What do you do?

"But what do you DO?" Asks our faithful reader Mrs Amanda Burkhart of Helena Montana.  Well, we hike of course!  But she knows this.  What does a day look like?  How do we keep from getting bored out of our minds?  I know these questions have been burning in the hearts of so many of you- worry no more! I'll clear things up here.

We wake up between 5 and 6:30.  From this time is takes us, consistently, about 1.5 hours to get out of camp. We start with putting our gear away and end with eating breakfast.   Our breakfasts vary greatly.  We've had cereal and milk, oatmeal, power bars, powdered donuts, or honey buns but one is a constant.  Stick Coffee (Stick coffee = Korean for Instant Coffee). We have stick coffee every morning.   After breakfast we hit the trail and hike. That first hour is, for me, my favorite.  I'm awake, my legs and feet feel refreshed and i'm feeling positive.  I love the first hours of hiking every day.   We hike for a few hours and then we stop to eat. After that, we hike for a few more hours and then we stop to eat. After that we hike for a few more hours and stop to eat again. This last time is usually when we've gotten to the end of our day.  We often stop at shelters to sleep but if we know it will be cold we set up a tent anyway.   Once we arrive in camp we break the work into 2 things.  One of us will set up our gear for the night (usually me) and one of us will cook dinner (usually Jamie).  We do this because when we get into camp we are starving.  We waste no time.  After dinner,  in very short order we floss, brush, hang the food and get in our sleeping bags to go to bed. 

But what do we do when we're hiking?  We sing.  We switch back and forth singing different songs but we have some old standbys that we always come back to.  I keep going back to "Bobby McGee" by Janis Joplin and Jamie goes back to "Devil Went Down to Georgia."  But our favorite time killer is story-hour.  We both read different books in the evening and then spend a portion of the next day retelling the details of what we read.  Jamie has read Contact, The Hobbit,  Sherlock Holmes, and currently a Sci-fi book, Ragamuffins.  I'm reading the Game of Thrones Series.  We're on book 5.  We've both gotten pretty good at remembering detail and dialogue.  If we have both read a lot, we'll switch back and forth between us and listen to each story alternately.  The problem, however, is that we don't often read a lot.   Often we're lucky to get through one chapter in an evening before we fall asleep.  In that case we switch to retelling movies.  Jamie is much better at remembering movies so this responsibility usually falls to him.  He's retold Batman (all of them), Starwars (all of them), The Avengers, and sometimes a random TV show episode he remembers.   As a joint effort we've retold, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buffy-Once More With Feeling, The Princess Bride.  We love musicals because it affords the second of our time killers-singing.

But mostly we just walk.  If the hills are steep, talking goes right out the window.   If it's raining or windy, it's impossible to hear. From breaking camp in the  morning to setting up camp in the evening is usually 10 hours.  It can be hard to fill that time with chit-chat.   I have to be careful.  I tend to dwell. I've written, in my head, a million nasty letters.  I'll remember and think about stupid and angering things that people have said.   I write (again, in my head) scathing comments to racist or sexist things I've seen on Facebook, in log journals, on bumper stickers.  Or, sometimes I'll just make up situations that I can get angry over.  When I find myself doing this,  I take a deep breath and let out an audible sigh.  Then I'll start talking or singing to myself.  It's impossible for my mind to have an internal and external conversation so this usually solves the problem.   And usually, within about 5 minutes we'll come to a beautiful vista, a strange new bug,  a gorgeous newly fallen fall leaf.  There are a thousand things on the trail to keep you entertained.   You just need to see things in the right light.