Rocky Mountain National Park
(the next day)

After surviving a hail storm that ultimately cost my insurance company $1500 for the damage to my car, I spent the night in Boulder.

Now I was on my way to Rocky Mountain National Park for a new experience: Staying in a tent in the wilderness. Except for spending the night in a tent in a friend's back yard when I was a little kid, I had ever done it. This was a pretty cool choice for my first real camping experience.

After arriving at the park, I spent the rest of the day driving through it, stopping to look at the scenery every once in a while. The park has one long road that leads all the way through. I entered on the east side, drove up the mountains until reaching about 12,500 feet, and then back down to the campground on the west side of the park.

At the end of the day, I checked into the campground and set up my tent. It was still early in the travel season...I think the road through the park had only been open a couple weeks. There weren't many people there at night. It was a perfect opportunity to drive back up to the top of the mountains and do some solitary hiking.

After parking my car near the top, I walked a path (stopping every 50 feet to catch my breath due to the altitude) to a pile of rocks. I climbed up to get an amazing vista of the surrounding area.

There weren't many people there when I arrived, and before long they had all left. I had the entire mountain to myself. I couldn't see anything else move, except for an occasional car that passed up the switchbacks on the far away road. It was a perfect environment to engage in meditation.

It was one of the most beautiful experiences I had ever had. It had been a cloudy, rainy day, but now as the sun was about to set, it began to peek out from behind the clouds and light up the sides of the mountains.

The entire world seemed to stop for the hour I was up there. Then people started walking up the path again, and I climbed down and drove back down to the campground to spend my first night.

The moment I feel asleep that night, I began having intense, vivid dreams. Everything wonderful and terrible, pleasurable and painful, fun and fearful in my life seemed to pass through my head that night. I was rolling all over the tent, and breaking out in a major sweat despite the cold temperature outside. I remember waking up at about 4 AM that thinking to myself "Shit! I'm supposed to be relaxing on this trip. What the fuck is going on here?"