As I continue to reflect on my brief time in the Tetons, I think often of the way the sun set behind the range.  Every evening we were there, my wife and I drove along the road to Jenny Lake, admiring the range in the setting sun.  I always focused on one part of the range in particular, the opening of Cascade Valley.  Countless times in years past, I have stepped out of the ferry that travels across Jenny Lake and into the trails that line this valley.  They are gateways to the high country, the land of treeless lakes, flower dappled meadow, and jagged peak.  So many mornings I have trekked up this valley to find mountain adventure.

     Now, with injured leg, I could not.  But I could remember, and I could dream. Watching the sun sink ever lower behind the range, looking at the valley as it lapsed ever deeper into dusk and shadow, I remembered another time of watching the sun slip below mountain slope.  It was in the Canadian Rockies, as I hiked over the glaciers that sprawl along the Icefield Parkway between Banff and Jasper, Alberta.  The sunset beckoned, the glaciers shone, the day drew to a close.  I was so content, content to be exactly where I was, atop a stretch of untramelled wilderness.
     We all need wilderness, of some kind, and we all need, in some way, to dream.  That's who we are, that's what we are to be.  We need to explore and risk, we need to vision and set forth.  So does Ecclesiastes say that, "God has set eternity in the human heart." We are born to wander.  In the best of all possible worlds, however, we are ultimately born to wander in the wilderness of God.  It is a wilderness that will never end.