Hiking with Hottie
Perhaps it started when I was five and my father took me camping in Sequoia. It was a chance to feel like a man when I was a young a boy. My dad and I slept in the tent like men do and we ate the same food and I rode in the front seat on the drive there and back. As a teen my passion for the outdoors was further fueled when I started rock climbing and backpacking with my friends. Again, it was a chance to be with my friends without parents yet we were doing adult things.
The satisfaction of learning and having the skills that enabled me to be independent in the wilderness and was empowering to me as a teenager and young adult. Making decisions and exercising judgment was a lesson in being a grownup. Being able to say, “It looks too sketchy right now. Let’s turn around,” while disappointing, was also rewarding because it allowed us to demonstrate, if only to ourselves, that we could make an adult decision.
I gained skills using a map and compass. The stoves we had back there were a cross between a deep fat fryer and a bomb in terms of danger and flame size. Our packs were big, heavy and left us raw and bruised. We wore boots that weighed so much that unless you had a pair of the behemoths you would not believe me.
I loved it. We all did.
The idea of being in a place that had not been overrun by man was awesome in the years after Robert Redford made Jeremiah Johnson as real as life itself. The high Sierra was federally protected long before the timber in the western foothills ran out. With the trails in the Sierra having been built by the CCC during the depression, the joke was that they had used Egyptians for the design and construction of the trails.
Our little group went hiking, climbing and backcountry skiing during the late seventies and well into the eighties. With no internet, we had to earn our knowledge via hard work, experience and mistakes.
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