It's minus eleven when I park my truck in the turnout at Stanley Basin. The snowy landscape is a ghostly gray in the predawn light. I pull my face mask up high and my hat low, leaving only a small slit for my eyes. I am abundantly careful in temperatures like this ever since I froze the ends off four of my toes.

I step out of my truck and listen to the sound of nothing at all. Jesus Christ what a relief, I think. It's hard to get away during the holidays. Some people are energized by socializing and all that rubbish. It's the mountains that energize me.

When Lewis and Clark arrived at the edge of the territory that would become Idaho, helpful locals warned them to push to the north and avoid the Salmon River Mountains. It was not the land that presented an unassailable obstacle, but the waters. Too low to have received extensive glaciation during the Ice Age, the Salmon Rivers lack the chiseled summits of their taller neighbors. Among them, though, are gorges holding treacherous whitewater rivers, including the “River of No Return,” the Middle Fork of the Salmon, famous among whitewater enthusiasts.

I don't come up here very often – there are any number of craggier mountain ranges closer to home, but I felt like something a little different, so I decided to hike Marsh Creek. The trail begins west of Stanley, an isolated tourist town reputed to be the coldest zip code in the contiguous United States.

In much of Idaho, waterways barely live up to their names. Most of the so-called rivers would be mere creeks back in my home state of Ohio. But in the Salmon Rivers, the water means business. I began the trip with the intention of visiting a hot spring on the opposite bank of Marsh Creek, but I discarded this plan as soon as I caught my first sight of it. Even now, at a fairly low level, the creek was flowing heartily, and its shallows were crusted by a fragile layer of ice.

The snow was largely untracked on Marsh Creek Trail. I followed some moose and deer tracks for the first mile, but most of the grazers had already moved to their winter ranges in the lower valleys. Later, I followed two sets of wolf tracks that were headed toward the Middle Fork. Other than a few squirrels and mountain chickadees, the forests were silent.

In my obsession with altitude, I forget, sometimes, the beauty of the lowlands. I usually pass though areas like this in the dark, at the beginning and end of a climb. I am more accustomed to wailing winds than singing waters. In the balance, I prefer the stark, hostile grandeur of the alpine country, but there is an appeal to the soft and inviting gentleness of a mountain forest.

The Salmon Rivers put me in mind of the Appalachians, of my college days and my adventures back East. Backpacking in New Hampshire, skiing in New York, rafting in West Virginia. I think of old friends, and our Spring Break road trips to the Great Smokies in Tennessee.

I stop beside the creek seven miles in, finding a big Douglas-fir to lean against while I have my lunch. I watch a squirrel eating the seeds out of a pine cone in a nearby tree. Beneath his perch is a mound of demolished cones a foot tall. Guess he likes this spot for his lunch, too.

I often ponder the odd turn of events that brought me to this remote corner of Idaho. I sometimes think I should get the hell out of this backwater and find some civilized place to live. By necessity, my life here is deep in the the closet. A couple years ago, a professor at a nearby university was fired simply for expressing support for the LGBT community on her personal social media account. The University didn't even bother to whitewash the reason for her termination: that's Idaho for you. I am fond of the people I work with and live around, but I have no illusions about how quickly I would be hung out to dry if they knew me for who I am.

So why stay? I could go to Seattle and have the Olympic Peninsula on one side of me and the Cascade Range on the other. I could go to Denver and live in the shadow of the Front Ranges, or maybe San Francisco, with John Muir's magnificent Sierras for my backyard. Heck, I could just move over to Boise – the really good climbing is a long way from there, but at least I'd be on an islet of blue surrounded by a sea of red.

But the squirrel nibbling his pine seeds offers me a reason to stay. As does the Marsh Creek Trail, whose snows are unlikely to be marked by any other bootprints for the rest of the winter. And what of all those peaks that I have yet to climb? Every one calls to me, pulls me in, entreats me to stay.

These mountains are more of a home to me than any I have had before. I adore them, and cannot imagine life without them. Challenging, remote, mysterious and lonesome, they are not just a playground. They are my way of life.