Back To Nature

Thursday afternoon when we get off work Mandi, Ryan, Ward, and I will be headed to the White Mountain Wilderness for a long awaited backpacking trip. This is an area that none of us have ever packed into before and I'm greatly looking forward to it. This is also the first backpacking trip that we have done in somewhere close to a year. It's long overdue. Other vacations are nice, it's always good to get away, but theres just nothing like being deep in the wilderness, where most people don't ever go, with some of your closest friends. Last year we did a trip with a rather large crew because it was my bachelor party. It was an excellent trip into an incredible wilderness area. We saw almost no other living souls. It took us a day and a half of hiking to get up to this area where you see Ward walking by himself. The view looked much like this in all directions all around us. Aside from us you could see no sign of humanity. It took us another day and a half to get down from this point. There were wild strawberries along the trail for the whole hike. At the end of the first day we camped next to a mountain lake.
To the right is a picture of Ryan on the left and Carter on the right sitting next to the campfire at the first night's campsite. That thing Ryan is holding is his banjo. He carried it, hard case and all, along with his 60 or 70 pound pack for the whole trip. All together he was carrying somewhere around 100 pounds up and down about 3-4 thousand vertical feet for close to 20 miles. It was impressive. It was also nice to have a little banjo at nights after a long day's hike.
Almost a year ago, these seven people were spread out across two states and two countries. It took one of us getting married to bring us all together for this trip. In all honesty though, it took more than that. It took the wilderness. It took mother nature in all her rough and ragged beauty. It took the promise of a veiw never seen, a mountain never climbed, a black storm that might chase us across a high ridgeline, and the knowledge that at any moment she could throw something at us that we weren't expecting. It's always a challenge and there's always something new. Here's to mother nature, the next trip, and all of the trips that came before. I can't wait for the next one to start.