The past week was a perfect microcosm of how I want to be spending my time in this next chapter of life. It included service and habitat restoration, music and dancing with friends into the wee hours, meaningful work on the land with people I care about, and a great day of adventure in the mountains.

I spent most of the week down in the Eugene area. Before heading to Eugene on Saturday however, I spent the morning volunteering with Bark and the Parrot Creek Cultural Ecology Project. This was the second time I’ve been out to this site and the weather was much more obliging than the first time – a sunny, warm Spring day vs. a cold, rainy Fall day the first time. The project focuses on restoring an 80-acre site near Oregon City so that it can be a space where Indigenous people can safely gather natural resources such as foods, medicines, and weaving materials while connecting with the land and their communities and traditions. On this particular day we were working to remove invasive Hawthorne, Blackberry, and Scotch Broom in an area that will someday be restored to a White Oak Savannah. Saturday night was out on the town in Eugene with friends dancing to Blu Egyptian and Skeletons from the Closet.

Most of the rest of the week I spent on my friend’s farm, Mountain in the Mist. I helped with garden work and preparing an area for a pond. We also found some time to hit some nearby mountain biking trails. I’ve been able to spend some substantial time out there recently and I really love it. It’s such a beautiful, peaceful place, and Drake and Emily are some of my favorite people. There is something so satisfying about working with people I care about, tending to the land and to each other, outside in the fresh air. The work we’re doing can be physically demanding and hard, but in some ways it hardly feels like work. We’re listening to music, talking, laughing, and at the end I can see real results in the form of a nicely weeded garden, well pruned fruit trees, or a patched up fence. It is certainly a taste of a different way of being, maybe one that our ancestors would be more familiar with. Where work and leisure, labor and play, sort of meld together. Where we are working on the land with people we care about to provide for our own livelihood, not going to an office or a factory to spend the majority of our waking lives with people we don’t really know to make money for a faceless corporation. They feed me incredibly well and I always sleep great, which is ample compensation in my book.

The biggest highlight of the week was a backcountry ski trip to Mt. Bailey. We left at 5 am on Thursday to make the 3 hour trip South and get to the trailhead and on the mountain before the promised sunshine started melting the snow too much. On arrival, there was a light dusting of new snow at the bottom of the mountain around 5,000 feet, a good sign. We decided to bushwack up the Eastern side of the mountain instead of taking the more established trail on the South side of the mountain. This would be a more direct route and would get us easier access to the North bowl that gets less sun and might have better snow conditions.

The hike started clear and cool as we made our way through mixed conifer forest carrying our skis on our backs. There was some downfall to begin with, but as we climbed the forest started to open up and the hiking became somewhat easier, at least from a downfall perspective. A couple miles in, around 6800 feet, we started to climb the ridge we’d be on to the summit and we got our first panoramic views of the landscape below. Rugged Mt. Thielsen to the East with Diamond Lake below, Crater Lake to the South, and Diamond Peak to the North, all of it shrouded in a thin layer of clouds and covered with a dusting of new snow.

Around the 7,000 foot elevation level, the snow got deep enough to put the skins on our skis and ski the rest of the way to the summit at 8,368 feet, which we reached around 1 pm. The wind was whipping and cold at the top, so after a brief interlude for some photos we started our descent.

We descended a couple hundred feet to get out of the wind and have a lunch break.

After lunch we began our descent in earnest, opting to stick to the East side of the mountain. The snow was pretty good in my estimation, although I’m no expert. Light enough to make some good turns, but definitely starting to get a little wet and heavy in the sun. We enjoyed a good 500 feet of descent in a big wide open bowl and another 500 or so in sparse trees.

We were back to the cars by around 3 pm where we hung out for a while eating some snacks and enjoying the sunshine. On the way back we hit up Umpqua Hot Springs, a great treat for some weary muscles, and had a Greek feast at Alexander’s Greek Cuisine in Roseburg. By the time we got home around 9 pm, full bellies and tired bones, sleep came easily.

This past week felt right in many ways. It was full, but not depleting. It was tiring and involved a fair amount of discomfort at times (climbing the mountain, cutting thorn laden Hawthorne, pulling weeds). But it all somehow left me energized, filled up. Busy feels scattered and depleting, this week felt full in the sense that my days were built around what actually matters to me – the land, community and people I care about, the mountains, adventure. I’m still in the early stages of figuring out what things look like going forward, but this last week felt like a step in the right direction.