My Mountains by Chris Smith
It’s hard to write a book that’s both page-turning and gentle, yet Smith excels at it.
My Mountains: Our Family’s Story of Adventure, Mysteries, and Tragedy opens on a blue-sky Colorado day and a text message no parent wants to receive.
From that first, shattering scene, author Chris Smith carries readers into a life measured not only by summits and trail miles, but by the stamina of a family learning to love through pain. What follows is a candid, deeply humane memoir that holds sorrow and wonder in the same steady hands — and invites the reader to keep walking.
A Family Tested by Fire and Altitude
Set largely in and around Pagosa Springs, Colorado, Smith’s narrative traces the arc of a tight-knit family tested by catastrophe after his eldest son, Keagan — once a fearless outdoorsman — survives a devastating accident that leaves him in a wheelchair and tethered to powerful pain medications.
The book moves between the raw immediacy of hospital corridors and the hush of alpine mornings, between the logistics of caring for someone you love and the liturgy of finding God in the wilderness. The mountains here are not metaphors so much as companions; they are the backdrop to courtship, marriage, child-rearing and a faith that is interrogated and renewed in the wake of loss.
Smith organizes the story in crisp, emotionally resonant chapters that function like waypoints on a long trek. We watch him and his wife, Michele, build a life around camp kitchens and chapel basements, under summer thunderheads and winter stars, and then navigate an opioid crisis that threads through their home with the quiet relentlessness of weather.
Along the way, there are indelible scenes: a false ballistic-missile alert in Hawaii; team-building and tough decisions at summer and Christian camp; tender, unvarnished exchanges with God in the insomniac hours. None of it reads as spectacle. It reads as lived-in truth.
A Spiritual Memoir Anyone Can Relate To
Smith writes with the plainspoken authority of someone who has split logs, scrubbed pans and delivered impossible news. His sentences are clean and lightly musical, with a craftsman’s respect for grain. The tone is never triumphalist; when hope arrives, it does so like sunrise through lodgepole pines — quiet, earned and a little breathtaking. You feel safe in this narrative, even when the subject is anything but.
The book’s pacing alternates between high-tension sequences (doorbells, locked rooms, hospital calls) and the ordinary mercies of family life (meals shared, letters written, snow hikes, the goofy joy of cousins reunited). That rhythm gives the memoir heft. It keeps the pages turning while honoring how grief reshapes a day, a year, a household. Small, unforgettable details do more here than a dozen generalized superlatives.
Readers who gravitate toward spiritual memoirs will appreciate the way Smith renders prayer as conversation — sometimes tender, sometimes exasperated, always honest. Questions are allowed to stand in the cold air. Consolation, when it comes, isn’t a slogan but a presence. That generosity of spirit widens the audience: secular readers will recognize themselves in the book’s attention to caregiving, moral fatigue and the stubborn work of showing up for one another.
Though the narrative moves back and forth in time, the transitions are smooth, and the chapter architecture is intuitive. Smith blends reportage (dates, medical realities, mountain logistics) with lyric attention to place.
The prose occasionally widens into testimony, then returns to the near-camera intimacy of family conversation. Readers who appreciate Cheryl Strayed’s eye for landscape, Kate Bowler’s theological candor or Philip Yancey’s narrative patience will find familiar pleasures here, though Smith’s voice remains distinctly his own.
A Story That Leaves an Impact — and Begs To Be Shared
Readers will walk away with a renewed sense that love is logistical — rides given, doors unlocked, casseroles warmed — and luminous — grace noticed in the middle of the night. They’ll witness a portrait of the Rockies that respects their danger and their healing: the mountains don’t solve anything; they steady you while you figure out the next right thing. And finally, a blessing for anyone walking through grief: the assurance that joy, though altered, is not canceled. The trail continues.
My Mountains is an unflinching, big-hearted memoir that will comfort the bereaved, encourage caregivers and captivate anyone who finds solace in high country and honest storytelling. It’s hard to write a book that’s both page-turning and gentle, yet Smith excels at it.
My Mountains is perfect for readers of narrative nonfiction who value family stories; book clubs seeking substantive discussion about resilience, addiction and faith; outdoor enthusiasts who love the Rockies; pastors, chaplains, counselors and caregivers looking for a humane companion text; and anyone needing proof that tenderness can coexist with tragedy.
Chris Smith is an entrepreneur and owner of multiple healthcare businesses across five states. He’s a father of eight, grandfather of twenty-one, and a natural leader who inspires others to pursue meaningful missions.
He feels closest to God in the mountains — hiking, paddleboarding, camping, and finding peace in wild places. My Mountains is his invitation to walk through hardship, hope, and the sacred beauty of life.
Chris loves people (but not crowds), old books, big views, and a life that’s honest, hard, and full of purpose.
Publish Date: November 4, 2025
Genre: Memoir, Nonfiction, Religion
Author: Chris Smith
Page Count: 256 pages
Publisher: Lucid Books
ISBN: 9781632968593