Adventuring Home One Day Off At A Time
Home. Where is it? Is it a feeling or place? How do you really know when you’re there?
These are questions that we all ask ourselves during our lives and at few points we try to answer them. Home, for me, is where the grass is the greenest. Home can be in a person or a place. Ideally, I think we all want to wind up finding home in a place and in a person. As of right now, for me, I have a home in a lot of different places. I feel at home when I’m alone listening to the acoustic version of “Rain King” by the Counting Crows. I feel at home when I’m at the shop and I manage to sneak into the background and watch everyone interacting as a community and not as individuals; the flow of conversations being carried by currents of laughter and waves of smiles. I feel at home at the beach and in the mountains. This year more than ever, I feel at home when I’ve earned it.
One of my favorite things to do when getting the top of a mountain, whether it’s running, hiking, climbing, or some kind of combination, is looking back over my shoulder of where I’ve come from. The miles of travel turn quickly into memories. Sure, sometimes it’s bittersweet because you realize you’re only half way, but that’s part of earning the adventure.
Each week the shop is closed on Monday, so from Sunday at 4 PM to Tuesday at 11 AM I try my best to not work. I go as far as trying to not even talk or think about the shop. That doesn’t really ever happen, but I give it a go. Over the last year and a half my running has positively changed from an easy and effective form of therapy to a means of maintaining a good level of fitness for any adventure I can find from Sunday at 4 PM to Tuesday at 11 AM.
This past Sunday, I found myself with a wonderful friend staring happily into a hazy horizon from a lookout perched on a mountain top just below 7,000 ft. above sea level. Even though the rising smoke from the surrounding forest fires effortlessly marred the curve of the earth, it was spectacular. I felt at home as the cool air from the Queest-Alb glacier blew through the open windows. I felt at home studying the faint outline of the Puget Sound sleeping below the silhouette of the Olympic Mountains. I felt at home standing in the middle of the lookout as I peered through one window pane and saw Mount Baker and Mount Shuksan sharing a friendly horizon.
The lookout was originally built in 1931 by the US Forest Service as a fire lookout was manned for just over ten years and now it’s maintained by the Everett Mountaineers. You can stay the night, but this adventure was just an eleven hour day trip. It’s a long commute, one that includes a one-way eight-and-a-half mile mountain bike ride and a seven mile hike with several thousand feet of elevation gain, but it would be dreamy to call this lookout home for a summer.
