Borah’s Crucible: A Feather, a Rock, and the Mountain’s Fire
- kennethplacroix
- Aug 31
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 3
Content note: This post includes a brief mention of a dream involving falling and death, shared symbolically as part of the lessons I carried from the mountain. If you find this topic difficult, please take care as you read. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available. If in the U.S., you can dial or text 988 to connect with the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
A crucible is a severe test or trial, a place where heat and pressure strip away what is false and reveal what endures.
The night before my climb, I dreamed of someone falling from a ridge. Not stumbling, not slipping — falling, completely, to their death. The image was sharp, vivid, unsettling, the way a bad dream can feel more real than waking. When I opened my eyes at 4 a.m. in McKay, the vision was still with me, clinging like smoke in my chest. My mouth was dry, my stomach restless. Before I even sat up, I whispered a prayer to the universe for help. I didn’t know what form that help would take, only that I would need it.
The plan was simple: leave by 4:30, start hiking by 5:00. Instead, a few gear snags slowed me down. By the time I pulled into the lot, it was 5:30 and still pitch black. The first twenty minutes out of McKay were smooth highway, but then the road narrowed to gravel, crunching beneath the tires. With cell service gone, silence thickened. I felt it then: the reminder that I was entering a place where comfort doesn’t matter.
When I stepped out at the trailhead, the air slapped me cool, not freezing but sharp enough to bite skin. My breath fogged faintly in the beam of my headlamp. The mountain itself was invisible — just a darker shadow against the stars. Even with AllTrails and the memory of a past climb, I felt strangely disoriented, as if Borah had shifted in the night.
I asked a few other hikers for directions, but their clipped answers only cut deeper. Their eyes narrowed — appraising, maybe dismissive. I could almost hear the silent verdict: unprepared, reckless, amateur. Maybe they weren’t wrong to be cautious; Borah is serious, people get hurt here. But they didn’t know my story, the quiet work I had done to get here.
Already, the lesson was beginning: not letting other people’s projections decide my worth.
The first steps burned hot. Borah wastes no time. The trail pitches up like a wall, pulling breath from lungs, forcing sweat before the body is ready. The soil underfoot was damp, spongy in places from the rain the night before. My thighs lit with fire. The chill air bit my face while my back ran slick beneath the pack.
The cockiness I had carried from having climbed Borah once before burned off quick. The mountain stripped it like bark curling under flame.
But the judgments of others lingered longer. Their glances and mutters were heavier than my pack. I carried them through switchbacks in the pines, resin sharp in my nose, wind sighing in branches above. I carried them across slopes where my thirst grew heavier with altitude. My bottles weren’t low yet — I would guzzle most of them near the summit when my body hit its limit — but already I could feel the ache of need pressing in. Food I had enough of on the climb up, but I rationed carefully, knowing I would run low on the way down.
And yet — that was the deeper fire. Not just muscle and lung, but the slow burn of dragging other people’s voices until, later, traversing Chicken-Out Ridge for the second time, I finally realized: I could set them down.
Dawn came about an hour and a half into the climb, painting the ridges in layers — rust, granite, brown, streaks of white. By the time I reached Chicken-Out Ridge, the voids on either side were fully visible, endless and blue. My palms sweated against the stone.
And there, caught in a seam of rock, I saw it: a single feather. White at the base, dark at the tip. Fragile, yet whole.
It stopped me cold.
I bent, plucked it carefully, and tucked it into my pack. My dream of falling flashed back — the body tumbling, the void rushing — and the feather spoke its quiet rebuttal: You are not falling. Move lightly. Trust what you cannot see. Let go of what is heavy.
The mountain speaks in signs, if you are willing to see them.
At the summit, the wind tore across the ridge sharp as broken glass. I pulled my jacket close, lips cracked from thirst. I drank deep, guzzling what I had left, my body at its edge. Around me the world spread out in every direction — ranges like waves, valleys hazed with dust.
I bent down and picked up a rock. Plain granite, cool and grounding in my palm, heavy in my pocket. A vow: when the impossible rises again, I will remember this. That anything can be done if I break it into pieces and trust myself with each one.
Nearby, I noticed others doing the same — picking up rocks, carrying tokens. And then a man near me, bent double and gasping, murmured words nearly identical to the mantra I had been whispering for hours: trust yourself.
I smiled. The mountain doesn’t whisper to just one of us. Her lessons ripple, echo, carried on the wind in the voices of strangers.
The descent across Chicken-Out Ridge was the real trial. The summit glow faded, and the dream returned. This time there was no line of hikers to follow. No chatter to soften the silence. Just me, the void, the ridge.
The fear was total — marrow-deep. My hands stiffened, my vision tunneled. My heart pounded louder than the wind, the ridge hissing in silence broken only by the scrape of boot on stone. This is where you die, fear whispered.
But then the morning’s prayer returned. The simplest form of help: break it down.
Step. Breath. Grip. Release. Step. Breath. Grip. Release.
Piece by piece, stone by stone, I crossed. Fear stayed beside me, but it no longer ruled my body. And when at last the ridge gave way to gentler ground, I knew: this was the true crucible. Not just surviving fear, but learning to walk with it.
By the time I staggered back to the trailhead, legs trembling, mouth chalky, skin crusted with salt, I could feel the current that had carried me. Some call it surrender. Some call it trust. Some call it flow. The name doesn’t matter.
What mattered was that Borah burned away what I didn’t need: ego, comparison, the illusion of climbing alone.
And in that refining fire, I realized: I had earned Borah that day. Not like the ultrafit who glide up and down in a few hours, or the mountaineers with polished skill and practiced calm. My way was different. Borah wrung me to the last drop of water, stripped me bare — body, mind, spirit — and still asked for more. And I gave it.
I didn’t conquer Borah. I stumbled, clawed, faltered, prayed. But I kept moving. And that was enough. That was the bargain. That was the price.
The mountain accepted it. And in return, she gave me what I most needed to learn.
The mountain burned my pride and left only the ember of trust.
A feather on the ridge, a rock in my pocket, water given when I asked.
My private mantras rose in other voices, as if the current was larger than words.
Looking back, I could have carried more food. Another liter of water. I could have scouted the trailhead the night before. But I don’t regret the cracks in my preparation. They were the openings where the lessons entered.
Borah’s crucible was never about conquering. It was about being stripped down to the bone and finding what remains. Over 13 hours and 11 minutes, I climbed 5,062 feet across 9.43 miles, taking what must have been tens of thousands of steps, each one stitched to the rhythm of 143 beats per minute — nearly 113,000 heartbeats in all. I burned 5,345 calories, but what I really shed was fear, doubt, and the illusion that I had to carry more than what was mine. Even the strangers who judged me were also looking out for me, because on Borah, survival is a shared responsibility.
I began the day haunted by a dream of falling. I ended it carrying a feather and a rock — proof that I did not fall, that I was held, that the mountain gave me exactly what I needed.
And when the impossible rises again — as it always does — I will remember: break it down, trust yourself, and carry only what is yours to carry.
For those curious, I also logged the full route on AllTrails — a digital breadcrumb trail to remember not just where I went, but how far I’ve come.
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