camping

It was the summer after my daughter graduated from high school, and we decided to take a big trip to the Grand Canyon to celebrate. My oldest son was coming back from college at USC and we were going to have fun as a family. The plan was for us to take two weeks hiking the various trails around and down into the canyon.

The first day of our vacation, we drove from Tucson, where we live, up north to the South Rim of the canyon. We found a good site in the campground near Bright Angel Lodge and set up our base camp. Part of our trip would include hikes down some of the trails that would take us a couple days, but we planned to take a separate set of equipment for camping down into the gorge.

On our first actual day of outdoor activities, we began hiking around the relatively easy Rim Trail. As it was the popular part of the season, there were hundreds of other people enjoying the views as well, but one young man always seemed to be at the same place at the same time as us. We soon began conversing about the opportune meetings and learned that his name was Jacob and he was 19 years old. He had planned to do some major hiking during the week that he was there from Las Vegas and was excited to meet my children, who were the same age as he was.