Some places never change. How reassuring that is.

My son spent this Christmas, and the days preceding it, with his father. So I packed my bags and headed into the mountains, back to the county I called home for 13 years. I have been gone from this ski community of about 25,000 people for three-and-a-half years now. Folks there would say the place has changed dramatically. Condos have gone up. Open space has vanished. Acres of trees were cleared last summer in a fruitless attempt to get ahead of the pine beetles that are turning the evergreen forest to rust.

For me, it could still have been May 2003. Everything was familiar and memories leapt toward me from around every corner.

As I drove my trusty Saturn from the Continental Divide into the valley in which the towns rested, my eyes fell on a mountainside neighborhood I knew well. Peeking out from the trees was the apartment building in which Roger lived. I hadn't thought about him in weeks. Without warning, I felt a pang of longing in my stomach, or somewhere thereabouts. His phone number popped into my brain without my conscious permission. I pushed it aside and blazed up and over the rise to Frisco.

My friend and former fellow newspaper reporter Lu and I arranged to rendezvous for a long-overdue catch-up and an afternoon hike with our dogs. I pulled into a parking spot on Main Street Frisco, where we'd agreed to meet. A black truck parked next to me, and a man got out and walked into the store in front of my car. He was a bit grayer than I remembered, but he was still Travis Holton, the owner of three of the county's finest restaurants and manager of the immensely popular Lake Dillon Tiki Bar. A 40-something man in Sorels walked past my car on the sidewalk. I knew his face, knew it fairly well, in fact, but his name eluded me.

I smiled, sitting there alone in the car. In this county teeming with holiday tourists, the first two people I saw still were people from my past.

Lu and I walked from her home up a snowmobile trail into the forest. Fresh snow weighed the tree branches so that they appeared to bow before us. The lodgepole pines through which the path wandered stood like sedentary escorts, stately and somehow protective.

A snowmobile drove around the corner, slowing for us. The driver, his face hidden behind a hat and goggles, waved and smiled. The smell of the two-stroke engine filled the air. Lu and I both inhaled it deeply, acknowledging that for better or worse, we both loved it.

A couple on cross-country skis appeared around the next bend, a golden lab, golden retriever and a black dog of uncertain parentage bounding beside them on the trail. The man and woman each were pulling a tot carrier on skis, price tags still waving in the breeze from each tiny vehicle. A sleeping baby, nestled deeply in a blanket, rested in each one. They stopped to chat about the weather, and the four of us laughed at the five dogs frolicking in the hip-deep snow off the trail.

They continued on and we turned toward Lu's home.

Later, we met another former co-worker at a restaurant on Main Street Frisco. The last time I had been there was the night of my farewell party, a surprisingly large affair attended by mayors, the sheriff, district attorney, and other contacts and co-workers accumulated during 13 years of small town reporting.

I walked in the door, cell phone to my ear. A blonde woman at a table of four caught my eye and waved. I waved back and said "Hello!" as though she were an old friend. In truth - and to my horror - I did not recognize her. She turned to her fellow diners and spoke to them with some enthusiasm. All three of them turned to look at me. Grateful for the phone call that prevented me from speaking to her, I moved to the back of the restaurant.

Twenty minutes later, microbrews in hand, the three of us saw newspaper photographer Mark Fox walk into the bar. We waved him down and he told Alex, my former editor, was meeting him there. Another former co-worker called to ask where I was, and joined us half an hour later.

A party of three had blossomed unexpectedly into one of six.

The last time this group had been together was only four months ago, at Brad's funeral. Then, we hugged one another in consolation, our faces tight with grief, eyes bloodshot and shiny with tears. Now, those same eyes were alive with mirth, the faces gleaming in the firelight.

We bid one another Merry Christmas and I drove to my friend's home in Breckenridge, where I was staying the night.

I wound through the back streets, absurdly proud that I knew my way around so well.

Again, without warning, I slammed into a wall of memories. There was another apartment building, this one Iain's. I saw us standing there the day he left the county, the day - in retrospect - that our relationship began to unravel. Robby was sitting in the car, peering at us as we stood, arms around each other. He was only five years old. "I never cry," Iain said, as tears escaped the corners of his green eyes. Then he dropped my hands as though they were afire - rapidly, almost roughly. "I've got to go. Now," he said and jumped into his packed truck.

He left me that day as he ended up leaving me at the last. Quickly, abruptly, as though in this way, he could escape the pain.

He started the engine that late fall day and looked at me, safe behind the wheel of my own car now. Tears ran down both our faces. He did not mouth goodbye. He did not wave. He did not drive out of the parking lot, he fled it, the truck almost lurching as he accelerated rapidly, tires spinning rocks, leaving a wide gash in the gravel.

I had pulled out behind him, and stopped at the stop sign only a block from me on this December 2007 night. I saw him stop two blocks away from me, at the last stop sign before the on-ramp to Interstate 70 west. There was not another car on the street, but still his truck sat motionless, brake lights glowing red. Five or 10 seconds passed, both of us stopped for a reason no one else could have understood. Then I pulled through the intersection to the post office. I remembered clearly that I knew I must check my post office box, knew I had to move through life's daily motions because that is all any of us can do to dull heartache.

Yesterday, I drove the dam road, and remembered boating there with Leland, the two-year beau all my friends hated for the hot-and-cold treatment to which he subjected me. He was freshly divorced then and deeply scarred and I never stopped defending or caring for him. At this moment, I could remember none of the bad. What I saw was him sitting on the pontoon boat, beer in hand, laughing.

I remembered Brad, too, whose three-story condominium overlooked this lake he'd so loved. We'd joked and sometimes were truly annoyed when he submitted yet another photograph of the sunset, the frozen lake, a sailboat race, or a mountain mirrored in the glass of its surface, all taken from the deck of his home. The home at which he'd died these many years later. I knew he was dead, yet I had a sudden urge to call him and wish him a Merry Christmas.

I left Summit County this morning, looking forward to this Christmas night with my son. I drove away from the stunning beauty to which people from around the world flock. I drove away from 13 years of memories, and the endless triggers that bring them back to life, almost as vivid as the day they were made.

I drove away from my old home, toward my new one. My brain shifted from the past to the present, returning me to my life as a city dweller and insurance saleswoman in a city that thrilled me with its possibilities. The facts of this life came almost like a surprise, so deeply had I entrenched myself in memories these last two days.

I will return to the mountains to visit, to make new memories in a place that changes at what seems an almost imperceptible pace, where long-held friends wander the streets beside ghosts from the past. The memories are now more poignant than painful. The friendships are deep and multi-layered, the kind that only come with years of shared experiences.

They all exist only an hour away. How comforting that is.