May 15th is the deadline for our travel photo contest! We’ve had some amazing entries, and we’ve been moved greatly by the photos as well as the stories behind some of the photos you sent in. We don’t know if the photo Elena Seibert submitted will win, but she won our hearts with her description of how a trip to the Swiss Alps changed her, and her friend, forever.

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Elena has taken pictures of faces for years. Writers, artists, celebrities—she’s coaxed the real person out from behind their public face and frozen it in light. Sonia Sotomayor, Nora Ephron, McKenzie Scott, Twyla Tharp. Legends. 

But somewhere in the years of school drop-offs and late dinners and a marriage that had quietly become something else, she had stopped looking for the horizon beyond her SRL lens. The camera was a convenient place to hide, and let her subjects shine.

NextTribe creates small group travel experiences for women 45 and over. If you’re ready to stop waiting and start going, we’d love to have you along. Check out all our trips here.

Then a newspaper article changed everything.

It was an article in the New York Times about a couple who’d hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc — one hundred miles through three countries, sleeping in mountain huts, waking to glaciers. Elena read it the way you read something that’s been written just for you. She’d never hiked more than a few hours in her life. She’s a New Yorker; Bear Mountain, a couple hours from the city, is about as wild as it gets. But something in her said: I have to do this.

She called her friend Lisa.

The Parent Bond

Lisa and Elena had been bound together by the particular intimacy of New York City parenthood—their kids in the same small Greenwich Village school from kindergarten through eighth grade, their families folded into each other’s lives through the ordinary rituals of birthday parties and field trips and the long hallway conversations that turn into real friendship. They were, by their own admission, very different people. But they’d shared something else, too: years of quietly managing marriages that were slowly, privately, coming undone.

The friends found themselves staring at the same open space where their former lives had been.

“We both kept it to ourselves,” Elena says. “Until something cracked.”

What cracked, eventually, was everything. Both marriages ended. The youngest kids left for college. And the two women found themselves standing on the same threshold, staring at the same open space where their former lives had been.

The year after their divorces, they hired a guide and flew to Chamonix.

On the Trail

Elena had prepared by taking a couple of hikes up Bear Mountain — and getting lost. “We had no idea what we were doing,” she laughs. She was fit; she’d always loved to move, to push her body. But this was different. This was eight days of hiking through France, Switzerland, and Italy, gaining and losing thousands of feet of elevation every day, sleeping in wooden huts perched on the sides of mountains.

“I just thought — why wouldn’t I be able to do it?” she says. “There was something about the divorce, the bad years. It was like, I have to do this. I knew it would make me happy.”

The first day on the trail, with the Alps opening up around them — the glaciers, the meadows, the improbable scale of it all — Lisa wept.

She was right. But she couldn’t have known how right.

The first day on the trail, with the Alps opening up around them — the glaciers, the meadows, the improbable scale of it all — Lisa wept. Just stood there and wept.

“The beauty was overwhelming,” Elena says, a little quietly. “I’d never seen anything like it. I grew up in New York. I just had never seen anything like that.” She pauses. “And then there was that other feeling. Satisfaction. Which was quite huge.”

The Tragedy and the Aftermath

Fourteen years earlier — to the day she took the photograph she entered in NextTribe’s photo contest — Elena and Lisa had stood outside their children’s school in lower Manhattan and watched the Twin Towers fall.

She didn’t mention the anniversary when she described the hike. It came out later, almost incidentally, in the caption she wrote for the photo. But it sits at the center of the story like a keystone. Two women who had watched the world come apart from a sidewalk in Tribeca. Who had then spent years holding their families together through the rubble. Who had finally, finally, let themselves step out into the mountains.

The photograph she entered in our contest shows a lone figure gazing out at an immense Alpine landscape—tiny against the peaks, but there. Present. Looking.

Forming the “Dysfunctional” Family

That first trip was nine years ago. Elena and Lisa (and more friends) have now hiked together almost everywhere: Patagonia, Morocco, Portugal, Slovenia, the Andes, the Atlas Mountains. They summited Morocco’s Toubkal peak in the dark, headlamps bobbing, terrified and exhilarated, stopping just below the top until their guide said, firmly: All of us are going up. And all of them went up.

Their group has grown and shifted over the years — six women on that first post-Mont-Blanc trip, roughly the same cast now planning their tenth hike together. They call themselves a dysfunctional family. They are, in many ways, very different people. But they are, Elena says, bound now. Permanently.

“I would never stop hiking after that first trip,” she says. “I knew immediately.”

“Pure, Unadulterated Peace”

What hooked her, she thinks, was the moving — the particular pleasure of a body in motion through something vast and demanding. “I like to move,” she says simply. “This was an extreme version of that.” But there was something else, too. Something about doing a hard thing with other women who were also doing a hard thing, and arriving at the top together, and standing there in the thin air being happy.

“It just felt like a whole new world had opened up,” she says. “Pure, unadulterated peace.”

I love doing a hard thing with other women who are also doing a hard thing, and arriving at the top together.

Elena is still a portrait photographer. She still lives in New York, on the Upper West Side now, not far from Barnard, where she went to college back when Columbia didn’t admit women. Her son is about to graduate from medical school. Her daughter writes.

She is, by her own description, an introvert who loves to wander alone with a camera, getting lost in a new city. She does not always want to do everything with the group. The women who travel with her know this now. It took a few trips.

But every year, she goes back to the mountains with Lisa and the dysfunctional family. Every year, she gets to the top. Every year, she stands there for a while, just being happy.

The mountain was always waiting. She just had to go find it.

This is the first in our Transition Travel series. We pay for essays that capture the way travel helps us heal, process and look ahead after major life shifts, such as divorce, retirement, empty nest, death of a loved one or some other seismic event. Submit your essays here.