Taking Community from the Trail into Everyday Lives

My daughter Katharine’s feet protested with four blisters and many aches. My water filter needed repair multiple times. Some climbs were tough and long, testing our stamina and patience. And long downhills pounded our legs and feet. We arrived at campsites at the end of most days tired, “hangry”, and sore.

Katharine and I experienced this adversity on our week-long trek on the John Muir Trail in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains this past August. The beauty and inspiration of nature (as I wrote about in A Week in the High Sierra: Connecting to Nature and Leaving No Trace in the Climate Era) helped get us through these challenges, but so did the human community on the trail that we did not expect to find. Continue reading in Age of Awareness…