Two years. This feels important and even weightier than meeting the original goal, which was one night sleeping outside per month for a year. The routine and its rituals have now crystallized, the inertia of habit creating its own momentum. My family knows to expect it, “it’s my camping weekend” needs no explanation or bargaining. The list I keep on my phone of gulches, ridges, meadows and desert hideaways where I have pitched my tent or converted the family SUV into a makeshift camper is long. Even my boss knows about this streak I’m on and simply wishes me well after the spreadsheets are closed for the day. I attached this month’s excursion to a work trip, my 4 Runner loaded with snowshoes and suit jackets, a camp stove and a laptop. The cognitive dissonance between my wandering self and the government office job is stark. The meetings and their agendas wrap up at noon on Friday, the black knee high boots that match my blouse quickly swapped for musty hiking boots with dirty shoelaces and a down jacket. Off to Rocky Mountain National Park I go. The idea of a park of mountains in the middle of an ocean of mountains has always seemed ridiculous to me. In a three thousand mile wall of craggy peaks that run from Canada to Mexico, how did these come to be the representative sample? The San Juans are more dramatic, the Anthracites more elegant, the sky of Montana so much bigger. It seems profoundly turn of the century arrogant to isolate, fence, and label this particular square as worthy of a title. I imagine a man in wool pants and spectacles saying definitively, these here, young man are the Rocky Mountains. Not those. These. These ones here. We will charge them much to see them. No dogs. Nevertheless, the park does house an outstandingly beautiful subset of peaks and valleys, lakes and spongy meadows. In February, it’s quiet and nearly feels wild, the folded earth ancient and imposing. So great are these mountains that even their shadows seem to have mass. But the enormity of this empty campground and the ubiquity of the signage belies an Edward Abbey fever dream. Not thousands, but millions of humans swarm this place every summer, great snake-like trains of cars winding around and over and across these valleys, people spilling out across the banks of high alpine lakes like sargossam. But in February, the silence is appropriately reverential to the cathedral. The only car I see all weekend is the white, slow moving truck of a park ranger. The blue of the sky is vibrant but a cold current of wind rushes down the cirque, across the valley, and into my face. Even though I am camped at nearly 10,000 feet, the snow is thin, as it is everywhere this year. I could get the car ready for the evening, but elect instead to practice-run winter camping. Ankle deep snow and a brick bathroom down the hill make the stakes extremely low. I take it as a fact finding opportunity– a chance to test out boots, problem solve staying dry, experiment with methodology for subzero, 3:00 am peeing. Although this winter is ending, another will come and it’s a good time to prepare for months 33, 34, 35 and 36. Over the course of the weekend, I have small successes. I make a fire. My feet stay dry. My gear is orderly. I replace a guyline on the tent. I have to replace the guyline because I broke the plastic piece getting it out from under the rock where it had frozen to the ground. I wear a trench in the snow going back and forth from the car, I put things here, forget, and move them there. I melt the Nalgene. On the final evening, the sky flashes orange, the blaze brief and vivid. Staring at the ocher, cottony clouds, the lemony streaks of the fading day, I think of the ludicrousness of this. I hear the skiing is great at home this weekend, the miserly winter finally parsing out several inches of powder on Mt. Crested Butte. A large portion of the people I choose to spend my free time with, including my husband, will be giddily loading chair lifts, leaving snaking tracks down the Head Wall, the Glades, and the North Face. And here I am, sipping soup out of a titanium cup, hovering over a small fire, preparing to crawl into a sleeping bag at 7:30 pm. Because it’s what I do. At least one time, every month.