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​I Just Like Standing On Summits​

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My wife, Hilary, was essentially handing me a gift, and I didn’t know what to do with it: She was taking our toddler, Jay, to the Oregon coast for a week, and I was invited to not join them.

Meaning: I had a full week to do anything I wanted, for the first time since Jay was born 14 months prior. No toddler wrangling, no constant vigilance to make sure he didn’t fall off something, or stick his finger in something, or eat something indigestible. I could stay up late, sleep in, eat takeout, whatever. OR: I could go on a big adventure somewhere, like I used to do: I could fly (by myself!) somewhere for a few days, or take a road trip, or pack a backpack and spend five days in the backcountry. What should I do?

One of my favorite memes of the past five years is the “We Have That At Home” meme. It started as someone revisiting their childhood memory of asking their mother to take them to McDonald’s, only to have their mother say, “We have food at home.” And then the meme of course evolved from there, in incredibly diverse ways.

I’d lived in Missoula for about five years of my adult life in total (over two stints), and I still felt like I hadn’t seen that much of it—grad school, then Covid, then pregnancy, and a new baby kept me close to town (or that’s what I told myself).

And then with an entire week off to go exploring, I got choice paralysis, and finally just decided to stay home. Luckily, we have trails at home.

I picked out some mountains, some close, some a little farther away, some legit rocky peaks and some just really steep tall grassy summits, and asked some friends to join me for different ones. I shot some video every day, put it on a hard drive, and thought “I’ll make sense of this someday.”

When I finally sat down with all the clips, I found myself digging way back in my own history to figure out a through line. As you’ll see in the video, it goes up:

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