Night 2: Hiking with People You Don't Know

Night 2/25

I am back from my NOLS Alumni Canyoneering trip.

It is always a little anxiety inducing to spend a day traveling to a destination where you meet 11 other people with whom you will spend the next 7 days. At times your life (and sometimes your hair, more on that later) will literally be in their hands. You really don't know how you are all going to get along or if it is going to be any fun. You show up floating on hope and knowing no matter what you are about to spend some time in a beautiful place...what's the worst that can happen?

I'm happy I don't know.

On NOLS Alumni trips you gather and then are divided into groups by the instructors/leaders. Your group is sent to a pile of gear and food, and you are expected to share this load and the chores for the trip. Then drive to the trailhead. And walk. Or ski. Or...? As a group, with people you have just met, you divide the food and gear on the spot, and expect that all that gear and food make it to the trailhead.

For this trip we met in Grand Junction, CO and drove to the Gravel Crossings trailhead the first day. It's on Cedar Mesa in Utah, south of Moab. It was well into the afternoon when we got there. But we only had plans to hike about half a mile or so and then make camp for the night. We camped on a shelf of slick rock as we would do every night on this trip, but this vantage had a view of the occasional car or truck speeding down the mostly empty highway. It's a funny thing to go on a backcountry trip and spend a night hearing cars, but it also isn't that uncommon. First and last days of hikes are often spent within striking distance of a trailhead and meant to give you an easy time getting to or from whereever you need to be in the near future. I have a friend who tells me he can hear the traffic on I-5 from the slopes of Mt. Shasta. The upper slopes, the kind you sleep on when you are trying to get to the top. Of the 14,000' mountain.

It is a generous gift to have to only hike half a mile, not much up hill on a first day out. I feel like I have spent so many first days going up, and up, and up, and up. And when it seems like night will fall before you get to your destination, it sometimes does.

But, we got to our camp site, went over the particulars: how to set up our shelters, how to use the stove, ideas for that night's menu...and got down to business.

It can be difficult to sleep the first night or two, or sometimes at all outside. This night had the added problem of an almost full moon coming out a few hours into darkness. The bonus was that I did not need a headlamp for my 2:00a.m. pee. Nobody needs to fall off a ledge at 2:00a.m. The bummer was that falling back asleep at 2:03a.m. was not as easy as it had been at 10:00p.m.

As first days of hiking with people you don't know go, the hiking was great. The meal prep was problematic. But how do you put 3 women, with all their assorted and varied food issues together in a cook group and expect that to go smoothly? I think you don't. But that is part of the opportunity of trips like this: learn more about yourself and how you interact with other people, and how to handle the problems in an appropriate way that also solves the problem. This is one of those things I know I need to work on. And I got to. With success? I feel like those two women are friends, so...yes? I don't know. What did I learn? I'm still not sure. Ready to try again next time it comes up. Yes.