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I want to climb that, I thought to myself, as I looked out the car window to the towering spires of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Whoa, that thought came out of nowhere. I was a cheerleader, not an outdoorsy, camping, mountaineer type. Granola and Birkenstocks were a hard pass for me. Yet, something deep inside me was instantly attracted to those peaks.

I recalled seeing Mount Whitney’s spires for the first time as a teenager. My boyfriend and I were headed to Mammoth Mountain to go skiing. I felt so cool as we tooled up the highway in his red Mazda RX-7, seemingly without a care in the world. I looked forward to those few days when I could escape my job, school, and the alcoholic home environment in which I existed. Then I looked over and saw the towering spires and the summit of Mount Whitney. I recognized that it was something special and knew that someday I would climb it, but beyond that I didn’t give much thought to it. This magnificent mountain seemed to beckon me to it. I couldn’t explain the feeling I had then—and I can’t explain it now—but somehow, deep down inside, I knew that I would one day climb that imposing peak.

A decade later, my husband and I made that same trek to Mammoth to ski and, as the magnificent rocky spires came into view, I again thought, I’m going to climb that.

This time the feeling was different than it was when I was sixteen. It wasn’t a distant goal for an undefined time in the future. The concept of climbing Whitney felt as if it was getting closer to being a reality. I silently stared, mesmerized by the craggy range, then realized that I was smiling at the possibility. I must have verbalized that I wanted to climb Whitney, because my husband’s voice interrupted my thought as he explained how he and his law school buddies had ascended it while they were in their twenties. He made it sound like a really great time, but he didn’t offer to climb it with me. I assumed that his lack of encouragement was because he’d already done it, or maybe because it was so hard, he didn’t want to ever do it again. I wasn’t sure why he wasn’t more supportive, and felt a bit frustrated by his overt avoidance of my comment. With a building sense of frustration, I silently turned my attention back to the mountain.

Driving up Highway 395, Whitney looks like a line of enormous rock spires that are often enveloped in a misty haze. The buttes were like a magnet that drew me to them. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know a thing about climbing and had never considered climbing anything, much less this treacherous-looking part of the Sierra Nevada. Yet, somehow, I knew in the core of my being that I would stand at its pinnacle. With that inner knowledge, I discovered an uncanny peace and calmness that’s created by something you desire when there is no doubt in your soul that it will happen—when the time is right.