I’m working on my holiday card prototype, which requires some photo perusing. As I’ve been gathering photos together to help me on it, I stumbled back into our California trip photos and I’ve gotten lost in them again. I can’t believe that six months later I still get chills when I see them. I was looking through our first full day hike in Yosemite, noticing things I hadn’t seen before. There are dozens and dozens of photos, and when I scroll through them I can see how the day unfolded. Views constantly changing as we climbed. I remember putting my camera away in my backpack – for the last time – just to pull it back out again fifteen minutes later, and then again, and still again.
I will never forget the way I felt the following day, as we climbed Glacier Point and gazed across the valley to the place we climbed the day before. We could trace the waterfalls up, up, up, and follow the ridge line around to where it started to descend again. I kept saying that we might have never even attempted it if we had taken the whole view in at the start – if we had known exactly what we were getting into. If we had a real visual of what 2,000 feet of elevation looked like from afar, not just the start of a path through the woods, the sound of water somewhere just up ahead, our footfalls and conversation and birdsong and breath. Maybe we would have second guessed our ambitious plans.
Not anymore. Whatever it is, we’ve got this.
