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next day I didn't want to leave. I wasn't hungry, I had a good night's sleep, and I learned a lot about myself. By the time I was picked up the next day, I felt I had learned things that would get me through even tougher periods during the rest of my life. And I will never forget the proud smile on my face when I climbed into the boat and returned two unused matches to my leader.

As the years passed I still did lots of car camping trips with my family, but we didn't really think of those experiences anymore as roughing it. In fact we use to joke about car camping and sleeping in a tent as taking it easy. By then, we knew the true meaning of roughing it. My brothers and I subsequently pushed the limits on camping trips we did with friends, or by ourselves as older teens, as if we were trying to find the boundaries of roughing it, without benefit of a map or a compass to guide our way. All of the activities of my youth had been like preschool for the activities I was to engage in as an adult.

When I got out of the army and started living on my own, I yearned to recapture the feelings of glory and revelry I felt in my youth on all of my outdoors adventures. I learned rock climbing and began hanging out with the kind of people I might have accidentally run into in the woods on my Boy Scout survival trip. We did whitewater-rafting trips on Class IV rapids, and planned back country wilderness trips to go rock climbing at locations that were miles from the nearest trail head. To be able to carry all of the necessary gear with us we would need for climbing, and take the food for the four or five days we intended to stay, we often opted for leaving non-essentials like tents behind. I would plan to sleep on the ground by the fire, or on the pocket-sized hammock I brought. Sleeping on the ground was definitely rough, but slumbering in my hammock was like floating on a cloud. Either way, I would wake in the morning, rub the spider webs off my face, drink a cup of coffee, and I was ready to go.

Once I did a backpacking trip with a couple of friends deep in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We hiked about eight miles in, climbed to the top of a mount, set up our tents and then decided to go back to the trail head to get the beer we had left in the car. Since the only weight we carried back to the car was our empty packs, we made really good time, especially since the trip back to the cars was downhill. Once we got there, we loaded the beer into our packs and began heading

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