By Jennifer Pharr Davis, on November 10th, 2009 After completing the AT in 2005, I was hired to my first office job and I made it 10 months before needing to break free from the cubical. I also needed to lose the 20 pounds I had put on sitting in said cubical.
In some respects I was lucky, because at least my desk was positioned near a window where I could look out at nature, but instead of providing inspiration it made me feel trapped. Fortunately my job had a four-month slow season that coincided with the optimal PCT thru hiking months, and when I asked my boss for time off, she gave it to me.
Since finishing the Appalachian Trail in 2005, not a day passed that I didn’t miss the trail. I missed the friends I made, the animals I saw, the time to think, the way my body felt at the end of a long day. But to go straight from my experience on the AT to hiking out west was still a bit of a stretch. The thought of walking through the mojave desert with 30-miles between water stops terrified me; and I had to Google the definitions of an ‘ice axe’ and ‘crampons.’ [Read More]
By Francisco Tharp, on November 9th, 2009 As we watched other fire circles from afar, and listened to tribal cries echoing between granite monoliths, I though of Ed Abbey’s line from his Havasu chapter in Desert Solitaire: “Like the Taoist Chuang-tse, I worried about butterflies and who was dreaming what.” [Read More]
By Justin Harkins, on November 5th, 2009 Fifteen minutes down the road, all was well. Robert Earl Keen and lemon-lime Gatorade had me in a fine frame of mind, and I was cruising down the road toward certain triumph. Yet again, however, the snow was to get the better of me. [Read More]
By Francisco Tharp, on November 3rd, 2009 Last winter I looked at the Spoon daily … I saw it on my way to and from work, out my bedroom window in the morning, and sometimes beneath my eyelids at night. I’m a fairly conservative backcountry skier safety-wise, so skiing it mid-winter scared me. Finally, in March – with my long-time friend and ski buddy, Reilly – I got to see it right beneath my BD Nunyos and blurring past my peripheral. [Read More]
By Jennifer Pharr Davis, on October 28th, 2009 I am ADDICTED to backpacking, hiking, and trail running. And therein lies the premise of this blog. We – you and me – are going to build a blogging relationship based on a love for the trails and spending as much time out in the wilderness as possible. [Read More]
By Justin Harkins, on October 25th, 2009 When a person loves something the way I love climbing, exploring, and being a part of the mountains, it is an impossible something to let go of. In the moment the destroyers become satisfied that I have sufficiently found myself, I will have become truly lost. [Read More]
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