Chase and I have been backpacking the last two weekends – both very quick escapes.

Last weekend, we left Bozeman at 7 pm, drove an hour without a map up a massive network of USFS roads, stopped and parked, and walked into the woods a ways.

We were back home 20 hours later, after cooking two meals over fire, exploring a gorge, and panning for gold.

This weekend, we’d get an earlier start: 5 pm.

We again drove an hour, walked into the woods, found a hidden meadow, cooked over fire, fished in a stream, wrote in our journals, and took gobs and gobs of photos and videos: of flowers, water, camp, fire, mountains, trees, birds, deer…

Then we went to bed, woke up at sunrise this morning, watched the alpenglow descend the mountain faces, explored a marsh, fished some more, and played around a lot with our cameras.

You see, Chase has this growing passion for photography. At 10, he’s enamored with the gear. He tells me he’s specializing in macro photography, as he snaps twelve images of a larkspur.

This one didn’t turn out half bad – he mounted the camera on a tripod, set the timer, and told me in no uncertain terms: “Sit still, please.”

Photo: Chase Jordan. Subject: Dad sporting new trekking duds (4.5 oz shirt, 4.0 oz pants) coming to BPL real soon, in front of a 16-ounce double wall tent he may be taking on a packraft trekking traverse across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in a week. Sigma DP1, f/4, 1/8s, ISO100, 16.6mm.