Chapter 1

For as long as I can remember our family, which consists of mom, dad, my sister and I, went camping.

We live in Cedar City, Utah and we head up Brian Head Peak every September for a month.

As soon as we got home we started planning for the next one. We had been doing this since dad bought a cabin on the way up the peak, near the 7,000-foot mark. (Its topmost point is 11,307 feet.)

It involved planning meals, buying the groceries to make the meals, accumulating water to take with us, both for drinking and non-potable reasons as well! Also, plenty of candles, matches and at least seven changes of clothes.

Dad is a well-known surgeon and mom is a tenured professor at SUU, Southern Utah University.

Cedar City is a town in Southern Utah, at an elevation of 5,846, with a population of nearly 39,000, as of the 2020 Census.

It has an average September temperature of 87 (high) to 58(low). We’ve encountered lots of snow, sometimes rain, and the occasional beautiful crisp day up where the air smells like air and not the water treatment plant on the north end of town.

As things get closer, (Think July) we all have responsibilities to take care of.

Mine was to have the Suburban made ready for the trip. We rent an attachable U-Haul and fill it with four cords of wood for the fireplace, and whatever else we can’t fit in the Suburban. (A cord of wood is four-foot-tall, four-foot-wide and eight feet long. While that sounds like a lot, it’s better to bring some home than to run out. One year we did, we packed up quickly and were home in our own beds barely an hour later.)

The cabin has four single beds but has no electricity or running water. There is a large enough fireplace to use for heating the place as well as cooking over! We use the ice on the ground to keep our bottled water and soft drinks cold.

I am Jeff, your storyteller, I am 21 and go to SUU as does my sister Mary, who is my Irish twin and is 20 years old,

A key feature of going to the same university that your mother teaches at is that we get free school for as long as we carry eight units per calendar year.

Our parents met and got married while living in Cedar City and going to SUU at the same time. Their schooling cost money. Thomas, our father at the age of 28, was a well-respected doctor specializing in the kind of surgeries it takes five hours at a time. Suzanne our mother, had a teaching agree at the age of 25.

By the first week of August we were on our way to being ready to take our trip!

Over the last 10 years the only problem is we’ve had was a flat tire on the suburban one time and forgetting batteries for our walkie-talkies that we take so that we can go off on walks sometimes together, sometimes alone.

Three days before we were leaving dad got a call that a woman was being flown to Dixie Regional Medical Hospital needing one of those five-hour surgeries.

Mom decided to stay home with him but the two of them strongly recommended we go off to camp out by ourselves, and we couldn’t convince them to let us stay!