Just Send It

I started to hear this term a couple of months ago. It was used almost as a dare, or maybe a form of encouragement I couldn’t really tell. “Bro, just send it.” The outcome to this mantra was usually either an epic story, stunt or most often a pitiful failure. Regardless of the outcome, it was used to spur people on to do something crazy, and I loved it.

There are often stages in life when time is our most precious commodity. Looking back we long for times in high school, college or other stages where we had ample time to do crazy trips on long weekends. This summer I found myself in one of those seasons where time was scarce, each week I looked forward to a precious yet scarce 36 hours of time off before heading back to work. While some spent those 36 hours getting rest before starting another hectic week I found myself along with some friends squeezing in as much adventure as possible.

In prepping for a trip, I always get stoked thinking about what we are planning on doing yet somehow forget to do any actual do any planning. Friday always seems to sneak up on me, and before I realize it the clock is slowly creeping up to 5 pm and somehow no one has decided on where we are going. It is in this moment that indecision kills some of the most epic and memorable weekends. It is between 4 and 6 pm where I discovered my favorite application for the term JUST SEND IT.

“It is in this moment that indecision kills some of the most epic and memorable weekends.”

It was a weekend in mid-July. All week long we had been discussing an overnight backpacking trip into the Ansel Adam’s wilderness. Through indecision, lack of ownership and laziness we hit Friday with no plan. Instead of bagging the backpacking idea we quickly whipped out a map and decided upon a lake to backpack to. Hopping in my van, the six of us made our way down the forest service road in search of a rad adventure for the weekend.

I’ll spare the complete details, but to make a long story short, the trip didn’t go according to plan. Instead of backpacking the 12 mile round trip trail to Lillian lake we got lost finding the trailhead, thankfully for us we had our trusty topo map of Ansel Adams wilderness and quickly made a plan B to Vandeburgh lake. The fun didn’t stop there, as we hit the trail we were swarmed by clouds of mosquitoes so thick that we thought the apocalypse was upon us. As we pushed our way into the late evening, we quickly realized that we would be hiking late into the night. By 11 pm we still hadn’t reached our campsite by the lake and decided to crash just off the trail in a clearing.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful with just a couple of small hiccups here and there and plenty of coffee (shout out to Kuju).

Yet even with all of the unexpected twists and turn the trip was still an overwhelming success. Without better words to describe we “just sent it”. That phrase is something I hope to live out more and more in the following months. Sending it doesn’t imply that we were unprepared, in packing we had all the gear we needed including the two most important pieces of gear—our topo map and plenty of Kuju Pocket Pourovers to last the whole trip. Yet, sending it did mean that we took a risk, we were willing to take a couple of wrong terms, hike a couple of miles in the dark and have a different trip than we expected but I can pretty safely say that we had an adventure filled weekend.

Yvon Chounard has some rad words that are quite fitting;

“The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong – that’s when adventure starts.”