I’m an adventure person. Always have been.

The grind is the grind — it pays the bills and keeps things moving — but if I don’t have something fun on the calendar that feeds that side of me, I start to go down.

I get flat.

So I deliberately put stuff on the horizon. Something to strive for. Something that reminds me I’m still out there living, not just getting through the week.

The video clip & blog post are from my WTF: Time is Ticking Podcast, enjoy the entire episode!

For years I’d see this guy on social media posting about Mount LeConte.

Every time he got to the top he’d write the number: 138 climbs, then higher. I kept thinking, “This dude’s doing it that many times… it has to be epic.”

Turns out it’s not some technical alpine climb.

Roughly six miles up, six miles back on the Alum Cave Trail. There’s an off-grid lodge up top with a mess hall and little cabins that books out a year or two in advance. That was enough for me.

I had a couple friends staying with us up at the house in North Carolina — Eagle’s Nest — and I floated the idea.

“It’s a little intense if you guys are down for it, but I think we should do it.”

They were in.

We packed snack bags the night before, set alarms for 1:30 in the morning, and drove an hour to the trailhead.

We were on the Alum Cave Trail by about 2:30 a.m., headlamps on, music in one ear, just putting one foot in front of the other in the dark.

You can’t see much.

Definitely not the scale of what’s around you.

About halfway up it was still pitch black. We came around a bend and I looked up. From everything I’ve done and everywhere I’ve been, that was the most beautiful sky I’ve ever seen.

Complete clarity. Zero light pollution. We stood there for 25 or 30 minutes just taking it in.

Absolute silence and stars.

The goal was simple: make the ridgeline before the sun came up.

We wanted the sunrise. The trail isn’t a flat 5K — you’re on rocks, it gets sketchy in spots — and as we got closer I could see the light starting to break over the ridge.

We were still about a mile out. I started fast-pacing, then pulling away from the others.

“Guys, we gotta go. We’re not gonna make it.”

They knew what I was after, so I just went. The last stretch I was jogging, bumping into trees, scrambling over rocks and cliffy sections, just trying to get there.

I hit the lookout — the one past the lodge — right as the sun was coming over.

There were already people there. Turns out they’d stayed the night at the lodge, rolled out of their cots, and walked over. I’d just done a six-mile night hike starting at 2:30 a.m.; they wiped the sleep out of their eyes.

A woman up there offered to take my picture.

She said something funny while she was doing it and I started cracking up. Right after the photo, the rest of my group came around the corner. We all got to stand there and take it in.

It wasn’t a murder hike. It wasn’t Everest.

But it was challenging enough, and in that moment nothing else mattered. We did the thing. I can still feel that picture. The sky halfway up. The light finally breaking after hours of dark. The present-ness of it.

That’s why I keep putting these on the calendar. The grind will always be there.

The adventure side needs feeding too. And every once in a while you get one of those mornings where the effort, the dark, the stars, and the sunrise all line up and remind you why you bother.

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