Noah and I spent seven days in Salt Creek Canyon and Horse Canyon, where Fremont Indian rock art and ruins abound. Although we explored ancient villages and visited famous geological formations, we did not see another hiker. This is truly the best season to explore the canyons: water, ice, and snow were plentiful, and the radiant sun warmed the air to around 50 degrees in the afternoon.
My first hiking trip with my mother! We spent five days in the Adirondacks just as the trees were turning (absolutely beautiful), climbed Marcy and a couple others (Mom's first ascent of Marcy,quite the adventure!), rented canoes for a day and set speed records across Lake Flower.
Not as much as I'd hoped for, a bit of walking in El Yunque with my parents. A weekend camping trip with Heidi and her friends was an interesting experience: camping on a field of mud, hiking through the jungle to deserted waterfalls, cooking out on the beach, getting very hungry and very dehydrated and very lost in the process...Later on another road trip with Heidi, Will, and Dargan included might swimming in the phosphorescent bay at La Parguera, clambering through mangroves (with rather intimidating jellyfish) off Cabo Rojo, and getting extremely sunburnt on Culebra.
I had never been to the desert or the canyons before, so a week in Bryce, Escalante, and Capitol Reef was amazing--especially climbing out of crack-in-the-wall in the snow! What was that folk song that went "sand in my coffee, sand in my tea, when I die they're gonna bury me beneath that shifting, drifting, Texas sand..."? Well, the first two lines are equally applicable to Utah...
Another trip with Noah, 10 days of idyllic late summer weather spent running about inappropriately named lakes in various states of undress...next time I won't bring quite so much damn gorp...
I've spent an embarrassing amount of time trudging through the high peaks, considering I've only climbed 31 of the 46 peaks...but I've had plenty of fun getting lost bushwhacking, falling into various rivers, moving boulders through knee deep mud, battling black flies (and losing), and eating far too much raw oatmeal with peanut butter. Next time it rains fourteen days straight in the Adirondack summer, you can bet that was my two week vacation...