Reminiscing With The Ancients

Miles 11.7

Camped at mm 203.3

The signs were old, my legs were old, the mountains were old, even the clouds looked old today. Walking through the world, Reminiscing with the Ancients. Whispering to my father. Dad. Daddy. Papa. Do you hear me?
These climbs just never get any easier. I feel them all throughout my body. Clear into my little tiny baby toes, and clear into some tiny muscles in my back that I didn’t know I even had.
And I take the decongestants to make breathing the tiny slips of air a little easier, and I look up and up and up until I can see the tops of the aspen trees, way up there.  And I wonder what they’re looking at. And the berries by my feet that just decided to change from green to red yesterday.
Fall is trying to be here. It wants it so badly.
But for now a little bee lands on my knee and I say clever dad jokes about it, and we wander through lush areas and then into dry ones and then there it is. Oh, there it is!
The 200 mile mark. We’ve officially walked 200 miles of this trail. We take a bunch of photos and then there’s nothing else to do but walk on, so that’s what we do until we get to camp where I wash my underwear away from the stream and we set up our tents and I choose to leave the rainfly off and look at the sky.
The sky filled with even more Ancient Ones.
Papa, I whisper. Tell me you’re proud of me.