Partway Up WITH MACK

The morning felt intentional before we even started walking.

The air carried that quiet promise—the kind that hints at snow without demanding it. Clean light. Cold enough to sharpen the senses. I had hoped for snow, not just for the conditions, but for the aesthetics. For the way a landscape reveals itself slowly as you move through it.

Mack arrived calm and easy. Friendly. Open. Put together in a way that didn’t feel rehearsed. She brought her dog along—steady, alert, clearly at home in the mountains. That alone said a lot. This wasn’t about proving anything. This was about presence.

We started up the trail as strangers moving in the same direction.

It didn’t last long.

Conversation came naturally, the way it does when there’s no pressure to perform. It felt less like meeting someone new and more like talking with an old friend—someone who understands pacing, both on a trail and in life.

As we gained elevation, snow began to appear. First in quiet patches. Then more confidently. The mountain shifting as we moved through it. We hadn’t hiked together before, and that mattered. You learn a lot about someone in unfamiliar conditions.

Mack knew the mountain.

Not loudly. Not performatively.

In the way she adjusted without comment.

In the way experience carried her forward.

We talked about life—who we were, what we were building, where we hoped to go. About purpose, ambition, and the tension between responsibility and freedom. The kind of conversation that doesn’t need steering because it already knows where it’s headed.

Out here, the world narrowed the way it always does. What mattered was simple: where we stood, what we carried, how our bodies moved upward. Mack spoke about the outdoors as a place where she feels small in the right way. Not diminished—grounded. Where the noise fades and clarity sharpens.

She told me how hiking shaped her confidence. How the mountains met her in seasons of stress and loneliness—not with answers, but with resilience. Step by step, they taught her to keep going. To trust herself. To grow into leadership instead of hiding in the background.

The trail never announces when it’s changing you.

It lets you realize it later.

She laughed when she mentioned how six miles and 2,700 feet of elevation once felt overwhelming. Now it feels small to moderate. Not because she became someone else—but because she stayed consistent. Growth, earned quietly, over time.

We stopped partway up the mountain. Not at a summit. Not anywhere meant to impress. Just a place where the body naturally asks for stillness. Snow underfoot. Breath visible. A silence that brings thoughts forward before softening them.

Mack said she hopes people see her for what she is—a normal person with a full-time desk job, a sense of humor about daily life, and a deep desire to be outside whenever possible. Nothing curated. Nothing extreme. Just honest effort and curiosity.

If this hike were a chapter in her life, she said, it wouldn’t be the ending.

It would be somewhere in the middle.

That stayed with me as we continued upward. How rarely we allow ourselves to be partway. How quickly we label ourselves finished or behind, qualified or unready. The mountain doesn’t do that. It meets you where you are and asks only that you keep moving.

Maybe that’s the real question the trail offers.

Not how far have you come?

But are you still willing to continue from here?

We didn’t leave with conclusions.

Just steadier footing.

​And the quiet understanding that being in the middle isn’t weakness—it’s proof you started.