What the Mountains Taught Me

By Destinee McKinney

By 30, I had checked all the boxes. I had followed the formula that I was promised would lead to happiness.

I was married. I had two beautiful daughters. A house. A yard—I was living the “dream.”

But deep down, there was an aching inside of me.

Compliance is not connection, and while I had done everything “right,” I felt completely alone. I felt like I existed to fulfill a role, like I wasn’t a person. In hindsight, I could only allow others to know me as deeply as I knew myself—and a stranger was looking back at me in the mirror.

Over the years,

I stopped listening to my instincts.
I stopped dreaming.
I stopped progressing.

And progress is something I thrive on. It is a core part of my being. When I wasn’t nourishing that part, other parts of me started to die. I feel most alive when I’m experiencing growth, and for years, I had remained stagnant.

In the spring of 2024, my life as I had known it fell apart.

I lost a baby.
I lost 40% of my blood volume, in two hours.
I was getting divorced.
I had lost my community, my faith, and my sense of self.

The grief that followed was all-consuming.

I was faced with a choice: to let my “failures” define me, or to build a future I was proud of.

I am no stranger to pain, and we all find ways to cope with it—but these life changes were nearly the end of me.

I am incredibly lucky I fell into a coping mechanism that ended up allowing me to heal—in a healthy way.

I started climbing mountains.

Mistakes were made.

I slipped in the mud.
Got hypothermia.
Developed a stress fracture in my femur.
Ran out of water.
Fell on my face.
Overestimated the amount of daylight I had.
Underestimated the amount of snow.

But regardless of what happened on my treks, there was one thing that was always true:

I returned to the trailhead feeling better than when I started.

Not fixed.
Not healed.
But the pain felt a little more manageable.

Sometimes the trail was smooth.
Other times, I was holding on with my hands and feet—scrambling up ridges or becoming one with the brush.

Sometimes the sky was clear.
Other times, I was navigating in darkness with only a small light to guide me.

This was true of my internal healing process as well.

Healing was not linear. Sometimes I could see clearly the direction I was headed and moved with purpose. Other times, I was in darkness, moving slowly, hesitating, losing perspective on where I intended to go.

This uncertainty and fear of the future were sometimes paralyzing.

One day, after summiting Broad Fork Twin Peaks via Ferguson Canyon, I was exhausted. I literally lay flat on my back, closed my eyes—blinded by the sunlight—and had a crucial epiphany.

I kept fearing the future because I couldn’t see it. I was choosing to believe and picture it as darkness.

But what if my future was so bright that I couldn’t make out the details yet?

My point of view had shifted tens of times on my journey up as my vantage point changed.

And at the summit, the views were incredible. Why not replace fear with hope? Trust that the views up ahead are greater than I can imagine.

From the bottom, the peak seemed so far away—but step by step, I gained the vert, eventually making it to the top. I had conquered what once seemed insurmountable.

I implemented this strategy in my day-to-day life. On the days when I couldn’t even imagine the next week, I lived minute to minute. I’d repeat the phrase “the next thing I have to do is _____.” (i.e. take a drink of water, put my shoes on, take a shower, send an email). Breaking down the day, or the climb, into smaller segments prevented me from being discouraged by how far I was from where I wanted to go.

Losing half of my time with my daughters was a grief I couldn’t bear. It is still the heaviest pain I carry. I knew to survive, I needed to set my focus on a goal. I needed to stay busy when they weren’t home. If I’m being honest, I was deliberately choosing to replace emotional pain with physical pain. I set a goal that summer to climb 100,000 vertical feet. To some, this isn’t a large feat, but my body was very weak.

I had lost a baby and nearly half my blood volume in April. I was severely anemic.

Hiking with anemia is incredibly hard.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
I was shaky.
I nearly passed out several times.
I had to stop constantly for breaks.

Before the pregnancy and loss, I was at the peak of my fitness. I prided myself on my ability to push my limits physically, on being fast. Slowing down was not only a constant reminder of the daughter I never got to meet—and the strength I had lost, it was a massive blow to my confidence. My self-talk was not positive, to say the least.

But slowing down gave me something I never expected: Perspective.

I started to notice the beautiful little details in nature that inspired me. Things I would have missed if I had been running down the trails.

Snail shells, each unique, not one like the other.
Fossils, showing evidence of life millions of years ago.
The moss growing in the shade of a tree.
Avalanche lilies that seemingly grow upside down.
Feathers left behind from birds soaring above.

I hope to become like:

The wonky trees that broke, repaired, and grew in a new direction.
The mountain goats; unafraid to traverse steep slopes.
The single aspen tree that refused to pick a side—growing directly in the middle of the trail.

My favorite season is autumn.

Fall in the Wasatch is something to behold. The aspens turn gold—and if you catch them at just the right time, they can be a vibrant orange.

But perhaps what’s most remarkable about them is largely unseen.

An aspen grove is one organism.

The trees connect at their roots. They communicate and disperse nutrients as needed.

When people experience trauma, one of the greatest predictors of how well they recover is if they’re caught on the rebound. Having a community to support you after experiencing trauma directly impacts your ability to keep moving forward.

I have met remarkable people in the Wasatch Range.

I’ve heard their stories.
I’ve shared mine.

And slowly—

I am becoming part of a grove. I’m able to receive and provide support to those around me.

The community I had lost, I learned, wasn’t ever really for me. It’s painful to lose people you love, but when you’re in the trenches, when conditions aren’t ideal, you learn really quickly who’s in it with you and who never was. Losing what wasn’t meant for me helped me find what was.

The mountains have given me community.

They’ve given me peace, purpose, and perspective.

Climbing them has made me proud of myself again.

They have made me resilient.
They have challenged me.
They have taught me.

It’s been two years since I set out to accomplish my goal of vertical gain for a summer. I’ve summited hundreds of mountains, covered thousands of miles, and climbed hundreds of thousands of vertical feet. I’ve watched incredible sunrises that remind me that no matter how dark the night, the sun will rise in the morning. Whether I’m the slowest in the group or taking the lead, my worth never changes. I’ve made countless mistakes, and I am still learning. But that ache inside of me is gone. I realized nothing outside of me could have ever filled it.

The voice I had once lost slowly came back as I trusted myself to go left at the fork, to turn around if inclement weather was ahead or if the scramble was outside of my ability. As I removed the noise of the world and all notions of what I should do, who I should be, I could finally feel my instincts again. I could clearly hear my thoughts and trust my gut for the first time in years. Part of this was learning that who I chose to follow or guide me up a new route could be the difference between losing my life or safely reaching the top. There’s wisdom in finding someone who has walked in your shoes and learning from how they navigated it.

I learned to get honest with myself. Is this within my ability? & even if I CAN do it, what is the cost? Answering these questions in the mountains allowed me to find my limits, which helped me redefine my boundaries in life. If I fell on my face on a trail, I got back up and kept going. I didn’t question my ability to walk or run; I recognized that being in the shadows had simply made it harder to see the roots. It didn’t mean I was a bad runner. I picked myself up and continued on. Just because I made mistakes didn’t mean I lost the right to feel alive, to keep going.

When my faith was shaken, I no longer felt comfort, love, or spirituality in a chapel, and this brought me immense shame. I had clung to the rules of religion to keep me safe for the last decade and, somewhere along the way, lost the entire point of being connected to something bigger than myself. I realized, just like there isn’t one way to summit a mountain, we all take a unique path to navigate this life. While in some ways, I have more questions than answers, I no longer do things out of fear. I’m regaining spirituality more wholeheartedly and getting comfortable with the unknown.

I have witnessed incredible sunsets, accomplished things I never dreamed I’d be capable of, but the most beautiful part of life is always my daughters. The privilege of being their mom is sacred to me. I get to witness their lives in a capacity that nobody else ever will. There was a time I didn’t feel worthy of this, but letting go of shame helped me clearly see that nothing could take that from me—except for me, if I let it. No adventure, no mountain, no place in this world could ever feel more like home than they do.

If I quit, didn’t find my way back, or didn’t take care of myself, what example was I setting for them? This exact thought helped me realize my body was never something to beat up. The more I listened to what it needed and properly fueled it, the healthier my mind became, too. I became less concerned about how my body looked and more focused on what it was capable of, how strong it could be.

I don’t know what’s next, but I’m finally okay with that. I’m confident I will learn how to navigate life’s terrain. I’ve built a new life that doesn’t require me to fit into a box or abandon myself. The grief of how I imagined my life would be still exists. But time is my most precious commodity, and dwelling on the past or letting the anxiety of what’s ahead rob me of the present would be a greater loss. I can’t wait to reach new heights and to make memories with the people I love. The mountains taught me to love myself again.

And they taught me: Even when the slope is steep, when my legs are burning, when I’m far from the summit, or when I can’t clearly see the path ahead, there is always beauty around me.

I simply must choose to see it.