An End and a Beginning

There's a lot I can say about this summer, but if there is one thing that sums it up more than anything else, it was that this summer was absolutely AMAZING. I loved the people I met this summer, whether it was the people I worked with or the crews that I guided. You all made my summer great.

Unfortunately, it was so great I did not get enough time to finish all the blogs I wanted: my last couple of trips, another on the new Sandy Bridges Program center, one on Leave No Trace. Hopefully I'll get around to writing them eventually, but for the moment I have a new adventure: studying abroad in Germany.

Thank you everyone for the fantastic summer.

To end, I have this poem from Sam Cook:

“Up North is a certain way the wind feels on your face and the way an old wool shirt feels on your back. It’s the peace that comes over you when you sit down to read one of your old trip journals, or the anticipation that bubbles inside when you start sorting through your tackle box in the early spring.

Up north is the smell of the Duluth pack hanging in your basement and the sound of pots clinking across the lake. It’s a raindrop clinging to a pine needle and the dancing light of a campfire on the faces of friends.

Up north is a lone set of cross-country ski tracks across a wilderness lake and wood smoke rising from a cabin chimney. It’s bunchberries in June, blueberries in July and wild rice in September.

Each of us has an up north. It’s a time and place far from the here and now. It’s a map on the wall, a dream in the making, a tugging at one’s soul. For those who feel the tug, who make the dream happen, who put the map in the packsack and go, the world is never quite the same again.

We have been Up North. And part of us always will be.”

-Sam Cook as quoted from his book "Up North."