The Traverse Mindset

BY KATE RILEY

Have you ever looked at the trail ahead and felt fully overwhelmed? That was me in June 2024, hiking the Continental Divide Trail in the southern San Juan Mountains of Colorado. There I stood, a speck in an open mountain landscape blanketed in snow, exposed rock, and blurry brush. 

In rugged terrain during my thru-hike, I used coach Marie-Pier Tremblay's “Sequoia Tree and Summit Mindset” problem-solving analysis as a framework to calm my thoughts. It goes like this: In the Sequoia Mindset, you’re inches from a tree trunk and all you can see is bark. It’s hard to decipher the route ahead when you’re so focused on one part of the bigger picture. Now breathe and step back. Rough bark turns into a trunk, the trunk to a tree, the tree to a forest, the forest to a mountainside. At the Summit Mindset, you can see a route ahead with a clearer perspective. On trail, I’d ask if I’m at the tree or the summit?  

However, the path visible from the summit can sport new challenges. I’m supposed to go over there? From here? How is that possible!?  

My answer was to recognize a third step in the process. The Traverse Mindset, between the dense tree and the summit view, is where every movement forward is a solution. In the Traverse, you’ll dodge trees in a bushwack, follow footsteps in a snowfield, rest at each switchback, and feel the edges of leaves against your skin that look blurry from afar, anticipating that the complicated rocky landscape disappears once the scramble has started. 

To mentally phase from the tree to the summit means there’s the reality of an in-between. The details of the traverse you’re living.

Photo: Laura Camp