For many of you, I am “that person”. Ya know, the one who when you see a special of someone on TV climbing a rock, traveling for an undetermined amount of time with a very small bag, or dying somewhere out in the middle of nowhere with no one to know what actually happened, you think of me. Well you see, I have those same people in my life. Recently, I got to do a 12 hour hike with a few of them.
Here’s the rundown on how awesome these people are; I was not able to meet Jaime before we became roommate because she was working/traveling in Thailand for the third time, Mike and Jaime had a lot to talk about, since Mike has recently returned from a 3 month trip to Thailand which included whitewater kayaking and staying in a Buddhist monastery, among many other adventures. I have only known his girlfriend, Diana, for two years in which time she has traveled to at least 4 other countries, (according to her brother, she doesn’t stay still for very long). Wendi has recently started exploring the world via whitewater rivers and has already been on a 20+ day trip of the Grand Canyon. Her boyfriend, Chris, spends every moment he can spare exploring off trail, in areas not many other people will go. Then there is Nat. From what I gather, he has traveled with little to no itinerary across countless countries, including thoroughly exploring the extents of the US by means of hitchhiking.
So that is the crew, and we spent an entire day in place called, “the Enchantments”… you could say it was a pretty magical experience… and substantially painful the last 3 miles. The trail had been closed the previous 2 weekends due to fire, and it was probably going to be one of the last weekends to hike the it in reasonable weather conditions. So naturally, most of Seattle was on the 18 mile trail with us. This proved to be detrimental when scaling Aasgard Pass (yeah, I know, Aasgard sounds epic).
About halfway up the pass, we heard yelling. There was a constant line of people all the way up the pass, so the yelling began to jumped down the line, and eventually we heard what all the fuss was about. “ROCK!!” As I looked up there were trees obstructing my view of what was to come, but I knew I did not want to stay put. There’s a problem here though, because when you start boulder hopping you can’t really look anywhere except the next boulder. After a few jumps, I looked up and realized my line of trajectory was heading straight for the “rock” emerging from the brush (which was actually a 200 lb boulder). Once I stopped, I had a nice 10 foot cushion between me and the boulder. No one got substantially hurt, and Jaime started a new hashtag, #neardeathbyfallingboulder (use it if you get the chance). So, you could call it a success!
The remainder of the hike was relatively uneventful (praise God) but absolutely beautiful!
for my friends who are moms 