I’m WILD and I don’t give a s***
I was the most present I have ever been in my entire life on the day that I forgot my ex-girlfriend’s birthday.
At the beginning of the summer several months ago a couple of friends and I started planning our last “hoorah” before school started. We were going to backpack in to one of the most beautiful places in the Northwest: The Three Sisters Wilderness.

Travel Oregon ought to have listed this place as the eighth wonder of Oregon, but they didn’t. Nestled in the Deschutes and Willamette National Forest, and a stone’s throw away from Bend, one of the fastest growing cites in the state, the Three Sisters shoot up into the sky with enough magnificent glory to make even the most seasoned traveller’s heart beat faster than hummingbird.
So one month before the onslaught of responsibility and classes began, we left Newberg, OR in a flurry of wrinkled clothes, Quaker granola bars, and half-full Nalgenes. Since this was in late July, we weren’t encouraged by lingering smell of smoke in the air as we descended off the east side of Mt. Hood on Highway 26. That was until we flattened out on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation and had this at our backs:

After a quick pee in the grass with no cover from the highway, we ended up in Bend late that night. I went to bed like a child on Christmas Eve: tossing over in delirium thinking about the trails ahead, too excited to sleep because I had all of my outdoor toys and clothes packed into my Gregory Baltoro 65L ready for adventure.
I broke up with my girlfriend of 1.5 years about 2 months before I would set off into the wilderness with my pals. I would imagine that most of us who have ever experienced a breakup know that space and time are the greatest healers. I was hardly concerned with space and time during drive to the trailhead — juxtaposed in their infinite paradox, they halted altogether. I was in a land of peace.
There’s something deeply nostalgic about forgetting the time and date in the outdoors. I’m the kind of person who usually pays no attention to that sort of thing anyway (I don’t wear a watch and leave my phone at home whenever I can), but also a deeply sentimental person whether I like it or not. I tell people that I often don’t have a choice of what I remember; maybe its a subconscious gathering of material. In fact, I even remember my sixth-grade girlfriend’s birthday (I’m 20, so it wasn’t that long ago, but still). I guess I had imagined that the same would be true under all circumstances.
Before realizing what I would actually accomplish on day 2 of our 3-day trip, I rolled out of my sleeping bag to this:

At 5:45am I scrambled up Broken Hand ridge with my Jetboil, cranberry oatmeal, and coffee to catch the sunrise and some quiet time. The howling wind at that hour made it impossible to hear anything other than whistling over my ears. Everyone else in the group was passed out in their tents after a night full of these:

In a flash of guts and instinct, I said to my buddy Michael after I came down, “you wanna summit South Sister today?” It was nearing 11am when I suggested the idea, and everyone in the group looked at me as if I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. Most people tend to side-eye me like that when I start acting crazy. Rightly so, it was going to be close to a 20 mile day if we did.
We got to our next campsite about 5 miles from No Name Lake, by then it was 1:45pm, 85 degrees and warming. I was starting to feel sore from the hike in the day before.
Michael, his twin brother Wesley, and I left half the group behind at a lakeside camp and decided to send it.
It took us 7 hours to hike 8 miles. Thank God the waning summer solstice was still on our side, otherwise we would have been glissading in the dark. At 10,358 feet, I was the highest I had ever physically been on my own two feet. I was purely elated.

It wasn’t until I got home a day later that I realized I had forgotten something other than the time of day, or the specific day…or the significance of a certain day.
Summit day was a day burned into my brain that I will have to try had to remember. I remember so clearly what everything looked like, smelled like, and sounded like, but can’t remember how I got from one place to another. It was all a haze of extreme presence.
I hiked 17 miles, experienced over 10,000 feet of elevation disruption, and did it all on 2 meals and a few granola bars. Easily, the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life.
The wilderness inside each of us knows no boundaries; it doesn’t stop calling just because you won’t listen; it doesn’t side with reason and common sense; it doesn’t judge you when you take on too much or put forth too little; it will never be silent until you look up from your boots hitting the mountainside through the thin film of dust on the inside of your Ray Ban’s to see the sun peeking at you in the distance, forcing you to weep from exhaustion, exhilaration, exhalation, and joy.
That’s the wild.
