Tired from driving, I had pulled off northbound Highway 191 just past Blanding and skipped by the established campground (“Devil’s Canyon”); opting instead to follow a Forest two-tracker far enough from the highway to escape the roar of late-night truckers. When I stopped my pick-up and turned off its booming CD player, I only then realized I had parked smack-dab in between two hidden camps, occupied by seemingly large groups of houndsmen and their teams of dogs.

The resonant baying of the hounds in camps obscured from view by thick Ponderosa forest -- and probably about a half-mile distant in two different directions -- was atmospheric, even soulful and I figured that it wouldn’t persist too late into the evening. Even if it did, I was beat and was sure that I could sleep through it as I find that type of bark to be hypnotic. Before long, a big Dodge Ram truck came rolling into my camp and stopped to size me up. The guy driving the truck was taciturn so I initiated conversation by asking if it was lion season.

“Nooooo,” he offered and continued on in a slow, slightly drawling style of speech, stating that he and his “boys” had brought their 38 “bar dawgs” out on a hunt and had split into two campsites so as to minimize the racket. I was tempted to inform him that they had failed miserably but thought better of it.

He suggested that I might find a more restful place to camp a few miles down the road but I replied that I used to have a big Plott-mix of my own and enjoyed the sound of howling hound breeds. “Well, we gottum all,” he said. “Walkers, Blue Tick, Redbone; you name it, we gotzit.” Hoping to conclude the chat so that I could start getting ready for sleep, I wished the guy good luck on their hunt and closed by saying that: “I guess I don’t need to worry about any bears prowling around camp tonight.”

He looked at me like he hadn’t a clue as to what I had just said and muttered something about “being off now, to check on the other camp of dawgs.” I wondered if they had simply chained up the hounds in the second camp and left them completely unsupervised. No matter, I thought to myself, it’s late, I’m beat and I still have a full day of driving tomorrow.

While I used to enjoy a Kerouac style road trip, in recent years I’ve grown to dislike long drives. There are several reasons for this: first, I feel guilty about the “carbon footprint” that comes with non-essential driving; second, I get claustrophobic after an hour behind the wheel and one can hardly expect to make much progress if you’re stopping to stretch every 60 miles; third, I’d rather spend my time hiking in our White Mountains -- getting exercise, saving resources (and money) and seeing, up-close, the plants and animals. One need not travel to Timbuktu to appreciate Nature’s marvels….

So, what compels me to drive a long distance at this stage of life? Mostly it’s the chance to visit with an old friend; to experience wild lands with somebody I know so well that there is little effort needed in the relationship. And by “little effort,” I don’t mean that all our interactions are completely harmonious but, rather, that the friendship is so deep, that disagreements can occur and when they do, they are generally quickly and effectively resolved (even if it is only to “agree to disagree”).

Such is my friendship with Dan, probably the person I owe the most to when it comes to learning to appreciate a good outdoor adventure. Now mind you, long before I met Dan (in our sophomore year of high school), I was avid for the outdoors; for being in natural landscapes. But, my time outdoors was always focused on learning about the wild creatures and their habitats. Just seeing a new bird or reptile was adventurous enough for me. I never really even considered hiking 20 miles in a day or climbing the highest local peak as something to do for its own sake. In fact, doing such things struck me as ludicrous, at best.

But while my couple of years with a local Scout group had utterly failed to convince me that it was “fun” to battle the elements, Dan had managed to introduce me to the thrill of an outdoor challenge. He achieved this by first teaching me the value of higher quality gear.

Back in the early- to mid-70’s, the “backpacking” craze really began to take off - due, in no small part, to a series of books by Colin Fletcher. Gear companies such as Kelty, North Face and Sierra Designs had given hikers, campers and hunters an alternative to heavy canvas packs and tents, as well as those nostalgic cotton sleeping bags with the inner lining depicting mallards on the wing. Gone too were the mid-calf lumber-jack style boots that literally weighed in at five pounds a pair.

Duck down, nylon and new synthetic fibers began to dominate the sleeping bag and outdoor apparel markets while ultra-light tents, backpacking stoves, cook-kits and spun aluminum canteens replaced the bomb-proof Army issue gear of old. Boots were streamlined and lighter Vibram took the place of the old steel-shank models.

In addition to the improvements in all forms of gear and clothing, camp food also made the switch from bulky canned goods (perhaps most infamously: Spam) to freeze-dried meals that only needed boiling water in order to be reconstituted into supposedly delicious entrées, fit for a king. Because these new freeze-dried groceries were pricey, Dan revealed the wisdom of repackaging ordinary foodstuffs. For example, we transferred peanut butter and jelly from their glass containers into “Gerry tubes” and we often subsisted on PB&J spread thickly onto Ritz Crackers for many of our early, over-night backpacking trips.

Our first major trip together was a backpacking journey across the state of Michigan from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. There had been five of us, high schoolers all and, by the end of the third day (and over 60 miles of hiking), three of us bailed out on the trip due to bloody, quarter-sized blisters on our feet. Dan, however, along with the smallest member of our crew (“Beetle”), made it all the way in the allotted ten days: a total of well over 200 miles.

That “failed” trip taught me a great deal about myself in general and, more specifically, about the proper breaking-in of a pair of modern hiking boots (such as they existed back in 1974). Over the next ten years, Dan and I took a few other grand adventures; supreme among them: a several months long dirt-biking voyage across West and Central Africa.

By the mid 1980’s, our paths had diverged and, while Dan had worked in several professions, he eventually married and raised a family in Bozeman, Montana while working on technology transfer projects contracted by the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, I had finally settled in Arizona in 1990 and embarked on a career with the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

When I retired in 2014, I decided that I would take one out-of-state camping/back-packing trip a year and, so far, three of those trips have been with Dan. All three of our trips during these past five years have been to Utah (as it is the state mid-way between us). The story of our most recent trip, to Utah’s Ashley National Forest in the Flaming Gorge area, will be the subject of Part 2 of this article which you can read in the September issue of Outdoors SW.