Wow, so epic fail on the blogging for the summer. I think that's mostly because I did very few of the things I was planning on blogging about. I stopped running in June and stopped hiking a few weeks ago because of a knee injury. So while the blogging was a failure, the summer itself was not. I had a wonderful second summer in Lee Vining and am so very grateful for the fantastic friends I made and the great times we had. I know that's vague, but if you're out there reading this, you know who you are and what I'm talking about.
The next two months are mine. Things have really slowed down in Lee Vining - many of the seasonal employees have headed home along with the majority of the tourists. My job continues until the end of November, so that means I get to live in this place as a pseudo-local for the next couple months. And the list of things I have to accomplish is long.
I want to start running again. It was such an enjoyable pastime while I was doing it earlier in the summer - a great way to have an hour or so to myself each day. As the days begin to cool down, it increases the number of hours I have to run. Additionally, I'm coming off a torn MCL - a great story, though one I'm not going to share on the internet, if you don't already know ask me - so it'll be slow going to start. But I'd like to get back into the routine, and the new half marathon date is for sometime before next August. I know that gives me WAAAAAAY too much time to train, but I have no idea what my life is going to be like after November. I'll get to that in a minute.
The list also includes a lot of hikes to places I haven't yet visited. I'm focusing mostly on areas within the Mono Basin for the next two months because...here it comes...after November I'm leaving. I'll go home for a month, then come January, I'll be headed off on a new adventure - both eerily similar and completely different from the life I've been living here in Lee Vining. I've accepted a job on a ranch in Western Colorado for the year to work with a close friend designing an education program that will involve working with kids from surrounding communities. The ranch community is very small and the work is similar to what I've been doing here, but the Western slope of Colorado is a completely different landscape from where I've been living. I'm excited about the opportunity and the challenge, but I'm not looking forward to the leaving.
Throughout the summer I steadily grew to love and appreciate this place even more than I did last year, more than I thought possible. As I became more and more at home here, I began to look for opportunities to stick around (semi?)permanently. For those of you who know me well, you know how big of a deal that is for me. I haven't live anywhere longer than 6 consecutive months since I left home for college at 18. But something about this place has really grabbed me - could be the incredible landscape, but it also has something to do with the quality of the people here. I've made some of the best friends of my life in this place and that will be very hard to leave. It's difficult to describe to someone who's never been here exactly what it's like to live in a place like this. I feel like my sentences are full of hyperbole and lack any real quality or meaning that can be grasped from an outsider's perspective. I suppose that sounds kind of condescending and that's not how it's meant. It's just difficult to explain the little moments that make up living in a town of 400 people on the side of some of the most incredible mountains and wild places our country has to offer. So the next two months I want to spend exploring those nooks and crannies that somehow, over the 9 months that I've been here, have escaped me. I know there are way more than I can possibly discover in that much time, but it'll leave me something to come back to someday. And I do plan to come back. I love it here too much to leave forever so soon.
Mono Lake from Warren Bench 9/22/10
