is this thing on?

Back in...I don’t know...a long time ago...we invited Brian’s brother out to go on a 4-day backpacking trek with us at the end of August and he accepted our invitation. I hadn’t backpacked since high school (and even then, it was always to a hut or to a place where my youth pastor’s wife could drive to with the food- so I’ve never needed to carry everything you need for life) and Brian had never backpacked, so we were pretty excited. Come August, we realized we were very ill-prepared for such a trek and began to be intentional about hiking every Saturday and Sunday, including a test-run backpacking overnighter to make sure A) we had all the gear we needed, and B) to make sure we could carry heavy packs up a hill. Family visits, our intentional hiking, and our backpacking test-run resulted in a very “Epic” August and one that made me fall in love with Colorado all over again. I will say though, living the YOLO life in your 30’s is exhausting. August, Week 1 My parents c...

We spent the good part of a week in Port Angeles, WA for a Stoess family reunion and I was really excited to be somewhere I had never been before. I was also really excited to be close to Olympic National Park. We love National Parks so we planned to hike, a lot. Unfortunately, the weather decided that I should not see any mountains and that instead, I needed to see fog. Lots of fog. I’m still not sure I believe you that there are mountains there, BUT we made the most of it and hiked over 20 miles in 2.5 days and I felt superhuman hiking at minimal altitude. The fog redeemed itself by making things pretty and also by living up to how that area is described in the Twilight books.  I know Twilight is so 3 years ago to many people, but not to me and, I learned not to the town of Forks either. They are certainly still milking it. Every sign for every business seemed to reference it. Things like, “Buy Twilight Firewood here”. I’m a pretty big fan but I even found it annoying. I u...