Last week I wrote about the trip my husband and I took to Yosemite, an amazing hike through the High Sierras for five days. During that time we were completely out of touch with the rest of the world and focused on the path in front of us, nothing else.
When we left Yosemite after our trip, we drove down Highway 99, which is a dry, industrial contrast to wildly natural Yosemite and fresh, clean Coronado. During the drive, I listed the things I would miss most in the mountains, and I thought I’d share them with you here. I want to remember these things so I incorporate them into my daily life here in Coronado, and so that the quiet simplicity of the mountains is never far away.
1) I loved doing something completely new. I have gone on long hikes and short hikes, and I have camped before, but never like we did in the High Sierras. On this trip, we hiked independently each day for about 10 miles, but we spent each night in an established camp (one of them 99 years old) with a delicious dinner and breakfast served to us. We entered a world where new people — the seasoned High Sierra hikers, the mule wranglers, the camp managers — have unique status in the totem pole of importance, and we were on the bottom rung with our lack of experience.
Over the course of the week, though, we made friends, memorized our map, adjusted to the routine, and found a place of our own. By the end of the trip, we were part of the mule wranglers’ pre-dinner cocktail party (a circle of plastic chairs around a box of wine her mule packed into the backcountry) and were giving new campers extensive advice about the trails ahead of them that we had just traveled. As we hiked out of the wilderness and into Yosemite Valley, we noticed the changes in people that passed us, the way day hikers didn’t even stop to say hello or meet our eyes, and we missed the quiet of the backcountry and the camaraderie we’d experienced there.
2) Learning the names of things. My husband refused to start hiking until he purchased a naturalist’s guide to the plants and animals in the Sierras. I rolled my eyes at the extra weight in his pack, but he had a thing or two to teach me. Every time he spotted a bird, he used his binoculars and then the guide to identify it. Pretty soon I was getting into the swing of it, and I started using the guide myself to identify trees, flowers, and berries. By the end of the hike, I could recognize a lot of the plants around me, and it made the woods seem friendly in a way they had never seemed before. It made me want to buy a Southern California nature guide to use around Coronado!
3) Being unplugged. At home in Coronado, I look at my phone more often than I should, and spend far too long browsing Facebook, clearing out my email inbox, and checking Instagram. After our first day of hiking, though, we had no cell phone service or internet for five days. I knew I would find it refreshing, but I had no idea how much I would regret reentering the world of cell phone service. Even now, two weeks later, I have eased back into email and Facebook slowly, and I have hardly looked at Instagram. For me, Instagram has become less and less of a community and more of a stream of staged photographs about what their photographer ate, wore, or saw. I realized it was time for me to take a step back so I can use and enjoy social media for the right reasons.
4) Doing good things for my body all day long. Every day, we walked. We walked up, we walked down. Our days were filled with the steady rhythm of our hiking sticks and our feet hitting the ground: tap, step, tap, step, tap, step. When we ate, we ate well and heartily of real food and fresh water. I loved the singularity of purpose in our lives, and the good things we were doing for our bodies all day long. I returned to Coronado profoundly inspired by this, and also thrilled to feel so energetic after descending from a week at 10,000 feet to sea level! In the past two weeks, I’ve starting running with a friend, working my comfort level up from three miles at a time to five (and maybe one day ten!). I’ve also visited a Coronado gym with free childcare, and I may join it to continue doing good things for my body on a regular basis.
5) Realizing what I miss most about my home life in Coronado. Of course, when you’re out there in the woods, you miss a few things about home, no matter how much fun you’re having. After five days sleeping in a sheet sack between borrowed blankets, and after five nights of needing to wear a down jacket to dinner in September, I missed more than a few things about Coronado. Most of all I appreciated the similarities between Coronado and Yosemite, though, like the community of people who love where they live and work, who long to make it a better place while still preserving its beauty and charm, and who love it for all that it is — with its rich history, beautiful present, and promising future.
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“Coronado Living” is a weekly column written by one of eCoronado.com’s staff writers, Becca Garber. She writes about choosing simplicity and practicing hospitality with her family at home in Coronado. You can read more of her writing on her blog.
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Becca Garber
Staff Writer
eCoronado.com
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