Log Cabin Sunday 6/15/2025

The One in Which I Reckon with Some Bad Decisions

If you follow my instagram stories you’d know that I had an adventure this weekend. It kind of overshadowed everything else but I’ll try my best to remember other things that happened.

If you don’t follow, I’ll try to summarize this as quickly as I can. I woke up early monday morning to go on a hike. I’ve tried a couple of times this week to make it up to the top of a particular peak and have been turned around by snow each time. This week I was having such a lovely time until I got almost to the top and was stymied by one large snow drift. I tried to cross it and slid a long way down, then tumbled further. That’s when I should have just turned around. It would have gone down as a perfect hike. I saw a bear! I heard so many birds, including a western tanager, one of my favorites. The weather was perfect.

I did, in fact, turn around and was on my way back down the regular old trail when I got a notification on my phone that I’d left behind my airpod case. These are expensive little devices so I turned around and backtracked to where I fell. It took some Marco Poloing of me making the case beep for a while before I tracked it down. You can see part of my trajectory here:

At this point I took in the view and saw how close to town I was. I could literally see my house through binoculars. I could see a trail heading towards it, too. This made sense because all of the people who passed me on the trail while I dawdled and looked at birds and wildflowers never came back the same way. It’s a loop! So I headed in the direction of what I thought was a trail. It wasn’t, though. And instead of turning around I thought I would just have a little steep side-stepping and be home free when I got to what looked like a pretty easy ravine.

Look how close!

It wasn’t easy. It never stopped being steep. It was the worst hiking experience of my life. The ravine was filled with massive down trees and the sides were dense, near-impassible willows. The entire time I thought surely this has got to give way to something passable. It didn’t. I don’t want to belabor it, but it took 3 hours. Even though I’d planned for a long hike, I still ran out of water.

And soon I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I had no choice but to keep trying, though, so I did. My phone battery was also dying, because I took so many video clips. I considered search and rescue many times. I couldn’t help but imagine the headline “outdoor influencer rescued after getting lost on hike.”

My pride was not a good reason not to seek help. I want to make that as clear as I can. But as long as I could keep putting one foot in front of the other, I just kept at it. The problem is that I thought what was slowing me down was that my legs were just so tired. I was sure that “runner’s high” or beta endorphines or whatever would kick in and I would rally and get home. What I didn’t realize until it was almost too late was that I was suffering from heat exhaustion.

Here are the symptoms, so you aren’t dumb like I was. This is from the National Weather Service:

My legs were tired, but the weakness that was overwhelming me was from being on the verge of an absolutely dire situation. And with a dead phone it would have been hard to find me if I became confused and/or unconscious. Some other symptoms I should have noticed was rapid heartbeat and cramping. I got to a point where I couldn’t sit down to rest because my legs would seize up so badly that I could barely stand up after. And I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears every time I stopped.

One thing that absolutely saved me was finding a game trail that moved out of the ravine and along a ridge line that helped me find a more manageable path to an actual trailhead. I don’t know what I would have done if I were trying to follow the same path I had been. It’s scary to think about given how absolutely agonizing every 100 feet of progress felt throughout.

The takeaways should be obvious and I’m embarrassed to even say I didn’t have the judgment to follow my own experience and knowledge. You don’t leave trails when you’re recreating. And that’s not just a safety thing, it’s a responsible hiker thing. I shouldn’t have been bushwhacking as a way to reduce my impact. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Bring a portable charger for your phone. I could have used Strava, which was tracking my hike anyway, to see if there was really a trail before I was so committed. I also couldn’t communicate with my wife when she was trying to find me to pick me up because my battery was dead. Stupid. I know it’s not helpful to talk about myself like that but with hindsight I can barely recognize myself in that moment.

I brought so much water, but still it wasn’t enough. I had enough snacks, but a symptom of heat exhaustion is a lack of appetite. And the idea of eating a handful of mixed nuts to give me energy without water to wash it down was unthinkable at the moment. It was almost 100 degrees by noon, and I didn’t get to safety until 3:30. By drinking all that water and sweating without replacing it with salts I exacerbated it all by flushing all the salt out of my system and plummeting my blood pressure.

One more thing is that this weekend was our town’s annual summer celebration. We had spent a lot of time in hot weather walking around and being outside. On Saturday there was a fair and an outdoor concert and Kristin and I both remarked that we simply couldn’t get enough water, even though it was always cold and abundant. That night I should have been waking up all night to pee and never had to. That means when I went into my hike I was probably more vulnerable than normal.

I put myself in a similar situation almost 20 years ago when I climbed King’s Peak, Utah’s tallest mountain. Then, again, I followed my friends on a shortcut down the talus slope. This is a known blunder. I got to our camp before my fellow hikers and waited for them. When they got in, the descent had been so brutal that they didn’t want to take down camp and go home that day like we’d planned. At this point it was getting dark. I had to give a talk in church the next day, so I had to set out on my own in the dark with only a winding flashlight. I got to my car at 4 AM and drove straight home. I barely made it in time to give my talk, which was certainly not worth the risk I took to get there.

That should have been the last time I did something like this to myself but it’s unfortunately a lesson I needed again. I’m glad that the only lingering symptom is sore legs, some bruising from the fall, and an absolutely shattered ego.

It could have been so much worse.

Oh, I also lost my wallet somewhere in there.

Anyway, this post is the last I’ll talk about it. I expressed my shame and irresponsibility on my instagram stories and everyone was very kind in consoling me that everyone makes mistakes. But I’ve spent the past two days considering the position I put my family in and I can’t apologize enough for the impact that one decision could have had on many lives. I hope reading this helps someone else avoid something similar.

All of this is to say that the reason I am not reporting on Log Cabin Sunday until Wednesday. Monday I had the day off and almost died, Tuesday I took a sick day and drank a million gallons of Gatorade. I slept well last night and have some bruises and soreness but otherwise seem no worse for wear.

As for the actual Log Cabin Weekend portion of this all, I was able to go social media free on Saturday and phone free on Sunday. I got a few signed They Might Be Giants records from the local record store, we went to the city fair and looked at all the weird stuff people sell at those things, and there was a party band and fireworks.

Sunday was Father’s Day, and I smoked pork ribs starting at 10:00 AM. I rarely eat red meat and this is becoming one of my traditions; a little smoked meat as a treat. We also had grilled corn on the cob, watermelon, baked beans, and homemade rolls. It was a lovely restful day and I’m bummed that it’s so eclipsed by my stumbling around in the woods.

Whew. I don’t know if this was a fun read but it was cathartic for me to put it all down.

Albums listened to:

They Might Be Giants

• Beast of Horns

• Mink Car

• Join Us

Gordon Lightfoot, Sit Down, Young Stranger

First Aid Kit, Stay Gold

Watched: The Goonies

Played: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Read: Karen Russell, The Antidote