I have such mixed feelings about camping. On the one hand, I totally love it: the freedom to do nothing but stare into a fire for hours, the fresh air, the fluttering of bird wings, the hum of the river passing by my campsite. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like I've outgrown it: the days of dirt lodged in every crevice of my hand/fingernails/toes, temperatures dropping so low that I don't want to leave my relatively warm sleeping bag/tent to find a spot to pee at 6am, boredom, and too many sausages and s'mores consumed in too short of a time period.
Last week, we went to the Pike National Forest to do some camping on Mount Evans. Not the hike-in-with-all-your-stuff-in-your-backpack type of camping, but the buy-firewood-at-the-grocery-store-and-park-your-car-and-unload-into-a-campsite-with-a-handy-fire-pit-already-there type of camping. It was, overall, splendid, and even the massive amounts of dirt on my hands, arms, legs, jeans and socks didn't really bother me until the last day. We found a lovely day hike trail called Abyss, which sounds like it could be rough, but was actually a smooth, meandering stroll through stands of aspen and pine, through meadows of dandelions, log hopping over rapid creeks, with views sometimes of whole vast valleys and mountain peaks.
It's a good thing it was an easy hike, because I was feeling a bit nauseous from eating too much sausage that morning, which is a condition hereby known as feeling sauseous (which is to be nauseous from sausage, in case you didn't figure that out already). I left the mountain with clearer lungs from the fresh crisp mountain air and with a hilariously shaped hiker's sunburn that made its way around my tank top straps, into the part in my hair and all the way down to a spot on my low back that was exposed while walking with the backpack on.
I think I've decided that I don't really like hiking so much. If we're hiking to a place (i.e., a lake to swim in, a waterfall to climb under, etc.), then I don't mind, but the "hike for the sake of hiking" experience just doesn't speak to me. And even though I've learned this lesson before (ten years ago, on the first day of a 5 day journey along the southern part of the Appalachian Trail), I seem to forget it and wind up agreeing to go on hikes with people who genuinely like them. Hiking, like running without music or riding a bike with no destination, is just so boring, but that might have more to do with my own dislike of being too quiet to hear all the thoughts running through my head and may have nothing at all to do with the actual act of walking in a forward motion on a dirt path. I know that people really like to be all up in nature, observing its glory, but I find this is difficult to do while walking on a surface that alternates from being smooth dirt to craggy rocks, to full of earth-poppin' tree roots, to slippery mud slicks and back to non-threatening clear dirt pathways. In other words, I spend most of my time looking down to avoid stepping on something that will twist my ankle instead of basking in the glory of the wild (to be fair, I do this in the city too, and as a result haven't stepped in dog poop fr as long as I can remember).
But overall the trip was lovely, the wilderness was amazing, and the campfires were spectacular..
We returned to Denver with just enough time to shower (twice) and get ready to enjoy the Gay Pride events of the weekend. And as the Flintstones theme song promises, we did have a gay ole time.
No comments:
Post a Comment