Event: Glacier National Park, Field Trip
Date: July 2024
Location: Glacier National Park, Montana

Some children finish their last day of school and look towards the summer with glee, free from the strictures of adult supervision and full of potential for fun, activities, and shenanigans. Other kids, step onto the school bus one last time, already looking forward to summer camp. There’s probably a lot of nuance to be had in parsing out these groups of kids, but I don’t want to write that and you, the reader, don’t want to read that. Instead, I’m going to make a number of logical assumptions and call those summer camp kids nerds. What then, do we call adults who schedule running trips and call them camps? Any other self-respecting adult would call a trip taken in the summer for pleasure a vacation. An ultra runner? They call it a summer camp. Why? Nerds. Mostly. I digress.

The mediocre nerds behind this brand decided to try the whole summer camp thing, and go to Glacier National Park to do a lot of running. They planned the trip with spreadsheets, mapped out routes, bought bear spray, and packed their bags. If it sounds like they planned a lot, they did not. They stayed further out of the park than they realized, and didn’t get going-to-the-sun road reservations, meaning they had to arrive prior to 6am. Did that dampen their spirits? Maybe a little.

However, mediocrity perseveres, and our runners found themselves beneath the towering peaks of Glacier National Park, the air crackling with anticipation as they laced up their shoes, ready to conquer the unforgiving terrain. With the altitude adding some weight to their packs, they trudged up pass after pass. Eyes alert for bears, they saw an abundance of deer and mountain goats, as well as a lot of rocks that maybe looked like bears in the early morning dawn. 20+ miles each day taught them each a lot – that one of them struggles a lot more with altitude than the other, but that other has a debilitating fear of heights that sometimes means the crabwalk is the safest mode of travel. At the end of the day, the biggest lesson learned was that consecutive long days when taken in turn really aren’t that hard if you’re planning right, and that sitting in the middle of a really cold creek at the end of a run will always feel better than almost anything else in the world. Most importantly, they learned that while we may surround ourselves with structure, it’s really a return to nature, and a return to the basics that explains why we do what we do.

— @MediocreMiles_