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This was my first camping trip since I broke my leg in a mountaineering accident in August. I had been itching to get outside for months. This was also a trip to celebrate my 28th birthday, a birthday I almost didn’t make it to because of the accident. So it had to be a special one. The original plan was to camp in Big Sur. I made a joke when I first moved to LA that even in Southern California, I could never have nice weather on my birthday. In my hometown, it was always miserably cold and snowy. Now that I lived 500 miles south, the snow was replaced with rain, and it rained every year on my birthday. I knew I was taking some risks deciding to sleep outside in December, but I couldn’t help it. I was in dire need of some nature hangs. Long story short, we got rained out of Big Sur and I was feeling pretty depressed about it. I was scouring Google Earth in search of a last minute camping spot, and monitoring weather apps in hopes that the forecast would shine some sun on my camping prospects. Which is how we found ourselves in Death Valley, the driest place in North America. Despite my anxiety surrounding the effort to make this the “perfect” birthday campout, things just seemed to fall into place. I hadn’t made plans for what we would do during the day, so our time was spent exploring the park. And it was awesome. We off-roaded, drove through insanely huge mud puddles, saw some incredibly beautiful and spooky landscapes filled with Joshua Trees and fast moving fog, hiked along massive craters, and visited the lowest point in the lower 48. I also ate my body weight in KBBQ and cake in front of the campfire. I really couldn’t have asked for anything better. The perfect sendoff was spending golden hour at Zabriskie Point. The textures that exist in this eroded landscape are mind boggling, and I could have stared at them for hours, watching the changes as the sun moved across the sky. In all honesty, I know I could write pages about how stunning the landscape was that surrounded us, but the most important part of this trip was spending time with those I care about.