A Perfect Day

When we tell hiking stories, most often they’re tales of woe featuring bad weather, errors in judgement, fiascos both navigational and interpersonal. When the suffering is over, and if everyone survived, this kind of story can be a lot of fun. Obviously I’m not above a tale of hiking disaster myself. But what’s not as common is the story of a day everything went right, when the weather was good and the trails were smooth and life put some happy surprises in your path. But those days can be just as transformative, albeit in smaller, quieter ways.

On July 26th, Mica and I awoke at Horseshoe Canyon shelter, an easy day’s hike south of Monson. No one else was there when we arrived and no one showed up overnight, so we had the place to ourselves. The morning was cool, it had been almost chilly overnight, but the sun was already shining greenly through the leaves and casting bright little pools of gold on the forest floor. As usual Mica got out of bed an hour after me and was ready to go a half hour before me. I’m not one to race through the morning routine.

We stopped at the river a quarter mile down the trail, just below a rushing cascade, to collect water and wash some socks and bandanas. I sat on a rock and squeezed water through my filter while I watched blobs of foam dance a stately quadrille in an eddy. Dragonflies patrolled near shore, occasionally landing on my knees. I felt like they accepted me as part of the landscape, and I was weirdly touched.

Mid-morning, we were hiking quietly along a section of trail lined with large flat rocks to ease our way through a muddy patch. I had been lost in silent thought for an hour, zoned out on the meditation of moving, when Mica suddenly said: “I’m having such a good time!” 

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