Luck

This shot is simultaneously one of my luckiest and unluckiest. It was taken on a backpacking trip through Glacier National Park in the middle of a major forest fire back in 2018. We hadn’t been able to get backcountry permits through the lottery system before we went out there, but the fire scared a lot of people off and basically allowed us to design our dream backpacking trip through the park. We’d finished our hiking for the day, but a couple other people at the campsite we were staying at told us that there was a great overlook about ½ mile up ahead after the trail splits. We decided to go check it out, even though we only had about an hour of sunlight left. The further down the trail we went, the clearer it became that there was a misunderstanding. We thought it was ½ mile total, but they meant that it was about ½ mile from where the trail split—after a 1ish mile hike uphill. I don’t think we would have made the trip if we knew how far it was, since we already had about 12 miles and a couple thousand feet of elevation gain in our legs that day. We got lucky that people decided to cancel their trips, lucky that we’re terrible at communicating, and lucky that the smoke created some unique vistas—though definitely unlucky that the smoke obscured a lot of our big mountain views.