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now I’m leaving town

up on the sun, pt. 3

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up on the sun, pt. 2

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up on the sun: seven days in june

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Now that it’s done it seems important where our idea for the Big Trip came from. Like there should be a specific memory out there, one I’ve just misplaced for the time being, of sitting in front of a specific campfire or snacking on a boulder of definite shape, when everything clicked and we finally knew exactly what we needed to do. And with that, it was as good as done. But neither of us have found that memory. We can’t remember anything, actually, beyond the desire to journey—a desire that has been so foundational, and taken-for-granted for so long, that I want to call it instinctual. So that’s the way that the trip came to us: as a natural outgrowth of the years that preceded it. An inevitability.

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The Wind River Mountains are supposed by the Indians to be the home of the spirits, and they believe a person can see the spirit land, or the land they will occupy after death, from the top of them… When an old man is dying he finds himself near the top of a high hill on the Wind River Mountains, and, in front of him, the whole magnificent landscape of eternity is spread out, and the Sun-Father is there to receive him…

–Col. Albert G. Brackett, 1879

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I am less important than I thought, the human race is less important than I thought. I rejoice in that. –Wendell Berry

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swaths traveled and paths unraveled
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It is not by the splendor of far off views, which have lent such glory to the Alps, that these impress the mind; but by a gigantic disorder of enormous masses, and savage sublimity of naked rock, in a wonderful contrast with innumerable green spots of a rich floral beauty, shut up in their stern recesses. Their wildness seems well suited to the character of the people who inhabit the country.

— John C. Fremont

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