I spent my eighth grade year at the Aspen Middle School, which is not surprisingly in Aspen Colorado. In all honesty, Aspen is not my favorite place. I love warm weather and going to the beach all year long, instead of wearing three different jackets to school in the morning and being called a marshmallow.

But going into eighth grade was especially daunting. We all knew that the second week of school we would be leaving on a week long backpacking trip, where we would hike some thirty miles in three or four days and arrive at a small town called Marble.

Let me just tell you that we had not been thrown into something we weren’t prepared for. In seventh grade the ODE trip is a week spent on the Colorado River rafting. In sixth grade the students go on a hut trip, and in fifth they spend a week camping in Moab, Utah.

Not being an especially athletic person, I was particularly worried the day we loaded into the cars and were driven to the trailheads. And two hours into it, all I could think about was turning around and going home. My backpack was loaded down with both mine and some of the groups gear, and it was the joke of the patrol leader that it weighed more than I did (I’m fairly small, and weighed about 97 pounds then, and still do actually). My backpack was around 40 pounds.

That first day I was absolutely miserable. All I wanted to do was collapse on the trail and go to sleep. I pretended to have to go to the bathroom in order to sit down and have a short break, without my classmates laughing at me for being unable to carry on. And it was on one of my pretend bathroom breaks that it occurred to me: the majority of the weight in my backpack came from the food I was carrying.

Upon reaching camp that night, I promptly sat down in the grass and began eating. I must have eaten what was probably two or three pounds worth of granola bars and string cheese in one sitting, and in all honesty I didn’t feel too good afterwards. But I set up my tent and slept relatively well, except for the fact that my tent was on a rather large hill and I kept sliding into the door.

But the next morning I woke up with a very sore back from sleeping on a rock, and a much lighter backpack. As I slid on the straps I noticed the difference immediately. And perhaps it was just my imagination, a simple placebo making me think my pack was lighter. But by god it worked.

The rest of the hike carried on uneventfully, and I was even able to drown out the annoying voices of my classmates from time to time. And then we reached base camp, and I successfully completed all the trust exercises. I was officially and eighth grader, and I had never been so proud of myself for finishing something than I was then.