Welcome to my adventure…
I don’t know where this will lead me, but I hope to share this with the world, and maybe help a few people along the way…
I haven’t always been a “Camper”… Although I spent a lot of time growing up here in South Dakota sleeping in a tent in my parents back yard…
It wasn’t anything fancy… It was a small, blue “pup” tent that I got for Christmas one year. I think it was from J.C.Penny’s… (And I still have it BTW… Perhaps that will be a story to tell… in a blog post…)
Anyways… After a long career in the Army, I retired in 2004. In 2008 after becoming extremely depressed, and suffering from bouts of anxiety, I was diagnosed with PTS(D).
I tried therapy for a while… and prescription anti-depressants… but nothing seemed to help. But what did help was being outside. Running, or hiking or just being OUTSIDE…
In 2009-ish, I took an ill fated trip to the Shenandoah Valley with my son for a weekend of hiking and camping. Ill-fated in that I was no where in the right condition to undertake that trip. But it was also then that I started to look at hiking and camping more seriously as a way to relax.
And it was around 2011, that my wife and I started hiking the trails around where we were living in Maryland. Particularly, the Patapsco River State Park areas near Ellicott City MD. And this is when my life turned around. What started out as two or three miles, turned into six or seven, and sometimes more every weekend. And it was amazing.
Then in 2013, I was laid off from my government contractor job, and while hiking kept me sane during my job search, it wasn’t paying my bills. And I eventually took a job back home in South Dakota, with AT&T.
Coming back home was an amazing thing for me. But I left some great friends back in Maryland. And some amazing hiking too. But it brought me closer to family, or whats left of it, and of course, a different kind of hiking. Local state parks provide simple, easy and short hikes of a few miles. But this is the Great Plains… It’s pretty flat. But a few hours west are the Black Hills! And some absolutely amazing hiking and camping opportunities. And even a few hours further west are the Bighorn Mountains, The Tetons, and Yellowstone in Wyoming; Rocky Mountain National Park, and The Front Range in Colorado; As well as the Bitterroot Mountains and Glacier National Park of Montana, just to name a few places I intend to visit in the coming months and years!
And it all of these mountains that have been calling to me. And as I have shared my passion and desire to be in the mountains as much as possible with my friends and family on FaceBook, it was suggested that I do this blog.
So here I am… Starting out… Sharing what I know… Sharing what I learn… Sharing my opinion on places to go, equipment to use, and adventures to be had.
I hope this blog can help someone, sometime in the future learn to enjoy camping and hiking as much as I do…
Enjoy!
Sage Adventures 