Create a Connection

Getting to Know You Day


I lost touch with the outdoors. When I was little we had a horse farm and vineyard on one side and on the other side a dairy farm. The back yard was all woods for miles and we play all day in the woods and at the ol’ swimming hole.

When I went away to college we use to go backpacking up in the Adirondack Park in New York State. The longest backpacking trip was a 25 mile two day hike with a 65 pound backpack. In 1974 the summer that I graduated from college we went out to the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado where we hiked up the Continental Divide and camped out at 10,000 on the divide.



This is an old faded photograph of a friend on that trip as we hike along the Continental Divide.

My most memorable backpacking trip was when I was still in college and we went camping in the Adirondack’s Schroon Lake region to Pharaoh Lake. We were camping on the shore of the lake one night, we saw the Northern Lights as we laid on a flat granite rock on in the edge of the lake. It was fantastic! We had a front row seat with no street lights for ten or more miles. We stayed up all night watching them and a friend who turned in early didn’t believe us. He wouldn’t come out of the tent and when we got back to Rochester the front page headline said “First Time in Twenty-five Years Northern Lights Seen from Rochester!” he was mad at us because we didn’t drag him out of the tent.

Now I just take day walks for an hour or two, but I am hopelessly out of shape and now that I am retired I have to work on getting back in shape. But my love for nature has carried over to preserving the environment; I have a contemporary Cape that is passive solar and I drive a Prius.