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
Of course, GenAI does a lot more than order or sort text. It translates. It rewrites. It summarizes. It clarifies. It extracts. It interpolates. It expounds upon. It combines THIS and THAT into one thing. It re-imagines THIS, as if it were actually THAT. It recontextualizes THIS as if THAT didn’t exist. Its capabilities go well beyond simply sorting a list. In fact, it often gets simple sorting wrong, because it doesn’t use a hard-coded algorithm to produce it’s text transformation. Instead, GenAI uses vast troves of written example language to determine the probability of the next word it should write, and then the next, and the next… until it reaches it’s maximum output or it runs out of space.