Nice Butte

Greetings to all of our faithful blog followers – your prayers and God’s providence have kept us going almost to our first destination! While we have been traveling for nearly 32 hours, we are all in excellent spirits, even despite the sleep deprivation of some of us (such as myself). We have only a few hours to go before reaching Bryce Canyon, and yet we’re so used to driving all the time that we feel like we could just keep going all the way to the Pacific (though fortunately we will not be)!

                The trip so far has been interesting and yet uneventful in a very good way. In these 32 hours, we have traversed 8 states on 5 different interstates, traveling through at least 5 major cities along the way, not to mention vast extents of farmland or exceptionally lush pastures and forested land. We drove right by the St. Louis arch as we passed through the Gateway to the West, then spent most of the uneventful hours of darkness driving on the incredibly straight and empty highway through Kansas. That was a rather monotonous experience punctuated only by a rather creepy driver switch in the middle of nowhere (creepy music just happened to pop up on the iPod at that exact moment, and we were all eerily reminded of such films as “Jeepers Creepers”…). We also made a run to the Walmart Supercenter in the middle of nowhere at 3:30am to buy ratchet straps to support the metal luggage rack attached to the trailer hitch which appeared to be sagging lower and lower to the road, occasionally scraping when we’d go over a bump. Fortunately, we can now say that it’s completely secure (and we all feel safer for some reason), and that’s about the worst that has happened apart from the loss of power to two of the cigarette lighters which were being used to power much of our state of the art technology. The only other downer was the weather, which refused to be anything but gray, dreary, and rainy all the way past the mountains west of Denver, except for a brief glimpse of the sun to remind us that it really did exist. We certainly have been exceedingly fortunate, though, to have no greater problems than these!

At least for me, the most interesting part of the trip thus far has certainly been today’s journey through Colorado and into Utah. This morning started at about 4am with David driving and me as his navigator/make-sure-he-doesn’t-fall-asleep guy in the passenger seat. We passed the remaining time on the planes with a wonderfully long round of the Name Game, which about a half hour spent exclusively using names from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. We also got to see the sun defeat the clouds enough as it rose to produce a great pink sunrise. I got to start driving after we made it through Denver, and I must say I’m glad that almost no one else was driving west of Denver on a Sunday morning because this is where it really got interesting. If you’ve ever driven on I-70 west of Denver, you know that it’s really windy and the weather is rather unpredictable. Soon after passing through Denver, we gained enough elevation that snow

started to blanket the trees and ground all around the highway, becoming thicker and thicker as we went. For those of you who know me, I love snow, so of course I was rather ecstatic about that. But on top of that we saw at least 40 deer (or elk, they went by really fast) and began to drive through a deep gorge with extremely steep, tree covered slopes or rocky cliffs rising on either side, all blanketed with snow. Then suddenly, the veil of fog and cloud was lifted, revealing majestic, snow covered peaks presiding over our tiny highway and dazzling us with the brightness of sun reflected off of snow. I was now ecstatic AND awestruck. I had no idea that some of the most beautiful scenery we saw might be on the drive there and not in the parks themselves.

We proceeded on through the ski-resort country and towns such as Vail and Aspen, continuing to be amazed by the scenery around us. Eventually we moved into a drier and warmer, but no less spectacular, area as we traveled along the bottom of a towering canyon and out into wider valleys, still with slopes of various colors and textures sweeping up on either side to high ridgelines. Our surroundings gradually became drier as we made our way into Utah, and we soon found ourselves surrounded by desertlike plateaus and buttes, intricate rock formations, and the occasional snow-tipped peak in the distance. Right now as I write we’re driving through the bottom of another canyon. 

I’ve tried to explain what we’ve seen as best I can, though of course it doesn’t do any of it justice by a long shot. To partially compensate for that, we’ll soon hopefully be posting pictures of all of this as we can, though even that still won’t satisfactorily convey what we’ve seen.

Each of us has different reasons for coming on this trip. For me, I know that the best times of my life have been spent in the wilderness and in community with other people. I also know that being away from the craziness that is the life of an American and a college student can be nothing but good for my sanity and spiritual journey. Also, I think I need a reminder that the world is huge and wide and much bigger than me. In fact, it was made by a God who is even huger and wider than these awesome places we are visiting. As others in the group have mentioned, I also think that we as men were made for adventure and not just for work and daily drudgery. Reclaiming some of that spirit is definitely part of what this trip is about. However, the adventurous spirit of a man is meant to extend beyond time spent with other men, or on outdoors expeditions, or on cross-country road trips. Jesus called us to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him. When someone is carrying a cross, it means that he has already been sentenced to die, and therefore has nothing to lose. Thus Jesus has asked us to be risk-taking, adventurous, radical followers of him in all we do – both in daily life and in our exceptional moments – rather than being passive men going with the flow and are slaves to the god of control and security. This applies to our careers, to our efforts to help the poor, and to our privileged roles of doing God’s will to advance his kingdom. Hopefully, we will come back with a bit better knowledge of what this means for us.

Until the next time!
Dan