Direction

Direction.

I will be buying one of these:



Admit it: so will you. You can't pass on something like that. There's nothing remotely practical about it, because it would probably be easier to loop one of those tiny pocket compasses to the strap of my 2 litre camelbak than to (1) bring a daypack big enough to hold the nalgene, and then (2) stop moving to (3) take off the pack, (4) unzip it, and (5) get out the bottle to (6) check the compass. All those extra steps, however, are not going to stop me wanting it and ultimately creating scenarios for me to use/need a nalgene bottle lid compass.

This weekend marked the real start of my work as an assistant coach for a new adventure-sport-plus-fundraising program for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. It's called Hike For Discovery and if it's being offered at a location near you, sign up ASAP. There are only 20 or 30 something chapters in the country offering it this year (the first year after the pilot program last year), and each of those chapters will only accept about 35 participants. We'll be hiking down the Grand Canyon, and we don't want to, like, erode the place.

I hiked with my head coach and her darling dog yesterday afternoon (before delving into 100 pages of reading my health education for teachers textbook: more later). It was sort of a feeler hike for how we'd work and hike together (I totally had my A-game on; this woman is about to run her second Boston Marathon, so I didn't want to be the slow or pant-y one), but also to test out a trail neither of us had done before. We did the San Pasqual Mountains south peaks, which was fantastic. The trail was narrow enough to feel legit, and spiked pretty quickly to help spread all the participants out early. The trail rolled through a stream-y valley for a while, which had ACTUAL GREEN GRASS and moss growing wild. This blew my mind. A few minutes later we had climbed back to the standard southern California plant life and sense of normalcy.

The program officially starts in a few weeks, but we have a few more mountains to test in the meantime. The informational meetings begin in a few days, which will be the first time that we meet the five volunteer mentors. And the meeting on Wednesday will be at REI, which is conveniently where I can buy my nalgene compass. I love it when a plan comes together. *evil laughter*.