Doing It Like Rabbits

In July of 2004, my buddy Art and I took a ten day backpacking and chain-gang working trip in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. The place was real close to Aspen where I was living at the time. Art drove out from Michigan.

It was a Sierra Club trip where you basically pay to work in a chain gang to repair backpacking trails. The one we worked on was in this holy place called Frying Pan Wilderness area. It's about 12,000 feet high with beautiful streams, wild flowers, and killer views. The group was about a dozen or so men and women from around the country. Everyone got along pretty well. Art and I clicked most with three young 20 something women from - coincidentally - Michigan.

The work was hard labor: digging, picking, hauling buckets of sand, clearing brush, carrying large rocks - you know, basic chain gang work. You see repairing the trails was important to keep soil from running off them into the streams and basically polluting them so much that cut throat trout - the local species - couldn't reproduce. So I guess you could say I paid good money to work my butt of every day at high altitude so some fish could have sex. Plus, you had to help cook and clean at night so I was like "WTF" kind of camping is this?

Still, it was totally worth it. The group got along great and sang by the fire at night having tons of laughs. We did a fine version of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" somehow remembering all the lyrics. But when the trip was over; when we made it back to the trail head exhausted, filthy and looking foward to a real feast at the restaurant in Basalt, Art slid Queen into his CD player. It was a nice summer day, so we had the top down on his convertible as the caravan drove through the mountains. We cranked Queen and sang along while the Michigan girls drove behind us cracking up.

This song stands out in my memory because the Michigan girls drove alongside us singing out loud to it. What a great song to end a great trip. I just hope the cut throat trout are doing it like rabbits now. Thanks Art and thanks Michigan girls.

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