much cared for snow; yet the desire was powerful enough to upend plans for a spring trip. Maybe it was talk about an overheating planet with melting polar icecaps that compelled me to go in the dead of winter. Perhaps there would come a time when the kind of snow I wanted to see wouldn’t be there the way I wanted it: in soft heavy blankets that covered everything in glittering whiteness. Snow felt…precious. Necessary, somehow, even urgent.

I did not think to understand what else snow could actually mean: purification, a cleansing of soul and self: all things I knew at some level were as necessary as the physicality I craved to make up for hours of sitting cramped and colorless office cubicle. I wanted to go for long forest walks, breathe fresh air, test my strength against the bigness of the mountains, feel my body work against the resistance of snow.

I told friends that Colorado was my getaway, my escape. It was easier than telling them what it really represented: a spiritual retreat that I did not know would start with an act of grace. A snowstorm had settled over Denver by the time I left Austin: that was the risk you took flying into the Rockies during the winter. For almost two hours, my plane circled the city in the clear blue space above black storm clouds before air traffic control at Denver International cleared us to land. My Airbnb hosts, two hippie elders who’d found their way to Boulder from other places before finding each other in their late 60s, later remarked that I had been lucky. Hundreds of other flights had been cancelled or re-routed.

My hippie hosts lived in a home in the rural north of the city. They deliberately kept it unlocked because they were trusting and because they wanted nothing to do with the fear that characterized the locked-door lifestyles to which urbanites like me were accustomed. Their only demand was that I did not wear shoes inside their house. Designed and built to resemble a two-story ship, the house felt like a sanctuary and a metaphor. I was the voyager and Boulder the end and the beginning of a winter pilgrimage.

For the next three days, I did nothing else but wander the mesas, hills and mountains around the city in hiking boots I’d fitted with new steel ice cleats. My skull throbbed with an on-again, off-again altitude headache. When that dissipated, I found that higher elevation trails that took me into less oxygenated zones at times left me with the split-second feeling that my head had separated from a body I could not control.

No day was the same as the next. And though I’d determined in advance exactly which trails I would hike, nothing went to plan. The first day out, I took a Lyft to the to the easy-walking Marshall Mesa Trail and discovered the trailhead gate was locked. Not knowing that trail closures were routine after snowstorms, I asked the driver to take me to the nearby Flatiron Vista Trail. That too, was closed.

Frustrated, I hopped over the log fence behind the empty ranger’s shack and started hiking up a snow- and deer track-covered hill. The peace astonished me enough to dispense with the music headphones I used to help me forget the headache that raged in my skull. For a moment I imagined I’d come to the ends of the earth and that I was the last human alive. I only came back to reality at the Airbnb where I learned from Internet research—and with some satisfaction—that had my adventures on closed trails could have landed me in jail and left me one thousand dollars poorer.

My hosts delighted in the story of my law-breaking escapade and told me they would have gladly fed me during my days of incarceration. Nevertheless, they still suggested I try trails they knew were officially open. Try the one at Wonderland Lake—it’s just a mile from where we live. The next day I did exactly that. Though mostly flat, one section of the trail took hikers to increasingly higher elevations in lazy switchbacks that ended at a paragliding platform near the top. Snow still clung to the land, but only in patches. The higher I climbed, the browner and scrubbier the landscape became. My hosts had told me that this was the way of snow in the Rockies, that it vanished quickly in the warmth of sun that shown 300 days a year.

The final day, I found myself chasing snow straight up shaded canyon trails that took me near the summits of Flatiron One/Two on Green Mountain. Everything was melting; I had barely begun to enjoy the snow I’d come to see. Some climbers I passed came dressed in parkas and winter leggings. But others, like the high school students who joked with each other about falling down icy slopes, had come in shorts and sneakers.

Cautiously tapping my way up icy trails and in ice cleats that sometimes gripped more mud than snow, I heard the students laugh. See you at the top, they said scrambling past me. Stopping, I remembered my collegiate self. The one who’d hiked Yosemite in old jeans and worn out tennis shoes with no tread and looked at safety warning signs posted on steep trails and also laughed. Listening to the chatter of the students, I smiled while my head lifted off my shoulders like a balloon. Snowstorms, snow melts, closures, headaches, changes of plan and all, my imperfect days of repose had been pure divinity.