This is The Shorts, and you're listening to The Dirt Pack Diaries, a duct tape and beer production.

With additional support from Patagonia, Kuat Racks, and New Belgium Brewing.

Bears up there, the ranger said, glancing at our backcountry travel permit

before tipping his broad-build campaign hat and ushering us out of his cramped station.

He didn't caution us, or quiz us, or check our gear, or show us a pictogram

of a car-sized beast licking brains from a pulverized human skull.

I can't guarantee that even those warnings would have kept us from our 10-day hiking trip

through Yellowstone National Park during the peak of Grizzly Bear season.

We were just out of high school. We were constantly stoned.

We traveled in an ode to that particular brand of privileged American adventure,

the cross-country drive, funded in equal parts by savings from crappy after-school jobs

at a camping store, and graduation money from loving parents.

In the fall, we'd both start at fancy colleges.

Tim, to Stanford, on his way to a pair of dad jeans and the hedge fund life in Silicon Valley,

and me, to Vassar, and nonprofits in Brooklyn, and waxing sentimental about stuff I did 15 years ago.

Our first days in the woods were everything we wanted.

The trail switched back through forests of Lodgepoll Pine, and crossed expanses of chest

high grass where elk and bison ignored us, and pronghorn stanced for cover.

At night, coyotes howled, and we smoked huge joints and misremembered the names of constellations

like Andrahajina. We talked across a small campfire about pressing issues,

what God would eat for dessert, or whether girls who skateboarded were hotter than girls who listened to rap.

Each day took us 10 miles further into the mountains, northern Wyoming.

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