Mountains

When I was growing up, my family backpacked together. My first official backpacking trip was in the mountains north of Boise, Idaho, when I was four years old. I carried a can of peaches in a little drab green knapsack (and nothing else) and was pretty proud of that. We spent the night in a big sleeping bag with my whole family, the kids squished between my parents. My memory is of two rectangular car camping bags zipped together, taking up the entire floor of our pup tent.

We didn’t do much family backpacking for quite a few years after that first trip, but when I was a teenager we started up again. Over the next decade, one combination or another of my five immediate family members backpacked into one basin after another in the Uinta mountains in Utah and in the Wind Rivers in Wyoming. We logged hundreds of miles on trails in the two mountain ranges combined. It was a routine summer/fall activity for us. We trained in advance for our trips, hiking many miles to get in shape (sometimes carrying backpacks with jugs of water or encyclopedia volumes in them).

Mom planned out our menus and made fresh beef jerky and baked “Logan” bread and dried fruit in a dehydrator and so on. It was a huge undertaking. Then she methodically organized our meals and snacks in carefully-marked plastic bags. Dad had each of us weigh ourselves, then he distributed the gear and food packages among our packs, reweighing from time to time, trying to keep our starting loads at or below the recommended physical limits for our respective body weights.

Our backpacking trips lasted anything from a few days to as long as a week or two. For our longest trips, we cached food ahead of time at midpoints on our planned routes.

Uintas Highline Trail

In my young adult years, after my two older siblings had moved away, my parents and I still backpacked together. Twice, the three of us (and our Old English sheepdog, Chaucer) backpacked the Uintas Highline trail in Utah from one end of the mountain range to the other; once from east to west (a route covering 85 miles) and once from west to east (a 100-mile trip). We did the east-to-west trip just before I left to serve an 18-month church service mission in South Korea. (2 months of language training in Utah, 16 months of missionary work in Seoul.) The west-to-east trip was just after my return to Utah.

Fairly early in the east-to-west trip, my parents and I spent a morning climbing up a valley to a broad ridgeline west of Chepeta Reservoir. As we climbed to the northwest, the forest thinned out until only scattered small scrubby trees remained. Then there were no trees at all. We couldn’t see much ahead of us other than the higher ridgeline and a few clouds. Along the trail here and there we passed surprisingly large rock cairns, some as tall as me or taller. I wondered whether they had been built by sheepherders. The morning weather was a bit sketchy. Shredded white, misty clouds rose up around us and blew past. It was foggy in places.

As we reached a point at the top of the climb where the highline trail turned slightly southwest, we could see to the north of the mountain range for the first time that day. The view was unsettling. Big cumulonimbus clouds were billowing up from floor of the basin to the north of us. As we hiked westward, the clouds rapidly built into a dark, threatening storm that soon rose above the mountains. It was headed our way.

Trouble

In the High Uintas, there are some basic rules for summer travel: Get up early, get packed, and get going. Storms are going to hit—and they’ll often hit hard with little warning—at any time from noon-ish on. Lightning is the biggest danger, but hail, high winds, and driving rain are typical hazards as well. The daily storms can sometimes be avoided by getting over a pass, or by hitting a summit and then getting back down, early in the day. But there are times when circumstances make high altitude travel during storm hours unavoidable. This was one of those times.

It became apparent that the storm was going to reach us soon. The specific place where we were on the Uintas ridge is a kind of wide plateau where the elevation is about 12,000 feet for a mile or more in any direction. There was nowhere safe to go to in the time we had left.

The three of us decided that we would have to hunker down and ride out the storm up there on the ridge. We took off our backpacks, removing a rolled-up foam sleeping pad and a plastic tarp. We put on our rain gear then leaned the metal-framed backpacks against each other. Then we covered them with black garbage bags that we used as pack covers, tucking in the bottoms of the garbage bags to hopefully keep water out.

Lightning

After we had covered the packs, we moved a ways away from them to get away from the metal. We spread the sleeping pad on the ground and squatted on it in a row, facing north, shoulder to shoulder, and covered up with the tarp just as the storm hit. The wind, rain, and hail blasted us. We hung onto the tarp and to the dog, doing our best to keep as dry as possible while minimizing our contact with the ground. Lightning was popping all around us. I could feel my hair standing up and thought for sure we’d be hit at any second.

The noise was deafening. Over and over blinding lightning flashed around us and the sound of close-up lightning—like a bedsheet being ripped—was followed instantly by the rifle- then crushing cannon-shot KA BOOOM of thunder right on top of us. Hail was pounding and the wind and rain and the storm on the tarp were all so loud, we couldn’t hear each other even when yelling at the tops of our voices even though we were physically touching each other.

I was certain we were going to die. “If lightning hits one of us,” I thought, “it’s going to take out all of us.”

Then an odd thing happened. I thought, “This couldn’t possibly be any worse,” followed immediately by the thought that it would be worse if, in addition to the storm, a sniper were shooting at us right at that moment. A sniper would have definitely made things worse for us in the middle of the storm. And that thought—for some bizarre reason—was comforting to me. I suddenly felt relieved.

(A Word of Apology

Now, in no way at all do I mean to trivialize the complicated trauma associated with actual sniper shootings. I can’t imagine the horror of being a part of, living through, or dying in a sniper shooting, whether in war or otherwise. This was a time well before the U.S. had experienced the shootings that have occurred in recent years. I thought about changing my story to get rid of the sniper part. The idea of a sniper making things worse was central to my experience and my story, however, so I decided to be true to that. I apologize if this re-traumatizes anyone in any way.)

Survival

After what seemed like a very long time, the storm blew over. We stood up in a bit of a daze, shook the water off of the tarp and the sleeping pad. Then we repacked and gathered ourselves enough to get our backpacks back on and continue on our way westward. We had been incredibly fortunate.

*

Late last Monday afternoon, I got into our car and drove away from a medical office building in Bountiful, Utah, lost in a haze of thoughts. For years we’ve struggled with our triplets’ behavior and have sought out many professional opinions and educational support for them. We’ve been in and out of multiple school and medical and psychology offices, trying various types of therapy, counseling, and treatments, looking for answers and trying to find ways to help our kids and ourselves.

After several years of this and having made minimal progress, we were recently able to finally get all three into in-depth neuropsychological testing to find out what their individual specific issues are. Last week, I met for an hour with the triplets’ neuropsychologist and one of her interns to get the results from Miss A’s four hours of testing. During the meeting, as we went over test result after test result, Dr. C (who is great, by the way) explained to me that little Miss A has deeply challenging learning disabilities. Her test results indicate that she has ADHD, an anxiety disorder, a social disorder, and multiple cognitive challenges.

Autism

I also learned that my sweet boy B has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. This came as no real surprise, given B’s behavior over the past four years or so. Still, it put me back on my heels a bit, so to speak. (Today, Ryan and I learned that C, too, has been diagnosed with autism. B and C are identical twins, so it isn’t surprising that their test results are similar. Both boys tested as having cognitive disabilities and attention deficit issues as well.) Two past screenings had missed it, but it seemed obvious to me that B was autistic. Even with that, the official diagnosis is a lot to absorb.

Dr. C said to me, “[A] has a complex set of things she’s dealing with, and she’s the least complicated of your three. You have three one-in-one-hundred kids.”

As I drove home that day last week, thinking through everything Dr. C and her intern had discussed with me, I found myself slipping into an increasingly negative state of mind. “How are we going to get through this? What’s going to happen to my kids? How will this ever be okay?” And then the thought came to me, “At least there isn’t a sniper shooting at us,” and I knew it was going to be okay. The storm will blow over, we’ll get up, we’ll get ourselves pulled together, and we’ll get going again. And it will be okay.

It’s going to be an interesting experience!