MY UTAH JACKET

By Brooke Williams


Photography: VisitUtah.com

This wasn’t just any parka, but a Patagonia Fitz Roy down (made from Traceable Down: 800-fill-power goose down) parka. According to the catalog it was designed for serious alpine climbers — to wear during extended freezing belays or high-altitude emergency bivouacs. 

Anything but a serious alpine climber, I am a committed wilderness explorer. Lately the wilderness I explore is vastly internal. I get there through the “outer wilderness”— in Southern Utah during a solitary walk in a familiar canyon, or looking up through the universe on a moonless, often cold, desert night. Or sitting in a camp chair in the winter desert awed watching cliff light pass through the entire spectrum of red, as the sun sets.

For me, the parka is perfect and I feel “called.”


Brooke Williams has spent the last 30 years advocating for wilderness. He is the author of four books, including “Open Midnight,” “Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness” and “The Story of My Heart,” by Richard Jeffries, as rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams. His journalistic pieces have appeared in Outside, Huffington Post, Orion and saltfront. He and his wife, Terry Tempest Williams, live near Moab.