For a moment, it looked like there was a way out. In the cockpit of the New Mexico State Police helicopter, sitting idle on a mountain ridge in the Pecos Wilderness northeast of Santa Fe, Sgt. Andrew Tingwall pointed at a break in the clouds. To his fellow officer, 29-year-old Wesley Cox, it looked like a tunnel, a thin valley through the dark and ominous cloud bank overhead.

It’s not always easy. Some couples have interests that are mutually exclusive—she gets up early to train for triathlons; he likes hitting the bars until last call. He lives to hike to backcountry lakes and cast for mountain trout. She hates to be dirty.

In 1984, Mark Mortier and a few friends crossed over the top of Santa Fe’s Lake Peak in flimsy leather ski boots, with skinny, 7-foot-long telemark skis thrown over their shoulders. They clipped at the top of a sub-peak on the other side and dropped into a small piece of heaven.

Wherein Chef Johnny Vee teaches a sad bachelor how to cook. And how to date.

Winter camping is not most people’s idea of a good time. It’s cold. There are no s’mores. You’re lucky if you can dig up enough sticks and tinder out of the snow to start a fire, and you’re luckier if you don’t make any forehead-slapping bumbles like letting the stove frost over or forgetting your lighter and matches a few miles back at the car.

Running doesn’t have to be a competitive sport. There’s no reason why, at 7 am on a warm Saturday morning, I couldn’t be running as hard as possible up the La Luz Trail in the Sandia Mountains by myself. It’s just that I wouldn’t. It’s too exhausting.

Even if you’ve climbed every route around Santa Fe, banked every turn on the trails at La Tierra and know the entire crew at Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works by their nicknames, you may not have