You're walking, and your pack is falling apart, your tins and ropes tumbling down the rocks and wrapping around your ankles.  And you're gathering it up, but everything keeps falling, and you're walking because you have this goal, but you can't keep your shit together, and everything around you is so beautiful and you are simultaneously in awe and hunched over, grabbing all your crap that keeps rolling away.

For seven miles, you're carrying on like this, waking the mountains from the dead with all the racket your stuff is causing, slipping away and you re-gathering it with every fifth step.  And you have this insurmountable precipice at the forefront of your mind, and it's really all you want to get to, all you want to ascend, and you're eyes are totally fixed on it--whenever you look up again from grabbing after the flashlight or the frying pan that rolled away.  These things are necessary, they're in your backpackers handbook, so you got to keep them in your pack or you could die at night on the mountain.  This knowledge, and the joy of getting to the top of that peak in the distance are together in your mind.

So.

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