Canoe Trip

One month ago, the first week of August, Scott and Caleb and Seth, along with Scott's Uncle Ken, brother-in-law Justin, and Justin's brother Evan, were in the Canadian wilderness making their way through a 70+ mile canoeing adventure. It was an adventure that was long in the planning and much anticipated.

We had no contact with them for the week they were away. I could only imagine the experiences they were enjoying together. So good for them all to be free of iPods, cell phones, and laptops.

It was a trip that Scott's uncle had led various family members on half a dozen times before. One of the early trips Scott was a part of the summer he was fifteen years old, which happens to be the age Caleb turned just a couple of days after this summer's canoe adventure ended. I wondered if Scott would be somewhat disappointed on this second time on the trip, having built it up in his mind for the past twenty five years. But when we finally spoke on the phone after the trip had ended, he said that this experience had been ten times better than we had all hoped for, and that he had appreciated the beauty of their glorious mountian surroundings far more than he had as a young teen.

Caleb and Seth were definitely impressed with it all as well... and we are so grateful for these city boys to have had a week with no showers or bathrooms, sleeping in tents, eating from a pot on a little camp stove, and the hard physical labor of paddling a canoe on seventy miles of lakes. They also cavorted in freezing waterfalls, hiked through dense virgin forests, whittled and fished and put tents up and took tents down and were part of a team of guys that bonded in a way they couldn't have anywhere else.

It was all a gift, this experience. I hope my boys will remember it for the rest of their lives. I pray they will remember the mountains and lakes and forests and elk and time with men that love them... and those memories will shout to them of the glory of their Creator.

I've been meaning to post pictures of this trip... and I will, hopefully this weekend. There are lots of good ones!