It’s four o’clock in the afternoon when we hit Slumgullion summit, and we’re so close to home I can almost taste it. Behind us the highest peaks of the San Juan Mountains cast long shadows across the big blue afternoon—Handies Peak, Uncompaghre Peak, and the Wetterhorn—while in front of us Spring Creek Pass marks the place where the continent divides the waters, where the first few trickles pool and start to tumble into a channel that a few miles downstream, when it snakes around my property, will already be called the Rio Grande.

We left Sacramento last night at nine, and it’s been a long haul across the Great Basin, but the Milky Way stretched itself thick and white across Nevada, and Venus rose just before the sun over Utah, and I’m so excited to be back in the high country I haven’t even suggested we stop for food.

With me in the 4Runner is my Irish Wolfhound, Dante, and a man I’ve promised myself I’ll love like no other before him. Our love is new, but so strong it feels like it’s got something you might call God behind it, and this is the first time he will see this place, these mountains, my home. I’m working an equation in my head that’s got to do with land and home and love and the mystery in the moments like this one where they all come together, but I don’t have all the details yet.

Dante and I have been at sea level for eight weeks and it’s not our natural habitat. In the six years I’ve owned my ranch in Colorado, I’ve never been away for that long. Dante hasn’t either, and he’s beside himself with longing, knowing he’s about to be reunited with his best canine friend Sally, knowing he’s about to get to go chase his horses around the pasture, knowing he’ll be able to sleep on his front porch with the sound of the river in his ears and the smell of the prairie grass in his nose—no more diesel fumes and car alarms—for the first time in two months, not a worry in the world.

For the last couple of hours the smells have been such that Dante can tell we’re almost home, and he’s been sitting at attention behind me drooling onto my shoulder. I’m feeling somewhat Pavlovian myself, though I can’t tell if it’s the sharp smell of the ponderosa needles, or the dusky scent of the aspen bark, or just breathing the high thin air with this good man beside me and this good dog at my back. What I do know is I’m as giddy and grateful at this moment as I’ve ever been in my life. Were it not for the seat belt, I might go spiraling out the sunroof for joy.