The day I almost died

These are some older pictures, but I haven't shared it yet besides with the people who went with me. I made it to almost the top of a mountain in two days!

I wanted some adventure that weekend. In fact I was going to ask Kevin, Mr. Hardcore-in-shape, if he wanted to go for an extended hike in the afternoon. I am eating lunch when he comes over to me and asks if I'm up for a hiking overnight stay! How fantastic is this! I immediately agree and go to my room to pack and get ready.


After some delays, where Kevin took the longest to pack, we stopped to pick up a giant block of cheddar cheese from the cafeteria, numerous protein (and in my case, candy) bars, some supper for the road, along with four of those giant hiking backbacks filled to the top (with, in my case, much borrowed gear), we are off.

To a completely different destination than we had originally planned.
Plan A involved a couple-hour hike, riding a cable car across a river to hike another hour to cabins for the night.

Plan B involved us monkeying across the cable that held the car because we couldn't get keys to said cable car. In the dark, because we had taken too much time trying to find the keys.

Plan C involved us climbing up an entire mountain in the dark, aided by flashlights and headlamps, setting up tents (in what we discovered was a thin layer of snow!), and getting up to climb to the top the next day.


The overestimation of my physical ability pulled us down like the heavy bag on my back. Hannah offered to 'trade packs with me', which was generous considering she had no pack at the moment. She and Leah had split a bag so at any one point one person was burden-free. Even when I was unburdened, I was only keeping up to everyone else.

Leah also traded packs with me once, and Kevin constantly stopped to wait for me. After five hours of hiking in the dark and cycling the weightless pack throughout our group (with a bias towards me), we made it above the snow line.

This is at a time of year when there was no snow, so we ascended the seasons as we climbed the mountains.

This photo is what I woke up to the next morning. We took a few photos, ate breakfast, packed one bag to carry lunch and extra layers, and hit the trail again.

We hiked above the level of the lake, into what became alpine meadowland. They were so picturesque, slightly reminiscent of some scene in the European mountains. Maybe Heidi was around the bend.


Being a city child, of course I hadn't eaten enough at breakfast, so every step I took drained me of an already low reserve of energy. Sarah, sticking to my painfully slow pace, urged me to take it step by step, and encouraged me with the promise of food once we reached the top.


There we had a picnic. My mood was elevated, my body was reenergized, and I knew that there would be no more climbing up. I clambered down the mountain like a nimble little mountain goat - well not quite, but I can say I survived the Garibaldi Hike.

And end to it all (chaos or life?)

How much chaos is there in the world? Why??


Today, I see it that chaos is the result of mixing the important matters with the trivialities, giving them equal weight, confusing our minds and our souls.


In photography, a general rule is to keep the background simple, so that the viewer's eye can focus on the subject. Another rule is good composition: put your subject at one third of the way from the top/bottom and two sides. Repeating patterns lead the eye and are soothing, as nature is all about repeating patterns.


We don't live our lives on purpose, it seems. We don't take the time to examine them. We pile the events of our lives the way I pile items in my room because my mother doesn't want them throughout the house. We don't spend time building our lives. We don't have the chance to choose ourselves, to fix the flaws in the foundation on which we build our lives.


Again, in photography, framing is important: finding a natural frame in the picture makes it pop out, much the way a picture frame keeps a picture or work of art from being lost in the vast expanse of the wall on which it is hanging.

sea turtle in hawaiian waters

Everything in life worth experiencing has frames, or limits, of some kind: pieces of music have a start and an end, and only have a certain range; artists and hair stylists have only a certain amount of fine dexterity, time, and tools; paramedics, doctors, and nurses have a limited amount of money, ability, and time. Even our lives themselves: we start at birth and only live until we die. Immortality would not make us better, because with enough time, we could all paint Sistine Chapels, carve Davids, give all our hair for cancer, climb mount Everest if we wanted to. But they are special because the people who did them did so in a few years, rather than in a few centuries. What humans do with limits is the most beautiful thing about us. Wonderful, heartbreaking, and terrible, perhaps, but definitely the most beautiful.


Today I see how it could all work. If we stood back and framed our lives with care, the way a photographer carefully composes a shot--taking into consideration the light and the colors and the contrast, choosing which details to leave out, how to better feature the subject, the point of interest--our lives, our world would be so much better.