Our Personal Peak

The cross was the biggest I had ever seen. Fifteen-hundred feet high, 750 feet wide, it filled my vision as I stood one August afternoon with my wife, Sarah, atop a Rocky Mountain peak.

Just moments before, Sarah and I, along with a few others from our church, had come to the end of a long morning’s hike. Now we stared in renewed awe at one of creation’s wonders—a giant cross carved into the surface of a 14,005-foot-high mountain, Mount of the Holy Cross.

The cross was formed by a naturally occurring fissure in the rock called a couloir. In summer the couloir stayed cold and snow-filled, creating a dramatic white cross, visible for miles.

For nearly a century the spot where we stood—a nearby peak across a rocky gorge—had been a pilgrimage site. And it was a pilgrimage of sorts that had drawn Sarah and me up the trail on this clear summer day. We were here because Mount of the Holy Cross, both the place itself and all it stood for, had become deeply important to us—to our marriage, more precisely.

After all, it hadn’t been all that many years before that we’d stood atop another mountain a few miles away saying marriage vows that I, at least, wasn’t even sure I meant.

We were young then, I in my early 30s, Sarah in her 20s, and we had little idea what we were doing. We’d met at the resort hotel in Vail where I was a chef, Sarah a waitress.

We’d dated for years, living like all the other young people we knew in Vail, working hard, partying harder, getting outdoors whenever we could. We loved our freedom as much as we loved each other.

One Christmas I’d given Sarah a ring—a gold band from one grandmother, a diamond from another—just a pretty piece of jewelry. Her sister heard about it, though, and squealed, “Congratulations, guys! You’re getting married!”

Dumbfounded and embarrassed, I didn’t know what to say. Soon we were planning a wedding.

Not a church wedding, though. I had stopped going as a teenager. We cast about until we found a minister—Don Simonton, a sun-creased, big-grinned Lutheran pastor—willing to marry us on top of Vail Mountain.

We insisted on holding the wedding in mid-September, never mind that autumn storms were already brewing in the high altitudes.