Now, you all know how I feel about the outdoors. I’m okay with it. In general. For the most part. But, as you also know, I am nothing but devoted to my boyfriend (right?), and dang but if he doesn’t love him some mountains, and so off we went to the lovely and amazing Mt. Rainier National Park on Friday morning. Well, make that Friday afternoon. I was all gung-ho to leave at the crack of dawn, but first there was some last minute packing to do and then we had to go to Safeway for raisins and M&Ms and then we forgot the peanut butter at home and then something else happened that I don’t quite remember what it was, and then we were finally off. We got all signed into the park by a charmingly incompetent ranger who typed with two fingers, squinting and holding his breath after every keystroke, and drove up to the trailhead and were worried about the weather and I yelled at Carl for bringing a summer sleeping bag (I was afraid he’d get cold!) and then we hugged and made up and then we set off, and then we walked up, and then we walked down, and then we made it to our campsite, and then we set up the tarp, and then we slept, and woke up, and walked some more, and camped again, and swatted eightythreemillion mosquitos, and slept, and got up early, and walked up and down some more, and then it started to snow and hail, and then we got to the car, and then we had some chili, and then we drove home. It was a very nice camping trip. The End.
No. Seriously. I find that camping stories aren’t all that interesting, for some reason. Maybe just my camping stories aren’t all that interesting, because now that I think of it, everyone else I know has all these great stories about mountains they climbed and silly things they put in their gorp, and times where they almost died but didn’t. My story is all “Yeah, we walked and my legs really hurt and my pack was heavy and I had to go down stairs backwards but we saw some pretty stuff and it was a very nice weekend.”
So let’s see if Carl can’t do any better. Sweetie? Can you come here for a minute please?
Carl Here…Well, while Chiara got the facts right, my experience of the trip was slightly different. I remember the descent from the bare rocks of the pass at Frozen Lake down into the meadow of Berkeley Park accompanied by marmots scampering between thousands of beautiful wildflowers.
I remember lying in a hammock and Grand Park (a huge flat, golf–course like meadow on the side of Rainier) watching the clouds sink down until finally they were dodging between the stands of trees.
I remember the first minutes of confusion as we debated whether the white flakes I had just seen were snow (in August!?) or flower petals that had blown off a bush (It was snow, lots and lots of snow).
Sadly, nothing epic really happened (unless you count my mile sprint to the outhouse). In fact the trip was pretty much the antithesis of epic, I mean, we literally spent an afternoon lying about reading the New Yorker Magazine. How cush is that?
Well, there you have it. Poetic, ain’t he? Man, having other people write my entries sure makes for an easy journalling experience. This is great. But you know, about camping? Even though I cried and said I didn’t like walking, and I didn’t want to carry my pack any more, and I hated gorp? We did see some beautiful stuff, and I did feel proud for walking oh, twenty miles in three days. I know that’s strictly minor league for some of y’all crazy PCT hikers, but for the delicate blossom that is your friend Chiara, it was epic. This was the first trip I’ve been on that did not involve my borrowing most of the gear I used. I tested out my new sleeping bag for the first time…the documentation that came with it basically said, “Okay, here’s a nice big roomy stretchy comfy bag for precious little flowers like Chiara who can’t sleep outdoors because they hate being in sleeping bags. Wimps.” I had my own pack. I had my own shoes and my own pants and my own bandana and my own gorp recipe. I spent a lot of time thinking about my gear, when I wasn’t scratching off several layers of bug-bite-infested epidermis or complaining about how my legs hurt. I spent a lot of time thinking about peeing in the woods. I spent a lot of time being breath-taken by the gorgeosity of where we were walking, exclaiming over the flowers and the marmots and the trees. This trip gave me a little inkling as to why some folks are all crazy about hiking…I mean, I don’t completely understand it because in the final analysis I am a woman who deeply loves her couch, her book, and her hot chocolate…but it’s because it’s fun. That’s it! That’s the only reason! So I’m glad I did it, and that I had fun (I mean, I really like the New Yorker), and I’m glad that the idea of doing again one of these weekends in the near future seems like a good one.