Hiking the Windsor Trail in the Pecos Wilderness

I’m not a backpacker. Sure, I’ve gone on day hikes with a rucksack and granola bars. I regularly go kayaking in alligator infested bayous (still haven’t seen one in the water), I have even been glamping under the big and bright Texas stars. Yet, with the exception of scouting experiences as a child and one ill-fated camping trip in a truck pop-up tent, at the end of the day, I have always found my way back to a comfortable bed and a shower. Until a couple weeks ago, when I agreed to go backpacking in the wilderness of New Mexico.

My partner in crime, trail name Chiripada, has done this before and loves it. He picked up his trail name from a winery we passed, and it turned out to be more apropos than we realized. Like many Spanish idiomatic words and phrases, translation into English does not necessarily capture the subtlety of the true meaning. Chiripada is one of those words. It roughly means “unexpected luck” or good luck within bad luck. An example is that you spill your coffee, but you find money under the table when you clean up. That was much of our trip in a nutshell.

You would not think a career in legal innovation would prepare you for your first backpacking trip, but surprisingly, similar lessons can be applied to both.

1. Expect the Unexpected

Just like handling evaluations of tools, nothing ever goes completely according to plan. And we had more than a few things not go according to plan. Thankfully our chiripada prevailed–no one was injured and no major damage occurred.

We knew Hurricane Beryl would hit land in Texas, but at the time of our departure, it was not estimated to have a great impact where I live. Nevertheless, I prepared my family, stocking up with water and food (bread and milk!), and lots of instructions. Which turned out to be a good thing because the day before the storm hit, we discovered the eye was going right over my town.

It wasn’t supposed to storm at Williams Lake (elevation 11040 feet). There was not supposed to be thunder and lightning and cold temperatures. I can now say a severe thunderstorm at elevation in a tent is quite a different experience than when you are sitting in your house. At home, you worry the power will go out. In the wilderness, you worry you will get struck by lightning. We survived and had a brisk but lovely hike down the mountain early the next morning.

We never made it to one camping destination at Stewart Lake (elevation 10232 feet) (more on that later). We were lucky to find one flat spot before it got dark. Thankful, we settled in for the night only to be awakened at 3:00 am by an irritated bear. I know it was irritated because I looked up “bear sounds” after our return to civilization and learned that huffing means a bear is upset. Which was likely because a tent with smelly humans was on its turf. We sat in the dark, tense and listening until our guest moved on into the night.

2. But Prepare as Best You Can

When evaluating tools, it is necessary to prepare. You assess tools, you prepare requirements and questions to ask vendors. When you are presenting, you make an outline, craft a presentation and review it.

My job for this trip was to prepare the itinerary and book the rooms we would stay in between hiking jaunts (I would be useless figuring out what to pack-I left that to the expert). I took my job seriously, making an excel sheet of the places we would go, careful to include driving distance, hiking distance and anticipated time allotted for each. Did we completely adhere to this itinerary? No. Was it useful to know our timeline and keep track of our days (you do forget what day it is)? Yes.

3. Travel Light

I am a big fan of the KISS principle (and the band, but that is another essay), although I have to sometimes remind myself to get out of the weeds when dealing with projects. Look for the easiest way to solve a problem first.

This concept is akin to traveling light. You may know that backpackers always balance being prepared for every situation with packing as little as they can. Because those packs are HEAVY. And they are really heavy after you have been traveling six miles uphill in elevation (and you live at sea level). After several hours of walking, I kept thinking of the Katz excerpts from Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods,” and Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” where they share freak-outs about over-packing. Funny as hell, unless it is you. We weren’t quite Katz-level packers, but on our second outing, we made sure we were much lighter.

4. If You Want to Go Fast, Travel Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Travel Together.

While this is not specifically a lesson from legal innovation experience, I do think it says something about the need for teamwork and trust. You might get quick wins alone, but to make multi-step improvements or institute complex change, you need to have a team and you need each other’s backs.

I would never have gone backpacking except for Chiripada. He got me excited about the adventure and encouraged me that I could, in fact, do this. We listened to Backpacker Radio, window shopped at REI and debated the merits of different freeze-dried camp food (Peak and Stowaway Gourmet are good).

When we lost our bearings and our footing heading to Stewart Lake (more on that later) or when the uphill seemed never-ending trekking to Williams Lake, we kept each other motivated and positive. Thankfully we floundered at different times, but a rest, a snack, a joke and some encouraging words go a long way.

5. Be Ready to Pivot

When the unexpected happens–your client changes the requirements of a project midway or budgets disappear, you have to be ready to change course quickly and decisively.

On our first hike, headed to Stewart Lake, we had to turn back and find an alternative campground. Chiripada was unsteady for most of the hike and we both had not adjusted to altitude. We got a late start, ran out of daylight and had limited water. It was disappointing, but it was the correct call.

6. Focus

It is so easy to get distracted from what you need to accomplish on a project. There are a million other obligations, both personal and professional vying for our attention. But when you don’t stay focused, it can ultimately make the experience unnecessarily more challenging. Which sucks for everyone involved.

You may be getting the sense that the Stewart Lake hike was a series of unfortunate events. If so, you are correct, and most of them could have been avoided if we had been more focused. Medication was forgotten and had to be reordered locally. A trip to REI in town was needed for a missing item. In our rush to get started, we managed to forget a knife AND a leatherman, so had no tools to cut cording to hang backpacks or to defend ourselves if necessary. We could not light the SOLO stove because matches would not work and tinder was not dry enough. Due to a technical glitch, the map did not load on the phone and we had not checked it before we got into satellite access only territory. As darkness started to set in on the mountain, we could not figure out which trail to take or how far we needed to go. Looking back, I wonder how we managed to get so much so wrong, but at the time, we thought we were OK. We thought we had planned enough. We had not because we did not keep our focus. Lesson learned.

7. Mistakes are Opportunities Waiting to Happen/Fail Fast

Anyone working in legal innovation has heard these nuggets. Mistakes should be made quickly, we should learn from them and look for the opportunities they unveil.

The Stewart Lake hike quickly taught us that hiking the longer and very strenuous trails might have been a bit ambitious. Based on our experience, we adjusted our itinerary to substitute a similarly strenuous hike to Trampas Lake with a shorter, but still challenging hike to Williams Lake. Here we met a number of fellow hikers who were happy to share New Mexico anecdotes, and the location of a waterfall known only to the locals. Chiripada’s experience with the hiking poles at Stewart Lake caused him to experiment with one pole which turned out to be a game changer in staying balanced.

When we got home, we immediately looked for alternative trails to Lake Stewart and found one that is a mile shorter with several flat campgrounds along the way. Now we have a future goal to accomplish.

8. Just Deal with It

Stuff happens at work. In legal innovation and in life. Don’t play the blame game. Just deal with it and move on.

I mentioned that our stove did not work at Stewart Lake. Without hot water we could not make the freeze dried dinners we brought. Maybe not a big deal normally, but when you have been hiking all day dealing with a series of unfortunate events, it is easy to think dark thoughts about your hiking partner and catastrophize that you will starve in the forest. Of course we had other food–our granola bags did not require hot water. And it was the best damn mountain berry granola we ever ate.

9. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

You can also call this “No Harm, No Foul.” So many little mistakes are made all the time at work by everyone. We are human, after all. Most of these errors do not have a truly detrimental effect and if that is the case, have some grace, take a breath and let it go.

Did things go wrong on our trip? Absolutely. And I didn’t even tell you about the taco salad at Del’s. Did anything catastrophic happen? No. Could it have? Sure, but it didn’t and lessons were learned. No sense obsessing over the “could haves, should haves, would haves.”

10. Appreciate Serendipity

This is different from “Expect the Unexpected,” in that serendipity is about appreciating little but good things at work that pop up unexpectedly. A joke shared with a colleague, donuts in the breakroom, enjoying a walk at lunch. If you are mindful of these occurrences, and can find wonder and gratitude about them, they will revitalize you even on a bad day. And they might even spark your creative, problem-solving gene.

We had so many of these moments on trail, it seemed like some sort of magic surrounded us. When you challenge yourself mentally and physically, removing yourself from the day to day norm, amazing things can happen.

I knew we were headed into dark sky country hiking in the Pecos Wilderness, but I was not prepared for the night sky experience, free of ambient light. I got out of the tent in the middle of the night to crane my head back and look at the Milky Way, along with constellations bursting with stars. It made all the efforts of the day worth it.

We met day hikers on Winsor Trail and they had a cute golden retriever. The dog was clearly thirsty and its humans had no water!!!! I gave this pup water right out of my bottle. It was a good feeling to help out fellow trail travelers.

In the Jemez Recreation Area, we hiked to Jemez Falls. The water on the mountains is crystal clear, and I was determined to go swimming under those falls. When we arrived, we met two photographers from Santa Fe. They were doing long exposure shots of the falls. They asked if they could take my picture, and after situating myself on a submerged boulder, I agreed.  The pictures of me capture all the fun and wonder of the experience. We chatted afterward and took a group photo. Our photographer friends suggested some places to eat in Taos-Orlandos and the Taos Inn. Both were great. As was the Taos Mesa Brewery, where we happily discovered that servers follow their dreams.

While I might not be ready to trade my cozy bed for a tent permanently, this backpacking trip reminded me of invaluable lessons that apply to both the wilderness and the wild world of legal innovation. Who knew that battling bears and thunderstorms could make me a better innovator? Next time you’re faced with a daunting project, keep these lessons in mind. And maybe consider packing an extra granola bar and a leatherman in your sack– you never know when you might need a snack, a utility tool or experience a bit of chiripada.