Joshua's weblog

I have had a lot of trip reports in the queue to write -- or, perhaps I should say, I have taken a lot of trips recently, and some of them had moments worth writing about. I have half of a trip report written about getting shut down on Mt. Shasta; after it became clear that it was a simple recounting of a day, with nothing terribly interesting to say about it in that light, I gave up on that incarnation of it. In my mind, too, was brewing a set of thoughts about a recent cycling trip to make a lap around Lake Tahoe. On my laptop is also a draft of a post about mental health -- or, really, the things that go along with the absence thereof -- that I never seemed quite satisfied with enough to post.

It seems like what I was looking to write is a synthesis of all of these. Over the past few months, I have entered a handful of experiences with expectations for how they would turn out; some of them went exactly as I'd planned, and some of them were entirely the opposite. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what my thesis is here -- is it that expectations influence outcomes? that they don't? that expectations influence experience? Regardless, here are a collection of moments of each of these.

On Saturday (that is to say, July 15th), Josiah, Liz, and I went for an attempt on the Matthes Crest traverse from south to north. It was a total mess; in my book, it falls just barely short of an epic, but it certainly crosses the line over into being a total cluster. We got in a decent ways over our heads, made a mess of basically the whole route, and had a really long day. Remarkably, almost the entire day was still fun. Here is, more or less, how it happened.