Mountains

Every Spring Break, my family takes a ski/snowboarding trip. We've done this for at least five years now. Getting into the mountains is always eventful. One time we nearly ran into the guard rail and could have died. This time, apparently everyone else was having trouble driving. Every trip up or down the mountain (we made the round trip for four days) was horrendous.

Cars slipped all over the ice and sat bumper-to-bumper along the fifteen-mile road to the top. I thought about the nature of what we were doing. Not only was it dangerous for all of us to be making that drive, but we were all polluting so much! We were on that road for two hours one way.

On the last trip up the mountain, we were at a complete stop for so long that Jared and I went for a walk. We passed about fifty cars on foot. It was so nice to get out and do that, too. A while later, my cousin, Drew, and I got out of the car again to check out an ice skating pond. It was so covered by snow that we couldn't tell where it actually was. We played it smart and didn't try to walk on it. Nobody needs to catch hypothermia!

In doing those small excursions from the long ride up, I realized a small piece of how much we miss by driving past it all. There is life in every piece of that mountain. In the future, I want to spend more time enjoying the life in that special environment than spending huge loads of money for the industrialized tourist attraction that is skiing/snowboarding.