My family came from Bern, Switzerland. They homesteaded much of Marsh Valley near McCammon, which means someone in my line looked at a green and settled country they loved and chose to leave it for somewhere drier, harder, and more uncertain. I try to imagine the size of that decision, and I know I'll never fully understand. I have never had to bet my children's future on a place I had never seen. They did. The fact that I get to drive into that valley on a summer weekend, with my own family in the car, is the return on a sacrifice I did nothing to earn.
Here is what I came home with, and it wasn't the rodeo scores.
The stories our families tell are how we learn who we are and where we come from. A brand is not just a mark on a cow. A bench is not just a place to sit. They are the physical edges of a story that says you belong to something, that it started long before you, and that it will keep going after you. That knowledge does something to a person. It gives you strength on the days you feel weak. It gives you a place to stand in a world that often feels bent on tearing you down to nothing.
My grandfather has that. He knows exactly where he's from. You could see it in the way he sat on those benches in his cowboy hat and boots, unhurried, at home in his own skin. I want that for my kids. Not the trophies. Not the resume. The rootedness. The quiet certainty of knowing who they are and where they come from.
Legacy isn't something you leave at the end. It's built quietly, slowly, one experience at a time. It's being built right now, in the ordinary weeks, whether you are paying attention or not. The reunions, the benches, the scores logged in a worn notebook, the reason a brand is shaped the way it is. None of it felt important while it was happening. Yet, all these years later, it is the inheritance.
Someday my kids will tell stories about me. So will theirs. They are gathering the material this year, this month, in moments I'm probably not noticing.
What will they say?
I built the wilderness gap to help leaders close the distance they feel with the people they lead and the people they love. But the truth underneath that work is old and simple, and my grandfather taught it to me again on a sixty-year-old bench. In the end, the only thing we really leave behind is the story.
So make it a good one.
See you above the treeline.
If this one landed, forward it to someone who'd feel it too. That's how Above the Treeline grows. I'm John Bishoff. I help leaders close the wilderness gap, the distance between how they think they show up and how they actually show up, at work and at home. If a story from your own family came to mind while you read this, hit reply and tell me. I read every one.