Trek...Chapter 1

I've never had so many adventures that require multiple chapters! Or I'm just getting older and not able to stay up until the wee hours like I used to. Anyway...our family has had an AMAZING adventure over the last 3 days. I'm a little overwhelmed even trying to describe all that has happened and how it has not only changed our little family but touched each of us individually. There are not many experiences in life that you can literally watch your children change before your eyes or see things physically and spiritually emerge from them that you did not know were there. I feel like I truly have been given some amazing gifts and I'll try to share what has happened as best I can.

Exactly one year ago this month, the youth in our ward attended a stake "trek". Now I am not a Utah native so I'd never heard nor ever experienced a youth "trek" before. It was interesting watching the whole event unfold...the kids and their leaders travelled to a church owned ranch on the Utah/Wyoming border where they spent 3 days pulling handcarts over the same land that our ancestors travelled so many years before. What was wonderful was hearing about their experiences and listening to them bear their testimonies about what transpired on this trek. I truly felt a little cheated that I'd never had the experience. It sounded amazing.

Well, shortly after their activity last summer, our ward activity chair proposed the idea of doing a ward family trek to the ward council. Everyone agreed it would be an amazing experience but no one was certain how realistic it would be. Our fearless leader called Deseret Land and Livestock Ranch and asked about the feasibility of the idea. She was told that there were absolutely no openings available. As far as I knew, the idea was abandoned.

Last Christmas, our ward held a fabulous pioneer themed Christmas party. (Someday I will devote an entire post to our ward activity chair. This is absolutely no ordinary woman and the ward activities she has executed have been unbelievable. Never, ever ordinary and you always walk away having had an extraordinary experience...but that is for another post.) I have to admit that I thought the whole pioneer theme was a little random but like I said, we are not dealing with a woman who likes to do ordinary things. The party was spectacular and at the very end, they had everyone come in to the chapel so that the bishopric could give a special present to the ward members. They unwrapped a box and unrolled a huge banner that said, "Orchard Hills Ward 2008 Pioneer Trek...Come Take Your Place" and gave the date. I think everyone was pretty stunned. Apparently the circumstances with how this opportunity came to be were pretty miraculous and I can't remember the whole story. But our ward would be the first ward to trek together as families...our kids are the first to have trekked at this place. It was going to be a really unique experience.

They gave each family in our ward the names of real handcart pioneer families that each of us would be trekking for. It was not only staggering to think of the time and effort that went in to finding these names but our ward activity chair had actually found whole families that pretty closely matched our own families. And like I said, these were real families she had researched that had crossed the plains and pushed handcarts to Zion. Our family consisted of a father, mother, 2 boys close to our boys ages and a girl close to H.'s age. Each of us were encouraged to research our families and learn as much about them as we could. It was humbling to me that several of these individuals we were trekking for had not been able to complete their journey and had died along the way. While this was not the case with our pioneer family, I felt a strange sensation that this was a powerful opportunity to not only represent these individuals and the sacrifices they had made, but to somehow bring their experience full circle and see their journey to Zion physically completed. I felt strongly connected to these individuals who were not our direct descendants but who belonged to this gospel family where each of us are recipients in one way or another of these faithful Latter Day Saints who physically and spiritually made journeys that have brought all of us to the places we are today. I also loved the theme they had chosen for the ward trek...Come Take Your Place. Thus was the beginning of an interesting journey.

Over the last several months, we have been encouraged to prepare physically, spiritually, and emotionally for this experience. A trek committee was formed and it is hard for me to imagine the hours and hours of service that they have dedicated to the preparation and execution of this event. Every month we had some type of pioneer activity that focused on these 3 areas. We were also given papers each month that listed goals and activities we could do to prepare and start to more fully appreciate who these pioneers were and what the purpose of this experience was. We were encouraged to not only physically prepare with becoming physically stronger, collecting the gear we would need, etc. but we were challenged to learn new songs and hymns, memorize scriptures, study the lives of these individuals and understand the gospel more intensely in a number of different ways. This committee truly provided ways for each member of the ward to become engaged in this activity and experience. It has been months of preparation and opportunity and I wish I had taken even better advantage of all they provided and recommended.

This last month has been "crunch" time. Preparing for this trek has taken lots of time and resources. I have to admit that as the time approached, I became more and more stressed about the logistics of preparing for this. Tents, sleeping bags, eating arrangements, clothes, transportation...all the details started to stress me out. The ward members were divided up in to 4 different handcart companies represented by four different colors: red, blue, purple and black. Within each company, we were then divided in to handcart families...2-3 families that would be sharing one handcart. Each person was allowed one 6-7 gallon plastic bucket that could not exceed 17 pounds. Our tents, sleeping stuff, and other camping gear would be hauled up in trailers and waiting for us at our base camp. It was truly a daunting experience to try and prepare for this. I don't know why I felt so overwhelmed and discouraged...especially the final week before we left. A friend shared with me that she was feeling exactly the same way and felt like Satan was really trying to discourage her from going. We even had several families or individuals back out for various reasons just a few days before leaving. Hearing her thoughts intensified my desires to go. I really felt like this had the potential to be a life-changing experience for me and my family and that there was a very real unseen power trying to frustrate our efforts to prepare for this. It was a very real emotional roadblock I felt like I had to get around and we continued to prepare even though the stress continued to mount with all the other responsibilities that were falling around us. Another friend made the comment that she was certain some of the stress we were feeling was representative of the emotions so many of these pioneer women felt except they were having to prepare for a journey with no "home" to arrive at. I thought often of these women during the course of the days leading up to our activity. I wondered how they felt as they tried to anticipate the needs of their families, preparing to set out across a literal wilderness to a destination they knew little about. I wondered about the women forced to leave their homes and farms and flee in the dead of winter from mobs crushing in around them. How did these women choose what to pack? What to take and what to leave behind? How did they handle the stress of taking their little ones out into the cold and trying to help their families prepare for the challenges that lay ahead? I marvel now more than ever at the emotional, spiritual and physical stresses and challenges they faced. I understand in a tiny way more clearly the frustrations and discouragements they had to overcome in order to pack those wagons and set their hearts and faces to Zion. They had to have absolute faith and trust in the Lord and His promises. How did they have faith in those blessings when they were freezing and starving to death and burying their families? How did they find the courage to overcome the discouragement and keep moving? I remember one of my MTC instructors saying that you never heard of a pioneer going inactive on the plains because they were given something to do and had to keep moving. How can I find the strength of mind and heart to keep moving forward and keep actively "engaged" in the gospel, to manuver around the roadblocks and keep an eternal perspective? I left with such gratitude in my heart but also with questions that I was curious to see if pushing these handcarts could help me answer.

I am so grateful for the help I received in preparing. My darling sister Carrie made H. the most exquisite pioneer outfit. She made her a dress, 2 pinafores that I initially wasn't going to be caught dead letting my 3-year old tromp across the dusty plains in and a pair of pantalons that were so cute I wondered if we could just skip the skirt. I bought myself a real pioneer skirt and bonnett and we got the boys outfitted with plaid shirts and boring blue and khaki pants. We all busted out our trusty tennis shoes for the event and I have to say that was my favorite part...all the rustic looking pioneer clothes with the Nike tennis shoes underneath. Hey, I'm sure if the pioneers had had the option, they would have chosen sturdy tennis shoes too.

After months of preparation and planning, it was finally time to go.

We hauled our gear up to the trailers at the church the night before we were supposed to leave. I was giggling at how much stuff everybody had...including our little family. While I was willing to trek across the prairie, I was not willing to sleep in a cow pie under the wagon for 2 nights. We invested in a new air mattress, borrowed a tent the size of a small apartment, and packed enough snacks to bribe our little pioneers across the wilderness. I did pack some beef jerky that we tried to tell our kids was "buffalo" jerky...and I thought the huge bag of Swedish fish lent a sort of "immigrant-ish" feel to the whole snack bucket. I'm sure there were handcart pioneer spirits that got a good laugh out of the stuff we thought was essential for 3 days. Different times...

Well, here I am. Seriously falling asleep at the computer. And I haven't even arrived at the actual trek experience. I have a serious detail problem. But this is my blog...and nobody is twisting your arm to read all of this...although if you stop now, you really are going to miss out on the best parts. So good night for now my little prairie dogs. Come back and visit soon.