Bryan's 1st Guest Appearance

It has been an interesting week for us here on the trail. We have had a lot of highs and lows, both in regards to elevation and emotions. The greatest of these came on Thursday. We spent that day hiking through the Raetea forest. This was very much unlike any of the forest or hiking that we had done in Minnesota or anywhere else. This hike included twin summits of 540 meters, which may not sound that high in the grand scheme of things, but I assure you it is, when you have big packs and boots that are caked in mud. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we arrived at these points of high elevation we had to be in the lows of the horribly muddy and thick, with vines and brush valleys.

I'm sure you will or have read about it from Rachel's entry, but I want to express how impressed I was with her performance. Although this part of the trail was completed fuming with rage, dripping wet from condensation (and some tears) and covered to the hip in mud, I can honestly say I would not have wanted to be there with anyone else. We didn't just beat those summits, Rachel, namely destroyed them. And on of them twice due to some confusion with the arrows and which set it was that we needed to follow.

I was afraid however that she was going to fall off one of the summits when she was ahead of me in thick brush that you could not see anything infront of yourself, though to the sides there were amazing views over the edges that I wish that would could have captured on film, but as it turns out our camera is substantially less than reliable. However, she did not fall off the edge, she was just too angry to care to linger for even a moment.

Because we are usually set up and ready to go to bed at about 7 o'clock every night, we have been reading a lot. and it was here that I found a quote that describes somewhat the feelings that I have experienced when we reach a check point, or finish a particularly difficult section of the trail. Our journey is not nearly as perilous as the journey that Ernest Shackleton had just experienced, and I hope that we are never in mortal danger as many times that he was but I feel that it reflects the sentiment that I want to have on this adventure. But I also hope that you all will have an opportunity to share in this kind of feeling at some point in time, or will be able to look back at a time that falls into this kind of experience.

That was all except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the
Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with
well found ship, full equipment and high hopes. That was all of
tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had "suffered
starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory,
grown bigger in the bigness of the whole." We had seen God in
his splendors, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached
the naked soul of man.
-Sir Ernest Shackleton, South: the Endurance Exposition

Bryan