Surviving Tech-Free — Four Amazing Days in the Cascade Mountains
A Digital Detox Weekend at Mount Baker, WA — Photo Journal
It’s 6 A.M. and I’m awake. No alarm necessary because my mind has already been spinning for the last hour or so.
Are we really doing this?
As the back part of my brain is still cataloging all of our stuff to make sure we didn’t forget anything, the front part of my brain is trying to calculate exactly how long it’s been since we did something like this…
Let’s see, there’s 2001, when we went out to the Olympic Coast… No, we had our cell phones with us. I guess it would have to be when we hiked into that small campground at Itasca… When my wife was pregnant with our eldest daughter.
Friday is our 22nd anniversary, and our eldest daughter is about to turn 19, and our youngest son is 5…
Holy crap!… Has it been that long?
The crazy thing is, I’ve been dreaming of this day for months… No, years really… Maybe decades.
Clearly this trip into the Wild has been a long time coming. And yet, now that it comes to it, I’m laying here wondering if we should really leave our iPhones at home.
Maybe we could just bring them along but shut them off when we get there. I could really use that topo map app…
NO. If we’re going to do this, we can’t even have the distraction of the possibility of turning it on and “checking in.”
We’re just going a couple hours away to Mount Baker National Forest for a few days, but I truly feel like I’m heading to rehab.
A Little Backstory
I’ve always had some sort of electronic device in my hand, and I do really like helping people with technology. So after moving to Western Washington, my wife and I started a tech support business. It was interesting, and stimulating, and energizing to be running a business doing what I love… until it wasn’t.
A few years in, it was clear we were getting burned out. The pace of change in the technology world is relentless, and we just couldn’t keep up any more. And, worst of all, it was robbing us of our time and…