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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I don’t know the exact date but it was a spring day a little over 20 years ago now. I was in my early 20s and spent a lot of my free time hiking, camping, etc. At that time I was really heavily into caving, especially vertical caving where we would use ropes, harnesses, etc to explore chasms.

    This particular day I was on a several day camping trip to a really popular area in a national park. In the night a big rainstorm came and everything flooded. I had been there several days with my friend and we didn’t get the memo about the storm coming and were curious why nobody else was camping there when it was usually packed that time of year.

    The next morning we awoke and this campground (on the banks of a river) was halfway underwater. We soon learned that our road out was also underwater so we were trapped at the campground. We had plenty of supplies as we had been there several days with intentions to explore caves, etc.

    Now from this campground there was a really popular hike through a canyon with stone arches, cool caves, waterfalls, etc that was normally packed. Since we had the place to ourselves we decided to do the hike. I should mention that this was quite dangerous as the first mile or so of the trail was now under 2+ feet of moving flood waters. We had wetsuits (for caving) and ropes so we geared up and braved the flood waters.

    Dear reader it felt like such an epic adventure. I knew the landscape well from being there many times but this time was magical. There were massive waterfalls everywhere rushing through the green spring foliage. We had to use our technical rope skills to safely cross rushing white water streams but everything was so beautiful and dangerous.

    I haven’t done it justice of course but it was just this perfect day where everything came together. I was young and healthy, I had my best partner with me, we had all of the right gear, the road being underwater meant we had the whole area to ourselves, and everything had been magically transformed into a waterfall adventure park for us to play.

    I’m still chasing that feeling of pure joy I had that day.










  • You talking about Tortured Poets Department? Jokes aside about recommending a popular artist as an ‘unpopular’ opinion - I actually do disagree. I’m a pretty solid Swift fan but TPD doesn’t really do anything for me. I’ve listened to the whole album a couple of times and I found the songs all kind of samey and forgettable.

    If you want to introduce people to Swift, I’d vote for “All Too Well” which I think is just such a brilliant, relatable song about unrequited love.



  • Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Overall I agree heavily with what you are saying. I really was hoping for the feeling of whiplash when Biden took office because I expected him to drop like 20 executive orders on day 1 to undo the worst of the worst Trump shit. No reason not to have that shift drafted and ready to go before inauguration. But it didn’t really play out that way.

    I hope hope hope that if they manage to take back the White House and Congress that the democrats have an agenda ready to rock and roll because that otherwise it’s hard to maintain enthusiasm from the public when it seems like not much is happening.