Life on the road has, for us, been a natural progression. A road trip without an end date has turned into 2.5 years of living, working, and playing around North America.
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We truly think that the lifestyle found us, instead of the other way around. Moving into our bus seemed obvious. We had little resistance.
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It wasn’t an intellectual process, or a succession of logical steps. It was a gut instinct, a burning desire, a sudden impulse based on passion. We want to live extreme highs, and will take extreme lows as par for the course.

We backpacked for nearly a week in the Maroon Bells wilderness.

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The rain fell on us for three days. Everything was wet, wet as water itself. The liquid saturated every pore, adding pounds of water weight to our packs, but after awhile it didn’t matter. There really wasn’t anything to do but walk. Each morning, we hiked on, everything soaked, sloppy. Grey jays, wearing their feather raincoats, laughed at us from the pine boughs. We looked pathetic to them, trudging uphill in the dense fog.
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Then, the fourth day, the mountains seemed to slurp up the dark clouds. The fog swirled behind the panorama of ranges. Suddenly, a huge sun shone down. A brilliant moment of yellow light warmed us, 15 minutes of bright light that erased the days of deluge preceding, a reminder that you can’t be dry until you have first been wet.

Wilderness is a place that we humans are supposed to visit and then leave.
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But, not too far back in history, we lived out here. We ate and breathed and created of the earth and then returned ourselves to it.
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Every time I walk into the woods with a backpack, I try to understand the succession of events that led to our separation from these wild places. And I hope, with each day that passes, I may, myself, become a little more wild.

A photo is sacred. It represents a tiny splinter of time that can’t be replicated.
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Photographers are wranglers of moments, capturers of reality. Their work is an external memory linking us to the past, an instant our eyes couldn’t otherwise see.
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There’s magic in that stance. Clicking the shutter, he corrals a memory, trapping it in a light-tight box.

We perched at the tippy top of Buckskin pass and ate candy bars for dinner.
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The gold, crackly wrapper of my Twix bar glinted conspicuously from my knee. Alien. Where did it come from? How is a land that looks like this transformed into dextrose?
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We sat on the maroon rocks of the pass, 12k feet higher than the sea, in a different world. We ate of our packaged space food, astronauts of the wild.

The wind was strong this morning, mumbling incoherent ideas into the deep canals of my Eustachian tubes. I slept, half aware, past the sunrise.
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James was up and at ’em, God knows where. I thought I could hear him outside the tent, he and the wind leaping through the green morning, nimble as big horn sheep.
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I ate my breakfast from the comfort of these flimsy four walls of the tent, content to watch him frolic and lean against the invisible strength blowing in the low-oxygen air.

James flaps his brown arms like a moth, spiraling with floppy, cardboard-wing loops into the iced-over lake.

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Hey! I shout. He turns around. Don’t freeze up and die! I say. He just smiles in return and disappears under that blue layer of ice. Fearless.
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He reappears at the edge of the frigid water, wearing a wide white grin that childishly shouts: Wowie am I alive! Wowie is my blood pumping purple! Wowie isn’t it awfully wonderful, wonderfully awful to be so shivering cold?! Wowie, how can I help but to rush and run and ramble in a world that has solid ice and liquid water, under a big brawny mountain like this, Wowie Mountain.

If humans were only motivated by comfort, we wouldn’t come out here.
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There are cities with every luxury imaginable. We can be dry and warm and satiated and clean.
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But give us our dreams, give us leisure time that we can spend as we please, and where do we come but these alpine meadows, where rain pours and wind whips and the creeks soak our feet. Why would anyone choose discomfort ? Because we are an overly insulated people. We want to feel something. We want life-and life is not always a comfortable proposition.

It’s been a wet season here in CO, and our pop-top is a little leaky. Everything has been damp for a few weeks now. Our sheets squish as we climb into them and the wood floor is a slip zone.

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We took advantage of today’s sun to air everything out, emptying our belongings, everything we own, into a mound around the bus.
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Every time we clean thoroughly, we ask ourselves how we carry this much stuff. It makes us think back, to a time years ago when we had a studio apartment worth of things. We can’t imagine what we used to do with all that. James reminds me, holding up a plastic accordion, that we’re repeating history in our tiny home. We’re still weighed down, lugging useless (but awesome!) stuff, just on a smaller scale. He is a Zen master of simplicity. I remind him that life is a process and look how far I’ve come in my journey as a traveling hoarder. Everything we own is in the bus.