Imagine this: It’s fall semester, and you’re super pumped to go on an adventure now that you’ve settled into your new room at UMass. Just as you start your search, you get an email from UMOC (UMass Outing Club) about a backpacking trip to the Adirondack Mountains. Even though you’re not a big camper, you decide that the view of the New England foliage for an entire four days is worth peeing in the woods. You refresh the UMOC trip message board obsessively trying to be the first one to email in asking for a spot. 11:15am comes and you get an ecstatic text from your friend that “The trip is up!” You quickly fill out your email application, slightly exaggerating your experience level. It says the trip is “intense”, but it can’t be that bad, right? Backpacking is basically like walking around campus with your backpack, and you do that every single day, right? Wrong.
Backpacking through the Adirondack Mountains is not like walking. But even after all of the rock climbing with a twenty-pound backpack, it’s worth it. You also get to watch the sunset over the valley you just conquered, feel like a rock star at the top of every mountain you climb. You get to experience that overwhelming sense of pride that comes when you know you pushed yourself further than you ever have before, and you made it.
Packing up a sixty-liter bag with everything you can imagine needing for four days, hopping into a car with a bunch of people you just met to drive four hours toward the most intense backpacking trip of your life takes some serious guts. Once you’re halfway up that mountain, there’s no easy road. It’s either up or down, and if you go back down you’re still twenty miles away from the car, and in the middle of the woods with no cell phone reception. Not to mention, the unexpected joys of a UMOC trip. For example, did you know that if you leave a GoPro on your trunk then pop the trunk; the GoPro will shatter your entire back windshield? It will, and it did, and it was kind of awesome.
So what does it take to survive a UMOC trip?
1. An open mind
2. An adventurous heart and strong legs
3. A strong belief in yourself and those around you
4. The ability to engage in bliss
5. An awesome camera with a good battery life
6. A group of amazing people, who will pick you up when you fall down, whether that be physically or emotionally
This point is the most important. (Huge shout out to my fellow Dack-ers!) The people who “take you into the woods and do stuff with you” should be a bunch of goofballs who will host their own pretend radio show as you hike through the valley, jump into a freezing cold river just because they can, and shock the waitress of the first diner you find after your adventure concludes by ordering four entrees each. They should laugh, not cry, at the fact that you drove home with a trash bag duct taped over the nonexistent back windshield of your car. The kind of people who will carry an extra pound of clothing just so you can take a silly picture on the top of a mountain. They’re the ones who will climb the top 100ft of a mountain, drop off their pack, and then come climb it again with yours because they recognize that you’re not a professional rock climber. It is because of these people that any UMOC trip, long or short, intense or not, will be amazing.
Photos: Credit goes to the author and Olivia Merlino