Backpacking Memories from Wyoming

"Slimmer with Zimmer" was a life-changing experience

When people hear that I lived for twelve years in the wild, wonderful state of Wyoming—the seventh largest in the USA, but the least populated—they assume that I must have been a wood-chopping, mountain-climbing, horse-riding, trout-fishing, backpacking kind of fellow.

The reality was, I did sometimes chop some wood, although we stopped heating with wood when a chimney fire nearly burned down our house; and I did ride horseback sometimes, though that began way back in grad school, when I was living in Virginia; and I liked being outside in the town of Lander. And as a kid, in Boy Scouts, I went on a lot of camping trips. But climbing mountains, backpacking, and fishing were foreign activities to me, and so busy was I with teaching, reading, grading papers, faculty meetings, choir practices, and the whole usual run of life, that I can’t say it looked like I’d ever take a crack at them.

But one year it was suggested that the faculty, for their own development and to better understand the students at Wyoming Catholic College, should go on a backpacking trip similar to the one taken by freshmen as their orientation. Now, that trip is three weeks of backpacking, with two re-rations, while the faculty trip would be a modest twelve days (in the end, it turned out to be eleven because we did the hiking planned for the last three days in two days’ time); and yet, we would hike over a boulder field, past mountain lakes, over a steep pass, into the Cirque of the Towers, over a different pass, then climb Wind River Peak, and finally exit at Bruce’s Bridge near Lander. In other words, very demanding.

The planner and leader of the trip would be Dr. Thomas Zimmer, head of outdoor education at Wyoming Catholic College. Since just about all the faculty were a few pounds overweight, we jokingly called our expedition “Slimmer with Zimmer.”

I signed up for it, and boy, am I glad I did. It was, physically, the hardest thing I had ever done up to that point in my life, and the first few days were pretty awful, but eventually we got into our stride, and by the end we were sailing along the trails like pros. (It didn’t hurt that our packs were getting lighter by the day.) The penultimate day, when we summited the mountain, was the hardest thing I had to do on that trip, and I felt like quitting over and over, but positive peer pressure is a wonderful thing; you don’t want to flake out when you’re with other men, and you encourage one another to keep going.

One highlight of our trip was that a priest of the Fraternity of St. Peter, the late and much-missed Fr. Dennis Gordon, accompanied us as our chaplain for about a week’s time (he had to peel off to join a group of WCC students towards the end as their chaplain).