It has been about a month since my Dad passed away. I've had a hard time figuring out how to write about it. Thoughts come into my head of what I might write, but then that doesn't seem right, or how can I write just a little without it spiraling into this massive novel length post? Maybe I shouldn’t care how long it is. Now that I've started, I feel like I just need to put this all down and out in the universe some where. I tend to internalize my feelings and I am not good about sharing them. Something, I think I got in part, from my Dad. But, my friends and family here. You all deserve to know how I'm feeling and what I'm feeling, and what's been going on. Also, something something someone said once about dealing with grief being best when shared or something like that. So here's a not so little write up.

I guess I'll start where my Dad would. With Love. I love my Dad very much. I used present tense deliberately because I do feel he is still with me. I have amazing memories from my childhood of playing with my Dad. He was a caring and supportive father. Always willing to make time for me. I have fond memories of him teaching me to play baseball. We would go to the park and he'd throw batting practice for me endlessly. We would go for bike rides around town, down to the river to feed the ducks after church. He was an avid bike commuter, and passed that love of bikes on to me, always encouraging me to ride my bike around town, to school, the climbing gym, wherever. Bikes are just the best way to get around, way better then silly cars.

We also spent a lot of time at our family ranch. The Quadros (named after the original homesteading family we Shepherds purchased it from). For those of you that haven't been, The Quadros is a remote piece of land near the Oregon/California border. At first glance, it can seem like a dry, rocky, hot place. Lots of juniper trees and the infamous, star thistle. But the more time you spend there, the more of its subtle, beauty you can see. My Dad's family acquired this property in the 70s and my Dad spent his high school years there, as well as much of his young adult life in between college and his agricultural endeavors after college. My Dad loved the Quadros. I try to imagine some of the stories he would tell me of being young down there. Like, the first time he got the irrigation running. My Dad was a hard worker, the hardest worker I've ever known. So, when he recounted a story about a "hard day" of work, it carried some serious weight. He told me once about this day, I think he must have been in high school or early 20s, where he spent all day digging the irrigation ditch and preparing the flood irrigation set up, which uses a network of ditches and pipes to get water from the highest point on the Bogus creek which our property touches, down to a meadow further down stream. When he finally got the water running it was starting to get dark. Just another one of those typical dawn 'til dusk days of manual labor for my Dad. But this day, he was so tired, but also so satisfied with his work, that he just laid down next to the ditch and fell asleep listening to the water. That's how I'll always picture my Dad, just a hard working grower of things. He got joy out of making the grass greener, figuratively and literally.

I'd like to think he passed on his work ethic, and love of the Quadros to me. To some degree he did. But being realistic, I could never keep up with him in an honest day of work at the ranch, even being much younger.  I think I always thought "when I grow up I'll work as hard as my Dad, but not yet…" Haha, well, now I'm definitely "grown up" so I'm not sure what I'm waiting for. But that's ok. My Dad never put pressure on me to work as hard as him. I think he worked that hard because he truly loved what he was doing, and he wanted to share his love for the ranch with others and not pressure them to keep up, but to enjoy it in whatever way they got enjoyment out of it. When I got into dirt bikes, he encouraged me to do that every time we were down there. When that switched to mountain bikes a few years ago, I was definitely no longer a kid, but he helped me make a silly little mountain bike trail with the tractor. The thing I've probably worked the hardest for in life, meaning I've put the most physical effort into it, is climbing. And If I think about my love for climbing, that’s how I can relate to my Dad's love for the ranch. He just loved being there, taking care of the land, watching things grow, creating a safe protected environment for the deer, frogs, and rabbits,  and sharing that love for the land and nature with people that he brought out there.

In other parts of my life he was always supportive. Baseball in high school, but then I gave that up because despite my Dad's private training and unlimited batting practice, I sat on the bench more than I would of liked and got frustrated. He was encouraging when I quit, and I got into climbing. My love for the outdoors definitely comes from him. I have a very early memory of my first time ever camping with my Dad. It was in the Redwoods, and we did a short hike with a tent just up a hill. I sort of remember there being absolutely no trail. We just hiked up the hill from the car, a short distance, but far enough that we had to carry our tent and food and things in a backpack. It must have been one of his first times camping actually now that I think back on it because I have this weird memory of him bringing milk for cereal. Like, who brings liquid milk backpacking?

My Dad and his brothers have always gone for backpacking trips for as far back as I remember. They took me on my first trip when I was six (after the redwoods one I just mentioned). That's crazy, I cant imagine taking a six year old backpacking. I must have whined and complained so much. But they did. And I continued to go on trips with them from that time on almost every summer through high school, and less frequently but still on through my adult life. In those early years, I remember trying to carry a backpack myself. But like any kid put through a difficult physical time, inevitably I'd end up in tears at some point. My Dad was always there to take stuff out of my pack and carry it for me, or carry the entire pack itself. He was always just a calm, reliable source of strength and support in times of need.

My Dad also got me into skiing at a very young age. I grew up going to Willamette Pass with him many weekends throughout the winter, and this passion is eventually what led me to Montana. Another unique activity we always did when I was young, was what we called "snow caving". That name came up organically, when I was young I thought that's what it was called, I guess because the basic premise was that we went out and dug snow caves in the backcountry and slept in them. It's basically just winter camping, which people do of course do, but it's not super common. My Dad over many years of iteration, came up with a pretty solid design for a sled for towing behind while backcountry skiing. It was like his mini little engineering project, I still have what I believe are two of his remaining prototypes. They have an elegant PVC pipe frame which attaches to support braces which connect to a harness or backpack, making them handle quite better than your average DiY backcountry sled set up. He actually had a really good mind for engineering, way better than me despite my college degree in mechanical engineering. Anyway we'd pack these sleds full of winter clothes, snow shovels, bacon, and whatever else you need to survive in the winter, and ski in a few miles to the Oregon backcountry, usually near Crater lake since they get the most snow in the area. We'd spend hours or days setting up our winter camp. As a kid, it was magical building a network of snow trails between our dug out kitchen with tarp shelter, to the snow cave where we slept, and then some years to various igloos or whatever else we'd build in the 4 days we were out there. With the friends that my Dad would convince to bring along with us, we would dig out these massive snow caves. I think I remember on the most popular year we had a group of 10 people or so on one of these trips, and managed to fit something like 8 people in a single snow cave. Just another testament to his work ethic, but that's a big snow cave! I tried recreating one in the last couple of years and it was a lot of work. I made one probably big enough for a single person and it took hours, I cant imagine digging one big enough for 8. But, that was just my Dad, exposing me to wild new activities that nobody else I know of my age was doing. He showed me how to work hard, and have fun doing it in the outdoors. He fostered a sense of adventure, but was quick to laugh at a joke or have fun and take a break when needed.

He always asked me about my climbing. He helped me make my first connection in Chile, and after high school I had the wonderful opportunity to work as a hiking guide down there for a family friend. I really fell in love with climbing down there, and came back and went to school at Montana State. I wasn't always good at including him in my life. He always wanted to know more about my life. It is of course, common for young people at some point to put some distance between themselves and their parents. Its probably natural, some part of growing up that I can't explain. But I definitely experienced it. And now more than ever I regret it. That time of distance for me might have been the most pronounced while I was at college. I think it was hard for me because you know, college, I was having fun being young and dumb and trying out alcohol and whatever for the first time. My Dad never drank alcohol and did not approve of it. It was really hard for me to have some confrontational type conversations with my Dad, about me being an adult and living the way I want to. Especially when I was young, I just altogether avoided those conversations and pretended I wasn't drinking or doing whatever people do in college. It would have been a hard conversation, but my Dad was just always full of Love, even when he didn’t agree with something, and I'm sure we would have figured it out and he always would have loved and supported me no matter what, but it’s a talk we never had. And that makes me sad to think about, that for some reason I felt like I couldn’t always be completely open about things that we disagreed on.

I do have at least one really fond memory of my time in Montana where my Dad came out to visit me. We went backpacking in the Tobacco Root mountains. We did maybe 3 or 4 nights just him and I out there in the summer. The Tobacco Roots are pretty remote, but beautiful and alpine feeling. Compared to places in Oregon, they are quite wide open with less trees and undergrowth, and we enjoyed just hiking off trail in whatever direction we felt like. My Dad kept commenting how he loved that, just being able to look at a ridge and say "hey let's go there" whether or not there was actually a trail leading there. He really wanted to see a mountain goat. I was hiking a little ways ahead of my dad, we were up high above tree line and near one of the summits of the mountain range. I came around a corner and  had this goat maybe 20 feet away from me staring me in the face. It was such a cool magical experience, and then my Dad came up behind me and spooked the goat off before he got a chance to see it. Haha, I think he was like trying to say some thing to me and I was trying to shush him like "ssshhhhh goat!" but it was too late and he didn’t see it. The rest of the trip the whole mission was to get my dad to see one, but we never saw another.

In my adult years, I feel sad thinking about how I've spent less time with my Dad than I would have liked. Life has a way of carrying you away. I get caught up in too many little projects and lose track of days, weeks, months, and years. Neither of us were very good about calling each other often enough. I wish I'd been better. We'd still meet up at the annual Shepherd's backpack trip when I could every few years. I made it to less of those than I'd like, but he never missed one. I'd see him at the ranch multiple times a year, and I will always cherish those memories. Like that one time, where we had to move a piano with the tractor for some reason… (who knows why). Or figuring out together how easy it is to lose a track on an excavator if you're not driving it right. When Hannah and I got a woodburning stove, he was supportive of me coming down and harvesting firewood to keep us warm through the winter months. We spent the most recent years (and by we I mean mostly my Dad) building roads along all of the irrigation ditches so that a person could more easily access them by vehicle. He would always "walk the ditch" the old school way. Just a guy, with a shovel and some rubber boots. From the head of the ditch down to the meadow, cleaning it out and making sure the water runs clean through it, that there aren't any major gopher holes or leaks, delivering the maximum amount of water to wherever he was trying to irrigate.

 I think, in the last few moments that I got to spend with my Dad, one thing that will always make me sad, is one of the last things he said to me was "I just want to get to Know you…". I'm sorry Dad, that you felt like you didn’t know me. I'm sorry that at times, I'd put a wall up because I didn't know how to talk about certain things with you. You did know me. I'm just the same kid that you taught how to camp, ski, work, and who loves people and nature because of you. I never changed. And I still Love you Dad.