At the end of that first season, I’d successfully experimented with listing a couple of rooms on Airbnb. That winter, I was offered a cut of the revenue if I’d return for a second summer and list the rest of the Rider. After a five-month adventure about New Zealand and some time back home in Phoenix, I would return to Silver Gate for a second season.

In May, I decided to sell my troublesome Durango and fly to Montana, which meant I’d have no car for the summer. Instead, I commandeered one of the old road bikes lying about our property to restore for transportation. Silver Gate connects to the internet through painfully slow satellite, but for reasons I know not, Cooke City (just three miles up the road) has high-speed internet. Most days that summer, I’d pedal to Cooke to connect with the world. As we’re all learning, there is something both calming and freeing about limiting our access to the web. The requirement to pedal this stunning six-mile stretch of US Highway 212 made my relationship to our electronic tether even better.

My younger brother worked across the street at the Grizzly Lodge that summer. He, two other guys, and I started having these weekly discussion groups in his little, primitive, no-plumbing cabin along a bend in the creek. The first night he placed a candle on a barstool in the middle of the four of us. Assuming it a nice, ceremonial touch, we dubbed ourselves “The Knights of the Round Stool.” Largely an experiment, we grew to love these incredibly open discussions. Each week was a different topic, from dreams and fears to relationships and the influences our parents had on us. After a couple of hours baring our innermost workings, we’d head over to the creekside sauna and cook and plunge and stare at the stars and feel so alive and whole and lucky to be there. During our last session, we learned the candle on the stool was actually to cover up the smell of my brother’s pee jug that he’d lost the cap for and shared the greatest of laughs.

All my discussion group buddies went back to college, and soon after, this remarkable girl who graced the edges of our seasons between leading backpacking trips and sled dogs tours returned. Fascinating, kind, and wildly artistic, her eyes spoke of depths within. I often found myself short of breath around her.

One night, the two of us ended up alone in the sauna. Jumping into that snowmelt creek was sensory overload. Precisely then, I decided I’d try to work up the courage to let her know how I felt. Nervous as hell, I stumbled along in glow of the lantern she held toward the creek. We dove in and practically jumped back to the bank from the astonishing cold. My heart raced and pounded in my chest and temples. Shivering, I stepped closer to her in the faint light of the lantern. Fear gripped my body whole. Our eyes met. I felt I had just gambled the universe and the brilliant stars above would either explode into pure white light or come crashing down with the entirety of my existence. We kissed. Cold lips, wet skin, drunk with temperature change, steam from our bodies rising into the brilliant starscape above… It was pure magic. We would fall deeply for each other throughout the fall and winter.

An aspiring writer, I’d felt a book welling up within me that second summer and aimed to write as much as I could that off-season. Returning to Phoenix, I bought a fourteen-year-old Honda Element and converted it to a tiny home on wheels to set out in search of space to write. In January, I headed out across the south, while hoping to maintain that relationship across a continent — a clash of my highest values. Like a house of cards, it all came crashing down. Love lost, in no condition to write a book, I returned to Phoenix to lick my wounds among family and friends. When April arrived, I headed for the west coast and drove its entire length that month, the most spirit-mending act of my life to date. In Washington, I hooked a right back towards Silver Gate for my third season running the Rider.

Like clock-work, I went through those wonderful motions. I hosted college classes, bartended five nights a week, cooked myself in the sauna, tramped about the mountains on my off days as free as could be, pedaled the stretch between Silver Gate and Cooke City a hundred times to connect to the web, read books in nooks of the Rider, and lived a most charmed sort of existence.