A few weeks ago a little bio that I wrote was featured on a minimalist website that I follow (http://www.missminimalist.com/2014/09/real-life-minimalists-lauren/). I included a link to this blog, and a fair number of missminimalist readers signed up to follow. Inspired by their interest, and remembering that I never wrote about my summer exploits, I decided I would do a quick post today, and commit to writing once a week. This year I enjoyed my second summer with Adventure Treks, a program that takes teenagers on wilderness trips throughout the West. I worked a trip called California Challenge, taking rising tenth and eleventh graders backpacking, mountain biking, rafting and mountaineering throughout Northern California. Overall we had a fantastic time. Summer has lingered far too long back home in Georgia, so I feel like it’s still appropriate for me to post some thoughts on summer 2014 and summers of years past as well.
Five of the last eight summers, I have been lucky enough to close the summer sitting at an airport waiting to fly back home across the country. On each of these occasions I’ve felt a little sad and nostalgic, knowing that something special happened, something that is now over and can’t be recreated. Despite the different experiences of long distance hiking and a summer of working for Adventure Treks, at the end the feeling is the same, the awareness that I’ve shared a unique experience with special friends and together we were truly alive in this outdoor life. I love these intense summers that feel like you’ve lived years worth of memories in a matter of months, where days go by slowly but the weeks accumulate in an instant.
In the last few of these summers, these moments of quiet at the airport have been the first alone time that I’d had since heading west two or four or five months earlier. Not that I was ever alone in the airport terminal either, but for the first time, I was on my own with no one to talk to or compromise with or to be responsible for. I always make an effort to journal and reflect as I wait to board the plane. I remember my first of these experiences most vividly. It was 2006, and I was at the Bangor Airport in Maine. I was the last of my Katahdin summit crew to fly out. I had been near tears saying goodbye to the others as they departed one by one, but by the time I was the one sitting at the gate, waiting for a flight, my emotions could best be described as a satisfied melancholy. While part of me wished I could go on hiking indefinitely, I also knew that I did like my life at home. That Georgia was my home, and that there was a life that I was looking forward to returning to.
Much of this year’s airport reflection involved comparing my Adventure Treks 2014 experience to my experience in Alaska two years previous. This go round I took on more of a leadership role since we had three new staff members on our instructor team. That was such a switch from 2012 when I was the only new staff member on a team of veterans. I felt more confident in every element of the job this summer – and the fact that there are so many different elements is probably what I enjoy most about this type of work.
I also thought about how different my experiences in Northern California had been this summer than those I had when I traveled through the same swath of northern California that I had traversed during my 2010 PCT hike – both in regards to who I was and where I was at in my life, and in regards to how different the experience I was having taking care of a bunch of fifteen year olds was than when I was busting out 30 mile days with characters named Wiffle Chicken and TBone. During one of my many visits to the Mt Shasta grocery this summer, I met a hiker named Jaybird who, like me, had hiked the AT in 2006 and the PCT in 2010. Somehow our paths had not crossed until now, while he was attempting his third PCT thru hike, and I was running around the parking lot trying to limit the amount of candy that teenage boys shoved in their mouths. After playing a spirited game of do you know so and so, and did you hike with whats her name, a large part of me wanted to ditch my commitments right then and there and hike north with this dude. But another part of me felt glad that I had spent the entire summer in this one fantastic region that I had basically run through in 2010.
The other major difference between Northern California in 2010 and this same region in 2014, was the look of the landscape. Of all the changes in my life and current situation, the change in the landscape was by far the most alarming. In 2010, Mount Shasta was the snow covered behemoth on the horizon the we never lost sight of during weeks of hiking. This year, you could still see the mountain from all of northern California, but it looked like a sad thirsty pile of rocks rather than the grand white monster on which John Muir had famously spent the night huddled by a fumerole struggling to survive a snowstorm. Three years into a severe drought, the Northern California in which I spent the summer of 2014 felt quite different than the green region I came to love during a wet, snowy 2010. Along with millions of Californians, I am keeping my fingers crossed for a wet winter for them this year. All in all though, I am still in love with the west coast and very much looking forward to returning to Cali in December.
Peanut Butter and Frosting 