With what el Maya has described as the doldrums, the wife and I hit the road for the first time in years I went out on a backpacking trip. in deciding what the destination would be we scoured the US, looking for something special. Northeastern, to much phish, California too much dead, Southern Appalachia, too much slide guitar. We decided on the wind river range of the Rocky Mountains in the Bridger-Teton national wilderness area. One of the highest rated hiking areas in the country, it did not disappoint at all. With some of the highest vertical gain from the valleys of any mountain range in the world, the Winds are just one of the greatest places that I have ever been to. It’s where the pros go. Which was evident when these two flatlanders stopped into one of the local outfitters for some supplies and we were immediately found out as ‘flatlanders’. Not from these parts, well in these parts they got bears. So we bought the $40 cans of bear mace x2, and oh yeah they can’t go on a plane. So, you ship them back ground or what else? We didn’t know what else, so we just gave them away. This stuff is not really the caliber of stuff you would use on the subway for a mugger. It shot out a fog of brown mist of what could have only been the ground up peppers from a Guatemalan insane asylum, care of Chief Wiggum. Use that stuff in a confined area and you will lay waste to the entire room. it’s like an aerosol M-16. I got the smallest amount you can imagine in my eye and it burned for ten minutes, direct hit will almost incapacitate a polar bear. And a polar bear is almost double the size of anything in Wyoming so we should be ok. Well I didn’t need it for the cub that was the cutest 60lb. ball on fur, I ever saw. But his mama may have had different plans. I told her to keep her family where they were and we would be on our way. We were, and the mama bear just ate her porridge and left us alone. That scared the shit out of us.

Five days wandering in the woods with a backpack that I can literally fit my whole self into. Really, I was bored one day and put myself in the bag and zipped it up. Two days driving around Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park.