Backpacking the Trinity Alps: Gotta Keep God Happy!

God made summer so we can backpack. He doesn’t care where. Neither do I.

Keeping God happy!

I’ve packed to Lassen Volcanic Park, The Lost Coast, Emigrant Wilderness, Pacific Crest Trail, Swiss Alps, Marble Mountains, Canyon Creek and to other places for which I’ve forgotten the names but not the faces.

I plan to go again this summer if I can fasten the lap belt around my still tender tummy.

Gotta keep God happy!

Below is an excerpt from the book I am writing.  The selection explains why I’m drawn to backpacking like an in-breath is drawn to lungs.

Maybe it will make you want to keep God happy too!

Trinity Alps Backpack Trip…  

In what poets refer to as the dead of night, poets who obviously have never slept beside an alpine lake in the high country during a warm summer night, I got up and stepped out of the tent.  I gazed skyward, looking into the purple-black heavens in absolute awe, breathing out slowly, imperceptibly.

Stars hung low, big, bright, too bright to even twinkle, more like a glow.  Silent stars tinkling their songs over the millenniums like sirens, luring, rendering one powerless yet powerful at the same time.  I called softly to awaken my husband, luring him out to see the starlit sky.

He stepped into the night and scanned the sky with the practiced eye of a pilot and the heart of a mystic.  “Look,” he whispered, then nodded.  “The Big Dipper.”

There it was.  Not only huge in the sky but closer than I have ever seen it, dipping perfectly into the outline of the black-inked mountaintops, cradled like a babe held tenderly in arms, resting before resuming its eternal journey in the sky.  It was in that moment that I saw what I had never seen before. 

The smooth black water of the lake transformed into sky.  The Big Dipper, along with hundreds of other stars, glowed golden white in the watery sky.  A perfect mirror image of the lights rose from the bottom of the liquid blackness, mysteriously dancing.  I stood frozen in time, gazing into the bigness of nature that man has gazed into since the beginning of man, the Bigness that fills man with a sense of being a part of something greater than himself. There I stood, with ancient man, with every man, filling myself, feeling myself.  More than myself.  Alive.

Twilight

Last year I did not know if I would live to backpack again. I didn’t really mind the loss. I had spent enough time in those mountains to have made them my own. I realized that when we lose something we love, even though we may be heartbroken, we can find solace if we have loved enough. It’s when we haven’t loved enough that we can’t let go.

What do you do in your life that makes you feel alive?

How can you make God happy?

Maybe they are both the same question–and answer!

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