In November and December of 2000 I backpacked from my house in Palm Springs to Lake Mead and back.
During the past two months I spent many nights in a tent. This time of year the nights are 12+ hours long, and I only need 8 hours of sleep. The first night of my Lake Mead bike tour I was thinking back to a long hike I had done 14 years earlier and decided to go ahead and document it during my biking and backpacking evenings this past November and December.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
This is the opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
The year 2000 was about the same for me.
Continue reading Backpacking 500 miles in the Mojave Desert (part 1)