Hiking 2019

I don't talk all that much about hiking anymore.  Part of that is because I have a blog specifically dedicated to hiking (http://lonestarhiker.blogspot.com/) but even there I haven't talked about it much lately either.  For a number of reasons, my yearly hiking trips have been a bit scarce the last two years; 2017 I actually went to the West Elks about a year ago, near Gunnison Colorado.  Late September, actually.  Fall color hadn't quite peaked, but I had beautiful weather rather than being cold and wet, as I could have been.  All in all, I can hardly complain at all about that hike, except that it was a bit drier than I expected, and as is sometimes my wont, I bit off more than I was really in the mood to chew on because hiking all day and seeing new things all the time sounds great when I'm in the planning stage, but less so when I'm actually there.  2018 was a bust year for hiking, because we went to Hawaii and I went rafting on the New River Gorge with a bunch of teenagers and stuff.  Not that I don't like doing that, because I did, but those two trips alone consumed three weeks of vacation, and when some family commitments and other things got mixed in, that left me without a spare week to go out west and hike.  This has actually been harder for me than I thought.  I recently ditched Facebook (although i haven't canceled my account like I probably should; I just got rid of the app on my phone and haven't logged on from a PC in weeks) and my blogging and online activity in general has slowed, oh, for years, really.  But being completely unplugged for a while is wonderful.

For that matter, I don't really like people in person all that much sometimes either.  Although I've taught myself, mostly, to be outgoing and social, I do so because it's a learned skill, not because it comes naturally to me.  And, frankly, I don't always like it very much.  I find I usually do better by myself.  It's one of the things that I like most about hiking; the solitude and the quiet, quite honestly.  But I also love the outdoors, especially the Western outdoors.  Although I usually tell people, only partially joking, that I'm a native Texan; the son of the exact same type of stock that settled Texas in the first place, but I'm probably also formed somewhat by events of the last few generations.  When my family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, it was still at a time when people gathered physically, so my great-grandfather actually picked up from his home in the backwoods of the American South and moved to the frontier (although it was very rapidly becoming not much like a frontier anymore by that time.)  Southerners, especially the descendants of the backwoods Southerners (as opposed to the plantation Southerners) are my people, and I feel most at home culturally with them, but the West and Southwest is my true home, even though I find many of the people there, especially in the Utah centered "Mormon West" to be little more than Yankees in a better setting.  They have all of the foibles associated with the Yankees of more traditional Yankee territory in New England—nannying busybodies and community-scale totalitarians, too focused on "right-thinking" policing and virtue-signaling and with only a dim understanding of the concept of individual sovereignty.  Luckily, the more rural folks have an environment that mitigates this to a great extent, but in the urban and suburban communities... ugh.  My son and his wife, who is also a solid, multi-generational Texan herself, and so he gets her and vice versa much better than someone from another cultural tradition ever would, have lived in a college town in the West for a couple of years now, and they're still shocked sometimes by the busybodyish nature of life there, and their earlier enchantment with many aspects of the community has faded somewhat due to the incompatible cultural personality of the locals.  Sigh.

So, I find that the West and Southwest feels like home to me.  Wandering around the small towns, hiking, camping, sightseeing, I feel like I've been a stranger my whole life to everywhere else I've been, in some ways.  Until I start interacting beyond a certain threshold with the people.  There, I feel like the smaller town in Texas I grew up with and similar places in backwoods Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, etc.—y'know, the places my actual ancestors come from—I feel at home with those people, if not necessarily in love with the place.  And even that is, of course, under siege, because so many people live in those states now, especially in the larger cities, who have no cultural or genetic connection to the place, so they don't behave like the true locals.  They're colonizers and strangers, even if they've been there for decades.

Of course, where I live now, I'm surrounded by Yankee scenery and actual Yankees all the time, so it's lose/lose in some ways except when I'm talking to my better friends, many of whom, if they aren't the descendants of Appalachian Borderers themselves like me, are at least iconoclast in their personality type.  But there is no ideal place for me to live; I can either pick the people I get along with the best and hope that that doesn't change, or I can pick the scenery and environment that I prefer and take second-best rural Westerners as neighbors rather than Southerners.

Here's a couple of pictures from my last hike in the West Elks.

Here's a few pictures I took while spending the day at Palo Duro Canyon.  Maybe parts of West Texas would be ideal for me, or at least they would have been a generation or two ago before they got swarmed by migrants and colonizers from south of the border.

And the trip I took with my 17 year old three years ago.  When he was still actually not quite 14, and therefore not invited to participate in High Adventure, even though he was between his 8th grade and freshmen years.  At first that kinda ticked me off, but I got over it, in part because it gave me the excuse to take him with me on a solo trip anyway.

Of course, when I started typing this, I wasn't intending to ramble on about why I don't like people, what people specifically I don't like, and how I get away from them so I can come back ready to deal with them again for another several months, or whatever.  I was going to talk about what I hope to do in 2019 and maybe 2020.

I do have a few family commitments that will require some vacation time; a cruise to the Virgin Islands and elsewhere in the Caribbean, I think, is on the itinerary for around Spring Break time (or maybe it's a little later, early in the summer.  I can't remember.)  There will be requests on my time for High Adventure, since I'm in the Stake YM's presidency, although the nature of how we're doing it this year means that I might not be required to go, unless my own son goes.  (My youngest is a Type I diabetic, and although he's gotten pretty good at managing his blood sugar on his own now, my wife still can't handle the thought of him going on a trip like that without my direct supervision.  And he probably does still need it.  He's barely 15, after all.)  But it's not clear (yet) that we'll do that or won't.  This may be influenced also by the fact that a good friend of mine has been trying to reserve some time to go backpacking at Isle Royale with me, and my wife is even interested in going(!) and we've nailed down this summer as the time when this will finally happen.

All in all, that books at least ¾ of my vacation for the year, so my intention is to reserve the rest of it for a hiking trip.  But what to do?  And when?  Summers are always kind of tough because there's so many other things going on, but of course, it's the best time (only time, you could say, if you extend summer into at latest early October) to see the mountains.  But I also love the desert, which gives me the spring and fall, and maybe even the winter to some degree, depending on which desert I'm willing to go visit.  Fall also looks possibly rough; my oldest son still at home will have just graduated high school, will turn 18, and will leave on his mission service for the Church.  My wife will no doubt feel sad and lonely about him going.  Although I did take a backpacking trip shortly after my oldest son left for this same service in 2014, in retrospect, maybe it wasn't the best time to go.

I think my options boil down to maybe three possibilities:

1. I could go for my birthday in January or early February to West Texas and see either Guadalupe National Park or Big Bend National Park a lot better than I did in the past.  I could use my folks' house in Lubbock as a kind of base from which to strike out, although I don't really need a base, and Lubbock is hardly close to Big Bend, and not really all that close to the Guadalupe Mountains either (7 hours vs 6 hours driving.)  I also have a brother who lives in Phoenix; if I flew to Phoenix and got him or his wife to drop me off at Saguaro National Park or the Supes or something, I could make a trip out of that too.
2. I need to check on the timing of our cruise, but no matter what it is, I can probably work out some kind of Colorado Plateau trip in the spring and/or early summer.  The Needles district of Canyonlands National park beckons, for instance, or a more thorough exploration of Arches (although ugh, the people.)  Capital Reef National Park is a quiet one, although a bit farther, and a bit closer and many hours less driving gets me Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction.  Of course, there's also plenty of opportunities on BLM land or elsewhere in the same general vicinity of southern Utah and/or western Colorado from as far north as Dinosaur National Monument, to well into New Mexico and Arizona.  And as a potential spoiler, it would be fun (and closer) to do something very different from either, and explore the Black Hills, Badlands or Theodore Roosevelt National Parks too during this same time frame (April/May, probably.)
3. August could potentially be viable too, which gives me all of the Rockies options.  There are so many; I'm not sure which ones I'd favor at this point.  Leading contenders at this point in time include a return to different areas of the Uintas, the West Elks of Colorado, the Sneffels area, and the Wind Rivers