Camping and Cooking

You know what’s rad about camping? Exploring and camp food. The last part of this whole wild ride had a whole lot of both. When I was planning out the food for the trip, I really wanted to cook in the dutch oven for some reason. The very first night I had some cornbread mix ready to go and you could tell everyone was like “dude, really? We’re dog tired and now you’re going to start baking?” The real truth was that at the beginning of the trip the heat from the fire was crucial because it was still cold, but as we dropped in elevation it got warmer, so the real estate in the fire pan became less of a commodity. I would say that, combined with the fact that’s Heath’s will power at dinner had completely crumbled, so each night he was down for whatever he could get his hands on. No bake cheesecake, brownies, smores, chocolate cake, etc. In fact, when smores were on the menu it was pretty much a known fact that they were for no one else, and he would be eating a small dinner to accommodate his binging. All the marshmallows, all the chocolate, all the graham crackers. Systematically…one by one.

“I never thought my first cheesecake would be in the Grand Canyon.” No shit…that really came out of Ben’s mouth. It turns out he likes cheesecake, he just never knew it. Towards the end Ben and Heath couldn’t get the dutch oven ready fast enough and Ben even baked a cake over the fire…a fucking cake, and it was delicious.

By the end of the trip we were definitely ahead of our needed miles, so it became easier to give ourselves days off, which works out great because the canyon in the perfect place to let you inner little kid run around and explore. In fact, one of the pictures on my personal shot list was to get a good photo of one of Poler’s tents high up on a ridge. I’d seen an amazing photos my friend Ky Tait took of a landscape with a tent, and I wanted something similar. Well, we tried a couple times to hike a tent way up high and get the view, but it never seemed to get the intensity of the scene around us.

But, as I walked away from Heath setting up John’s tent one day I looked over and saw this. It’s my favorite shot of the whole trip.