The 4th of July

As a patriotic American with some great memories from the 4th of July, I look forward to it quite a bit each year. In future years, it will have the added significance of marking the anniversary of the day that I found my cancer had come back. Around 1:35 pm on July 4, 2010, I was sitting on the couch in my living room. As I ran my fingers along the skin below my ear and right at the end of the jaw, I felt a lump that was maybe the size of a large grape. I had no doubt what it was. We had some visitors over, but I rather abruptly stood up and left to go find my dad in his office at school where he was doing some work. As he has done throughout this whole process, he took care of the practical component of the problem and managed to get me an appointment at Huntsman for 2 days later, which is particularly impressive since they were closed on the 5th in observance of the 4th.

I'm particularly grateful that I've had him to take care of logistics since it has meant that I can deal with the unwelcome news in the best way I know how: escaping to the mountains. My brother Eli and I had hiked part way up White Pine earlier that summer before I had to turn around to make it to work, but we had seen enough that I knew I wanted to go back there to camp. We made a quick stop at REI so that I could grab a second sleeping bag for Eli and then started hiking around 6:30. We found a great spot a couple miles in:



We had a delicious dinner of Annie's Mac and Cheese and then crawled into my beautiful new tent and read by headlamp for a while. It really was a lovely spot and a good way to escape from a tough day.

The next morning we got up bright and early at 10:30 or so and had some oatmeal before heading up to the real attraction: White Pine Lake. It took us a while to get there, partially because we weren't as well equipped as we could have been to handle the snowfield we had to cross:



Incidentally, the ridge line that you can see in the background is the Little Cottonwood/Big Cottonwood ridge. In particular, the two high points on it right next to each other on the left side are the Broads Fork Twins, which I would climb 4 weeks later with Matt. One of the coolest parts of hiking all over the Wasatch was really getting a since of how it all fits together. I've always loved those mountains, but now I really know them much better.

The lake itself was pretty awesome. There was still a lot of snow and ice in it even though we were there on July 5th:



We headed down by a different route than we took up. That was a painful lesson in bushwhacking and common sense. One lesson that I relearned: if you're not sure how far you've actually traveled, you almost certainly haven't gone as far as you think. Anyway, my poor navigation skills led to this bit of bushwhacking:

I should point out that Eli and I had just emerged from the thick brush directly behind him. He was a total trooper about it which made me feel much better about getting into that mess. That said, he was glad to get back to the trail, which we intercepted not too far below where we had camped the night before:

All said and done, it was a great escape to one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, and it really couldn't have been better timed. Thanks to Eli for coming along with me and being such a trooper.