The trip to Bearpaw = amazing. Hands down the best camping trip I have ever taken. We were so far up in the mountains in an 1890s-looking camp with no electricity, an outhouse, and a wood-burning operated water heater, that it was hard to think of a life outside this special little shangri-la. The sky looked round and scattered with the brightest stars Ive ever seen. Animals (bears, bucks, marmots) literally lived in the forest right outside our canvas tent-house. We sat by the fire at night and actually made friends with once-strangers, and listened to this guy sing songs he had written on his guitar. It was a surreal kind of place, yet it also seemed to have the formula right–maybe life was really this simple if you let it be…not that I was having revelations left and right. It just felt like the world made sense up there. 
And then we came back down to the real world. When NG’s phone finally got reception, he received a message from his mom–his 1-week old neice passed away over the weekend (long story short, she had a disease that affected her heart. They knew that if she was born the chances of survival were extremely slim). And suddenly, nothing makes sense anymore.
Weird to come down from this “other world” and be flooded with news. Not all bad though: Another friend is pregnant and The Canadian is engaged. Congrats to them!
