Before our recent ten day trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, it had been almost thirty years since my buddy Dick and I had last slept outside in the woods. While so much has changed over the past three decades, the fundamental pleasures of being outside all came back: coming upon an alpine lake after a long, dusty hike; seeing the Milky Way in the middle of the night; being surrounded by wildlife in their own habitat.

While I consider myself a self-proclaimed mountaineer who has done many things even most thru-hikers would not, this is new territory for me. The longest I’ve hiked in one single…