![]() Yosemite morning, El Capitan on the left, the Merced River in the foreground (Photo: Emily Pennington)Ī lot of people have a rare and poetic transformation in the woods. What impractical magic had I stumbled upon? A forest-laden Burning Man for athletic hobbits? A blister-bearing mountain temple for misfits? It was my first sunrise in the Great Western Divide, and though I had spent most of my adult life up to that point in a strictly secular mindset, something about the soft glow and the stillness of the morning hushed me into reverence. The next morning, after a fitful night spent tossing and turning in our cramped one-person tent, I awoke to find the meadow and the High Sierra beyond it awash in pink-hued light. A woman pulled a ukulele out of her pack, Mary Poppins style, and the six of us howled at the moon as we belted out the lyrics to familiar pop songs. Not fifteen minutes later, we had arranged our makeshift rock chairs into a circle of former strangers and were passing around a Nalgene filled with scotch whiskey that made my head spin beneath the dazzling brightness of the Milky Way. This left us with two options: soak our dehydrated backpacking meal in cold water, making a crunchy and unsavory soup of bland calories, or use chocolate to bribe the hikers at the next campsite into letting us borrow their stove. The lighter failed to ignite the gas inside the metal burner. My stomach growled ferociously from the exertion, and David carefully assembled his little aluminum backpacking stove and delicately screwed its hose onto a fuel canister. By the time we made it to camp, I was a girl crumbled. Without a chest strap, my backpack clung to my shoulders like a limp orangutan and swung frustratingly to and fro whenever I moved. I felt like I was sucking air through a wet paper straw as we ascended in the afternoon sun. What I didn't know was that, once you reach a certain elevation, the air becomes noticeably thinner and thinner, until walking uphill requires a tremendous amount of effort and concentration. I did yoga three times a week-what could go wrong? So when he suggested a twelve-mile journey up to the summit of 11,207-foot Alta Peak and bedding down in the high-altitude meadow that shares its name, my youthful bravado and desire to impress him lit up, and I said yes. The author in Zion National Park (Photo: Emily Pennington)ĭavid wasn’t aware that this was my first backpacking excursion. Riding past an onslaught of fish-taco stands, dodging dengue fever in the thick jungle, and surviving a police shakedown, his posse had managed to do the unthinkable-prove that ordinary people with nine-to-five day jobs can save up, set off on a professional-adventurer caliber trip, and survive relatively unscathed. I fell madly in love with his ability to quote Epictetus over penne arrabbiata and his infectious adventurous streak years before we met, he and a group of friends had plotted a six-month course from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro. It was his fault that I had grown obsessively fond of backpacking in the five years leading up to my quest to visit every park. ![]() Mosquitoes began their invisible, Doppler-like buzzing around my head, but rather than turn back to make dinner, I felt compelled to climb to the top of a nearby boulder and lie flat on my back to watch the light shift across the famous granite dome.ĭavid was an Eagle Scout with the body of a lumberjack and the heart of a poet.
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