The Long Arm of History

Mountains steep as church spires. Ancient mosaics. Streams of crystal-clear water running over chalk-white rock. A Roman emperor's basement. Twisting Medieval streets. Folk-art beehives. A bomb shelter. Opal-blue lakes. Saint's reliquaries. Deep, underground caves. Bullet holes and mortar craters. Cities the color of sherbet. Butterflies. Lizards. Storks. Swifts. Seas of red roof tiles. A sea of turquoise water. A sea of humanity.

These are just a few of the things we experienced during three weeks in Slovenia and Croatia this month. C and I wanted to take a big trip to celebrate all three kids graduating and *big* birthdays for both of us this year, and we've always wanted to travel to Europe (among other places) as a family, but the timing and the finances had never aligned. With all the fledglings perched to fly out of the nest, it felt like now or never. To make the trip happen we cobbled together our savings, sold some building equipment, and gratefully accepted support from relatives.

Our choice of destination came as a bit of a surprise--both to ourselves and to those we told about it--but after consulting a well-traveled relative and watching several episodes of Rick Steves, we concluded that the the two countries would provide exactly the kind of trip we wanted to experience: a mix of nature and culture, mountains and seashore, caves and church spires, art and architecture, and both deep and recent history. I also had a family connection--a grandfather who came from Slovenia--which added a bit of a personal journey element to the trip for me.

Slovenia felt in many ways like coming home for me--the spectacular Julian alps were not that far different than my own Colorado Rockies and the forested lowlands were every bit as green as Maine. Beyond those similarities, it was a completely different world, as clean, organized, and well-run as an imaginary land. I never saw a pothole, nor hardly a scrap of litter. Every house was charmingly built, in white or cream or pale green or yellow stucco, with a red-tiled roof, wide overhangs, and second-story balconies with decorative railings adorned with geraniums. And the houses stood in neat little villages, rather than sprawling over every inch of countryside the way they do here.The capital city, Ljubljana, is a fairyland of beautifully designed art-nouveau-style buildings, where even in the outskirts, modern skyscrapers and old communist-era apartment blocks manage to look attractive. Even industrial yards and junk piles behind farmsteads looked tidy. The people we met were friendly and kind, and the cake was amazing.

In Croatia we moved into a much more populous, much more Mediterranean land, where long arm of history exerted a greater influence and left a far less orderly imprint on the ground. Over two weeks, we wound our way up and down the stone staircases of ancient, fortified cities on the coast, visiting Roman ruins and Gothic churches. The white-hot sun beat down out of a white-blue sky and bounced back on us from the limestone walls and earth, and we sought relief in Euro-style lemonade (water with pure lemon juice; no sugar, little ice) and the Adriatic, its water a mystical aqua-blue, where, with little in the way of beaches and even less in tides, you swim off of rocks that you wouldn't dream of going near in Maine for fear of being dashed to death by the waves.

What struck me on my only previous trip to Europe--ten days in Ireland ten years ago--was the way the Medieval walls and Georgian townhouses and modern buildings were woven together into a tapestry that demonstrated that time is a continuum and we are part of history. This continuum was even more pronounced in Croatia, where in Pula a Roman amphitheater still stands among the walls of a modern, industrial city, in Split, where tourists throng through the cobbled streets of a town built by Medieval refugees within the abandoned walls of a Roman emperor's retirement palace, and in countless other towns along the Adriatic coast, where magnets and shot glasses and linen dresses are hawked from the tiny first-floor shops of the towering stone or stucco buildings from which, long ago, merchants sold bread or flax, indulgences or tinctures.

It's not hard to imagine the same steep, narrow, stone-paved streets, now thronged with tourists, instead surging with donkeys, unwashed humans, rotting produce, and waste. Here in the US we tend to keep history separate from life. We might visit Gettysburg or the Liberty Bell, but rarely is our past so starkly woven into our present. And what a history--the outer wall of Dubrovnik, the Grič tunnel of Zagreb, the forts and fortifications, all play the same role, a (often vain) attempt to protect the place, and the people, from invaders. This part of the world sits at a crossroads: between west and east, north and south. It's been battled over by the Illyrians, the Romans, the Slavs, the Ottomans, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Venetians, among others, and, most recently, by the individual republics that made up the former Yugoslavia. You can see the signs of this latest war in the rebuilt tile roofs of Dubrovnik, where armies of Serbia and Montenegro aimed for the country's cultural history (and, across the border in Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the rebuilt Old Bridge in Mostar, where Croatian army did the same).

Despite this long, hard history, which you might expect to leave the residents bitter or careworn, we met many delightful people throughout our journey: the proprietor of the tourist farm where we stayed our first four days in Slovenia and his family; a boy who guided us to our apartment in Koper; another young man who did the same in Zagreb; the hosts of several of our apartments who went out of their way to make our stay comfortable; many of the waiters in the restaurants we ate in (most of whom took great delight in joking with us and in our attempts at "hello" and "thank you"--which was the extent of our language acquisition); the woman behind the desk at the modern art museum in Dubrovnik, with whom I bonded over being a mother of three sons, including twins.

When it came time to prepare to come home, I didn't want to leave. I was exhausted by the heat and the many miles of stone stairs we climbed every day, and I really wouldn't have minded eating a few vegetables and drinking a tall glass of ice-cold well water. But I wasn't ready to break up the family party--M would be staying behind to travel for a few additional weeks, and, after we got home, the twins would be back to their self-contained ways. I was enjoying us all being together. I also wasn't ready to give up having new and interesting places to go and sights to see every day. Somebody said the sign of a successful vacation is when you're ready to go home at the end, but for me I think it's never wanting it to end.

Glassels

As I've done readings and interviews for Uphill Both Ways over the last few months, one question has come up again and again: what's your next big adventure? And I've been chagrined to not have an answer. Since our big hike in 2016, the boys and I went on a road trip to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and points in between. I went on a solo road trip to Colorado last fall. We traveled as a family to Washington, DC, the summer before the pandemic. And I went to Mexico with friends last winter. We've also gone on our sort-of-annual camping trip, with a couple of missed years due to work and pandemic. But none of those have been adventure adventures like hiking 500 miles through Colorado. And since the book came out in March, I haven't had even a little adventure, other than a weekend of car camping, on my agenda.

I needed to do something to remedy that situation, stat, so I began thinking about a hiking trip along the coast in Downeast Maine, a trip we'd planned to take the fall after we returned from the Colorado Trail, until both the weather and the children threatened mutiny. I thought it might be my opportunity to give solo hiking a try, for the first time in 25 years. But as I thought about our gear--tents and stoves designed for groups, not singles--and the fact that I'd have to carry all my water, I decided to invite C along, even though I swore I'd never backpack with him again after our Colorado Trail hike (if you've read the book, you'll know why).

He agreed, and we gathered gear and food for two days and hit the road very early in the morning on the last Friday in July. C loaded his pack with most of the essentials, and with the weight I saved by not carrying anything vital, I brought along two books, a journal kit, a camera, binoculars, and an extra sleep pad for lounging on the beach. After a very long drive, we made the hot, sweaty hike in. On the five miles of up-and-down, rooty, rocky, brushy trail, with six liters of water on my back, I was very, very grateful to not also be carrying our 6-pound, five(ish)-person tent or our not-so-light Whisper-Lite stove.

Once we arrived at our campsite, the apltly named Fairy Head, we spent the afternoon and all the next day moving from rock to rock as we lounged on the beach, cooking, snacking, reading, birdwatching, and swimming, I was again very, very grateful to have company. I'm very good at entertaining myself, but it was nice to have someone to chat with and share camp chores with. Although we wished we'd brought a mini deck of cards, we caught up on about 20 years' worth of conversation. C, for his part, redeemed himself, and he only got a little bit antsy. As a remedy, I proposed a walk to the headland (and ended up slipping on seaweed and acquiring a collection of big, purple bruises). 

Our beach was made up of pebbles ranging in size from marble to potato. Most of them were a slaty gray, but several had blue, red, pink, or green in them, and they glistened like gems when wet from the outgoing tide. I was reminded of the book Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane, where he quotes The Meaning of Liffby Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, which MacFarlane describes as "a genius catalogue of nonce words. . . in which British place names are used as nouns for the 'hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all recognize, but for which no word exists.'" One example he quotes is " 'Glassel (n.): A seaside pebble which was shiny and interesting when wet, and which now is a lump of rock, but which children nevertheless insist on filling their suitcases with after a holiday.' "

C filled his pockets with glassels, several of which now sit on our coffee table. They've been polished enough by eons of being washed and tumbled by the sea that they are a bit more interesting than lumps of rock, and even the least shiny ones are silent reminders of a our adventure.

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Solitude

C and the boys left Monday morning for a nine-day hiking adventure along the Appalachian Trail through the 100-Mile Wilderness and to the top of Mount Katahdin. They left at just the right time--I was in danger of smothering my children, both literally (with a pillow) and figuratively (with excessive mothering).

I have written before, and I'm sure I'll write it again, that when my kids were tiny babies, my rapture for them was matched only by my desire to escape them. I'm beset by similar equal and opposite feelings for them again now that they're 16 and 20. Like most families, we've been blessed and cursed with an excess of togetherness over the past year and a half, thanks to the closures and constraints placed on schools and workplaces. While in many ways that's been wonderful and a true gift, I also find myself somethings thinking, Please grow up and go away to college, soon.

At the same time I'm afflicted with a maudlin nostalgia for their childhood years and a near-panic that we didn't do all the things we should have done when they were young, before they were grumpy and resistant to everything, and the things we did do, we might not have done just right. So it was time--for us all to get some space from each other, for them to go off and climb mountains and do some male bonding, and for me to revel in a little peace and quiet at home, alone, for the first time in as long as I can remember.

And, oh, have I been reveling. Nothing remarkable has taken place, nothing out of the ordinary, but the number of times I need to clean the kitchen daily has been cut down by a factor of ten, and it's been so blissfully quiet that I can actually hear myself think. Despite the quiet, I haven't accomplished quite as much writing as I imagined I would. It's funny how my job could take me away from home for ten to eighteen hours a day, but now I can't seem to wring more than three or four hours of writing out of a single day. Part of it is distraction, both of the electronic variety and the analog--the world outside is so dreamily magical right now: fledgling broad-winged hawks, clearwing hummingbird moths, painted lady butterflies, mushrooms of every color and shape. I need to get out there and check on things on a regular basis. Part of it is stamina--I'm not used to focusing for such a long time and my brain gets tired. And part of it is some combination of anxiety that I'm working on the wrong project and that I don't deserve to have this time, and doubt that whatever I work on will amount to anything.

To avoid burrowing too deeply into my own head and to quell those doubts and anxious feelings, I take myself to water every day--swimming the length of a pond three times a week with a friend, paddling solo on another pond followed by Indian takeout, a small poolside gathering with friends. I'm conscious of not wanting to give away too much of my time while also avoiding making myself crazy with my own company. The fleeting nature of this period of solitude also bears on my mind--they'll all be home on Tuesday, and then I'll have to recalibrate again, find ways to work amid the chaos.

In the meantime, I'm being gentle with myself. I won't write a novel before the week is out, but I did write a couple of scenes and figured out some character stuff (important things, like the narrator's name!). I also finished reviewing a manuscript I put on hold back in November and rewrote one final essay for it. I'm balancing butt-in-chair time with play-outside time (and lie-on-the-bed-reading-a-book time). The one thing I haven't made time for so far is doze-in-hammock time, which I plan to rectify this weekend!

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Big News

November is always a long month for me, what with the short days, downed leaves, and impending work season. This year it has been especially long, thanks to the agonizing wait for the election and the agonizing wait for the vote count and the ongoing agonizing wait for some grownup somewhere to step in and do something about the Keystone Kop Koup attempt. And now the holiday season is approaching, and it's hard to know what to do about it during a pandemic, when every holiday since the beginning of time has revolved around meeting other people's expectations.

If it were up to me, I'd spend Thanksgiving on the couch, watching movies and eating macaroni and cheese. It's not my favorite holiday: I don't care for the food, I don't care for obligatory gratitude, and I don't care for the whitewashed version of our genocidal relationship with the indigenous peoples of this land. However, C and the boys want turkey and all the trimmings (these being the same boys who for the first half dozen or so years of their lives ate nothing from the Thanksgiving table except cranberry sauce), so we'll have turkey and all the trimmings. At least I won't have to clean the house.

And this year, despite the pandemic and the political uncertainty (will we or won't we trade in democracy for a fumbling and inept authoritarian state?), I have much to be grateful for: my and my family's health, my oldest son close to home at a college that takes the pandemic seriously (and can afford to do something about it), and (drum roll, please) now the very real possibility that the book I've spent the last four years writing and rewriting will see the light of day! I'm very happy to share with you that yesterday I signed a contract with Bison Books, the trade imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, for publication of Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail.

It will still be a couple of years before you can hold the book in your hands (start planning your 2022 holiday shopping now), and between now and then there will be many rounds of editing and I'll no doubt take a few turns through the emotional blender. But for now I'm elated! Not even November can dampen my spirits. And hopefully by the time it's published, it will again be safe to breathe each other's aerosolized spit particles and we can celebrate in person at the biggest book release party you've ever seen!

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A HIke Down Memory Trail

I've been listening to this podcast episode on Backpacker Radio over the last few days (it's taking days because it's really extraordinarily long for a podcast—2 hours—and my commute is only 25 minutes) about a family who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail with four kids aged 11-17. It's made me nostalgic for our Colorado Trail hike of nearly four (four!!!) years ago. Yeah, we took along 3/4 the number of kids, and yeah, we only hiked 1/5 the distance, but there's still so much I can relate to in their discussion. It's also made me (even more) antsy to get The Book out there. I think people are interested in these kinds of stories. Now I just need to find the publisher who's interested.

Climb All Your Mountains

The first obstacle nearly defeats me, a granite boulder big as a truck, an iron rung at the level of my chest, another above my head and to the left, and no obvious way to hoist myself up and over. I last hiked this trail 25 years and 50 pounds ago, at a time when nothing seemed too difficult. Will this rock, five minutes into our hike, be my Waterloo? But I can't admit defeat—this hike, after all, was my idea, a trail two teenage boys can't possibly complain about, all sheer cliffs and vertical ascent. It's the reason we woke at five this morning and, against all precedent, left the house at 6:15. I still want to believe nothing is too difficult. If I can't surmount this rock, today, when can I?

I remember how stone works, how there's always a crack or a crevice or a crystal for hands and feet to find purchase, and I make it easily over. From there we clamber over boulders the size of household appliances, shimmy beneath slabs of rock balanced over cave-like crevices, side-step along angled ledges, and climb walls of rock on iron ladders bolted to smooth granite faces. The boys scramble ahead and wait, scramble ahead and wait.

I know we're nearing the top when I smell the familiar dog-poop odor of fall viburnum leaves, a scent that clings to my memories of the peaks in this small range. Atop one last ladder, we pop out onto an undulating plain of smooth granite and short, twisted pine trees. Near the cairn, we sit in the lee of the wind, snack on cheese, crackers, and figs, and watch a schooner with terra-cotta sails ply the waters around the islands, a scene that might be two hundred years old.

The boys bound over the granite as we head down the north ridge of the mountain. We lose them when we reach the trees, and they make their own way back to the car, taking the short spur and walking back along the road. C and I parallel the mountain, climbing up and down and up and down endless staircases of stone, eventually rejoining the morning's trail above the boulder field. Muscles that have been out of use for untold years quiver as I lower myself from rock to rock, exhausted from the morning's toil.

We find the twins at the parking lot, and they tease us over our choice of trail: "It only took us seven minutes to get here. It took you guys an hour!"

"That's okay," I say, "Nobody's lost or hurt, and we had a nice, four-hour hike."

"To be fair," E says, "It was an hour of hiking and three hours waiting for you."

Yes, to be fair, I made my very slow way up the mountain, but at least I made it.

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The Making of a Book, Part I

(Note: I don't have a catchy catch-all for today's blog. Thinkin' Thursday? Thorough Thursday? It's all too much of a stretch.)

The Book in its rawest form.

I always find it interesting to hear about an author's process in writing a book, so I thought I'd share my own process, up to the current point, with great hopes that there will later be a Part II post full of good news about advances, publication, promotion, sales, royalties, awards, fame, and fortune (or at least publication, please).

I dreamed up the idea for my book—which, if you're joining me here for the first time, is an account of my family's journey on the Colorado Trail in 2016, with side trips into my husband's and my first hike on the same trail 20 years earlier, ruminations about what's changed over the intervening two decades, and romps through natural and environmental history—in 2014, as I was nearing completion of my MFA program (in fiction, so totally unrelated). I recently ran across an old journal in which I'd outlined and started on an intro to a book about that first CT hike, so writing about the trail was not a new idea for me (or for C, who had actually made good progress on a manuscript many years ago).

In the two years between coming up with the idea and actually going on the hike, I wrote a book proposal and sent it to what I thought would be a likely publisher. I never heard back, and later learned the publisher went under, so it may not have been my proposal that was at fault (and lucky I did not sign on with them before their demise!). I also typed up the notes from our 1996 hike and attempted to do some background research on some of the environmental issues we'd come across. This while also working full time, parenting full time, attempting to talk my husband into going on the hike, and planning, purchasing, and packing for the hike.

While on the trail, I wrote in my journal every single evening, even when I was really, really tired. Sometimes all I could muster was bullet points, but I got down the important elements of the day. I didn't have time to write during the day, so I had to hold everything I wanted to remember in my head until bedtime, which overall worked out okay, though I could have done better with dialogue and other human interactions.

We returned home at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. The twins went back to school on Monday, I dropped M off at a friend's house (he didn't start school until Wednesday), went back-to-school shopping, then sat at a sandwich shop and started typing up my journals. I didn't just straight transcribe, but added to my notes from memory and converted close past tense (this morning we did…) to present tense. I also went through all my photos to trigger memories and add to the physical descriptions and watched all of C's vlogs to round it all out. Then I dropped chunks of my journal from the first hike into the manuscript at the appropriate geographic locations.

This took until early November, at which time I was all prepped to start researching, with a stack of library books at the ready. And then the next day the election happened, and I went into a tailspin. What was the point of writing a book about hiking in the mountains when the world was about to come to an end? Time I should have spent reading and writing about dams and wildfires instead turned into time spent reading news articles and writing letters to my useless senator. The holidays came amidst this chaos, and very little book progress happened over those two months.

In January, I committed to writing some short pieces about the hike, in an attempt to get my head back in the right space to work on the book, help flesh out themes, and possibly earn a little cash. At the same time, I started The Artist's Way, which as you may know involves writing three longhand "morning pages" every day. I kept on reading my research books, and at some point found myself sitting down at odd times of day to write out sections of the book, long-hand, three pages at a time. Coincidence or synchronicity?

At some point amid all of this, I had printed out my manuscript, such as it was, opened a new document, and began to type it in again, re-running all the words through my eyes, brain, and fingers and reshaping it as I went. Whenever I came to an area I needed to research, I'd look up articles, order books, and spend a few days or weeks reading about the subject before writing what I needed to and moving on.

At first I though I was just really bad at research, but after listening to people on podcasts talk about their research process, I realized that this is just how it works—you read a book or two and five or ten articles in order to write a couple of paragraphs. It's a long slog and I got impatient with the stop-and-start nature of this method, so when I came to a place that needed research, I put in a placeholder and kept going with the writing. I still looked up the articles and ordered the books, and I devoted a chunk of time each day to research, but I didn't let it slow down the flow of the narrative.

By the end of the summer, I had almost gotten through rewriting the whole narrative, with only one or two chapters remaining, and quite a lot of holes where I still needed to do research. At this point, I printed it all out again, bought a selection of colored pens, and took myself away for a glorious week at an artist colony, where I went through the whole manuscript, marking it up with different colors for different changes needed (orange=grammar/spelling; green=more/better description; blue=research; teal=write better), and I filled seven notebook pages with lists of things I needed to research. I also wrote an epilogue (which I have since thrown out, but it was a good exercise anyway).

It took the rest of fall, winter, and spring to fill in all those research gaps. By the end of June I had a completed manuscript printed out and sent it in the mail to a friend to do a first read-through. I revised it based on her comments and sent it to another friend later that summer and revised it again. Then I went to an agent-querying workshop, wrote a query letter, and sent it off to around ten agents, but got no bites. Then I got a job and forgot about the whole thing for a while. When spring came, I though of more revisions I wanted to make, and did those (most significantly lopping off the first chapter, strengthening threads of certain themes, and working on the characterization of the other people in the book). I also decided to skip the agent step (for now anyway) and appeal directly to publishers, which led to me writing a book proposal this summer.

And that is how we got to where we are now, and how one little book took three whole years to write.

Summer Round-Up

I thought summer wouldn't go by so fast this year, since we didn't take a three- (or eight-) week road (or hiking) trip in the middle of it, but, if anything, I think it went faster. After the first day of "Hey Mom, hey Mom, hey Mom," I knew I had to sign E and Z up for a LOT of camps, which I did, which was nice for me (and probably for them, too, but they won't admit it), but it also resulted in a lot of the same kind of rushing around to get places on time that characterizes the rest of the year and is, I believe, a huge contributor to making time fly by. But, this summer was not ALL rushing around. Since my last, 4th-of-July update, we took a weekend trip to Vermont (for a funeral and some college tours, but also a bit of sight-seeing and hanging out in swimming pools; I have no photo evidence of that trip, however).

We also went to the beach.



And I, without kids, did some bird-watching.



And saw Maine's peculuar red-billed tropic bird.



And some bonus seals.



We went to the beach again.



And we went on a 5-day camping trip.


With 4 other families, for a total of 21 people, 12 of them being males under the age of 18 (five of those being males 13 years old).



While there, we climbed a small mountain.



Then we went to the beach again.



And we went hiking again.





And, finally, we celebrated the nominal (though not calendrical and, this year, not even weather-wise) last day of summer by taking a gorgeous boat ride among harbors and islands and coves.



This summer may have gone by too fast, and it may not have been marked by an epic vacation, but it was still pretty darn nice.

Become a Trail Naturalist

I have a piece in the latest issue of TrailGroove Magazine called "Becoming a Trail Naturalist," in which I give tips for hikers and backpackers to incorporate a study of natural history into their trips. Please check it out, and while you're there, explore the rest of the magazine and let the lovely, lush photography inspire you to hit the trail.

Thru-Hiking en Famille

The last (for now) of the short pieces I've been writing over the last year about our Colorado Trail hike last summer has just been published in TrailGroove Magazine, Issue #35. My piece, Thru-Hiking en Famille is less of a how-to than a how-we-did, but if you're looking looking for tips on getting your family out on the trail, or are just curious about the nitty gritty details of our trek, or if you just want to see more pictures of Colorado's scenery, please check it out!

Writing the Colorado Trail

The whole (purported) purpose of quitting my job and hiking the Colorado Trail last summer was to write a book about the hike, a hike on the same trail C and I took 20 years ago, and the social and environmental changes that took place in the mountains during those two decades (there were many ulterior motives as well, but we don't need to get into those here).



Writing a book is a HUGE undertaking. Not only do I have to take journal notes from two separate six- to nine-week hikes and turn them into a coherent narrative, I have to research, digest, and summarize in an engaging way such things as water rights and reclamation, fire suppression, mining, climate change, public lands, grazing, recreation, and about two billion years of plate tectonics, uplift, and erosion. No problem. The writing and research are moving forward apace now, but I did take a little bit of a break from about November into February. I think it was a necessary period of senescence, letting the thoughts and experiences marinate a bit before turning to the monumental task of information-gathering. But I was not entirely idle during that time: I worked on several shorter pieces, some of which pertain to the hiking of the trail, two of which went live last week:

On Parent.co, "How Being a Mom Helped Me Hike 500 Miles," a short list of ways that my experience of being a mom made hiking the trail easier than it had been 20 years ago.

At Mothers Always Write, "Five Hundred Miles," an essay about sharing the trail experience with my teenage son.

If you're game, please check them out and let me know what you think. And if you do the social media thing, I'd love it if you shared either or both on Facebook or Twitter.

Andy Goldsworthy-Inspired Hike

On Monday (a dubious holiday here in the US), we took a consolation (for Curry and Me, who had been looking forward to our cancelled backpacking trip) slash punishment (for Milo, Zephyr, and Emmet, who are against leaving the house for any reason, ever, especially if it involves physical activity and/or nature) hike on one of our favorite local trails.




Autumn was in its full glory, with blue skies, high winds, and magical leaves falling through the air.

The previous night, we'd watched the documentary Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, and some of us were inspired to make our own Goldsworthy-esque installations.










It was fun getting visceral and hands-on in nature, rather than just walking and taking pictures.






Goldsworthy's ephemeral art makes a strong statement about impermanence and non-attachment, which I find is also the message of this season, as the leaves turn beautiful, vibrant colors only to fall away, leaving brown, lifeless branches. It's always good to be reminded to live in the now.

Colorado Trail Redux ~ Part II

In today's post, I answer some of the most common questions I get about our trip.

How far did you hike?

The official length of the Colorado Trail is 486.4 miles. But there is a keyhole in the middle, where you can choose one of two routes. We took the Collegiate West route, which is 5.1 miles longer than the East, making our official trail distance 489.5 miles. This does not include any extra off-trail or in-town miles.

Where does the CT begin and end?
The CT starts in Denver and ends in Durango (or vice-versa) and follows a roughly S-shaped route (you can see a map of it here).

How long did it take you to hike it?It took us 42 days, or exactly six weeks, to hike the trail.

How many miles did you average per day?
Averaged over the 42 days, we hiked 11.7 miles per day. If you don't count the two days on which we hiked no on-trail miles (one "zero" day, which was a complete rest day and one day on which we attempted to hike Mt. Elbert), we averaged 12.2 miles per day. We also had several "nearo" (i.e. near-zero) days, on which we hiked a anywhere from 2 1/2 to 9 miles on trail before or after going into town.

What is the greatest distance you hiked in a day?
Our biggest mileage day was 18.8 miles. It was supposed to be a 19-mile day, but I developed shin splints halfway through and was perfectly happy to skip those last two-tenths of a mile. We toyed with hiking a 20, but it never worked out.

What did you eat?
Ugh. Probably the worst part of the trip was the food. We decided to go stove-less to save weight (and no, cooking over a fire was not an option, because it's dirty, takes a lot of time, we didn't travel with a saw or axe, and there were fire restrictions—meaning no building fires outside of official Forest Service fire rings—throughout most if not all of our hiking area), and so we had cold reconstituted oatmeal for breakfast and cold reconstituted beans and rice, couscous, and ramen noodles for dinner. Everyone liked lunch—cheese, crackers, nut butter, instant hummus, and candy—the best. We also had various bars and trail mix for snacks. I chose the most nutritionally dense items I could find—putting freeze-dried fruit, chia seeds, protein powder, and milk powder in the oatmeal and freeze dried veggies in dinner, and avoiding sugar and other empty calories. My kids (and husband) dreamed of and talked about food—greasy, salty, sugary, junky food—nonstop, and bought and ate as much of the same as they could every time we went to town. I longed for salad and grilled cheese sandwiches.


How did you get this food?
We were very lucky to have our own personal Trail Angels, in the form of my parents, who met us at two campgrounds, in tricky resupply areas, and brought us not only our box of dried food, but also coolers full of cold drinks, fried chicken, homemade cookies, and other delights. They also met us at the end of the trail, with our car. Two of my aunts happened to be vacationing in another tricky resupply area and brought us our food box, took us out to lunch, and let us use their shower. The other three times, we hitchhiked into the nearest town and picked up our resupply box at the post office (and, no, people aren't any better at picking up hitchhikers when three of them are adorable, helpless children).




Did you all share one tent?
Yes we did. You can read more about our tent here. It was very, very cozy. The zippers started to fail about halfway through, C and Z accidentally put the center pole right though the nylon one day (I did a beautiful fix with nylon tape, if I don't say so myself). Otherwise, I think it held up well and did a really good job keeping out the weather (and we did not get struck by lightning that time we camped on top of a mesa and the lighting was coming down all around us).

How was the weather?
The day we started hiking it was 98 degrees F. By the last week, we woke up with 1/4 inch of ice in our water bottles every morning. We had several days of pretty steady rain in about the middle of the trip, and I was immensely grateful that it came at a time when most of our hiking was below tree line (the week before we had at least one major pass to climb every day and spent much of the time in the alpine zone; not only would rain have made this section more difficult and dangerous, it would have obscured the amazing vistas). In short, the weather was Colorado.



What was the best part of the trip?
The views. The wildflowers. Walking through the landscape and noticing the communities of trees and plants shift with changes in altitude, direction of slope, proximity to water. Seeing my kids take on responsibility and challenges and be independent. Watching my kids be silly and childish. Observing them getting along, telling stories, making jokes, inventing games, listing their dream foods. Snuggling together in the tent at night, reading Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. Noticing the way time slows down when we have nothing to do but place one foot in front of the other and nowhere to go but the next campsite.

What was the worst part of the trip?The hiking. No, not really the hiking, since that's what it was all about, but I'm not gonna lie to you, the hiking was really, really hard. I am a slow hiker to begin with, and I was sore, tired, and out of breath much of the time. Developing near-crippling shin splints halfway through. Being blamed for anything that didn't live up to anyone's expectations (but getting no credit for the fabulous stuff), since I was the instigator and planner of the whole trip. Not having enough time to simply sit and take in and enjoy the places we say. Not enough time to read or draw or write or cloud-collect, or daydream. Too many people. The mountains were crawling with them—backpackers, day hikers, trail runners, mountain bikers, hunters. Any sense of solitude that once existed in these so-called wildernesses is no more. Would you do it again?Yes. No. I don't know. Some days I thought "I am never backpacking again." Other days, I daydreamed about my next trail—finish the rest of the Colorado section of the Continental Divide Trail (the CT and CDT overlap for ~300 miles) with the whole family, hike the Arizona Trail all by myself. I don't think I'll go back and hike the CT again when I'm 62, but you never know...