• AT HAND: Deuce Lee, The Big Dipper, Gravy
• LOCATION: Colorado Trail/Central Divide Trail, CO
• DATES: July 12 – 16, 2026
• STATS: 5 days/4 nights, 50 miles – 9,649 feet EG

There’s false safety in a climate-controlled, smartly appointed rumpus room. You can lean back in your gaming chair, headset cocked jauntily over your ears, shades drawn tightly on the light from beyond your refuge, immersed in soothing, backlit fiction and secure in consequence-free anonymity. Avoiding the real world is ever easier, and the lines between genuine and fictitious grow harder to distinguish with every mumbling vibration of haptic feedback against your thigh. We obediently sacrifice privacy for convenience, experience for security, contemplation for entertainment, authenticity for empty recognition. Engaging with the outside world is just too scary and unpredictable, carbon monoxide handshakes and bruises that won’t heal. We hoard certainty and control in our personal kingdoms, retracting reflexively into our carapaces like the socially stunted D students that we all are.

What are we really afraid of? A stubbed toe? Freeway driving? School shooters? Existential guilt? The unknowable hereafter? We attribute our anxiety to external factors: fate, the influence of bad actors, karmic debt, unpredictable weather, bum luck, the wrath of God…but it’s all in our heads, wrapped up in idealized, unrealized versions of ourselves that can’t be attained by staring at a screen, conducting relationships remotely or otherwise living by proxy. We have to get out there, breathe deep, maybe mix it up with some randos. Otherwise, the panic that ripples right below the surface will construct our lives for us choice by frantic choice until we have no more decisions left to make.

“The only thing to fear, is fear itself yourself.”

Of consequence: Mountaintop flames in the distance at twilight; bushwhacking for water; moose wading quietly through an alpine pond before sunrise; high elevation yoyoing; vistas galore; surprise alpaca caravan traffic jam; smoke walking; waterfall white noise; afternoon rain imprisonment; trainspotting; the higher the socks, the downer the fool.