Musing from the trail. -“Take time to look up from your feet, you may never be here again”.

Hey Team!

Sam Herrera here. I wanted to take a little time to chat about the annual trip that we as a crew take each year. Some of you may be familiar with our shenanigans in the wilderness and some may not. This particular blog leans more into how these trips mold us as humans. These musing below are my story on how this past trip impacted me personally. I hope you enjoy my questionable spelling, run on sentences, and inappropriate use of parentheses. I'll never claim to be a writer, but I do have a story from the heart to share. 

For the past three years the ERTH Beverage team has packed their backpacks, laced up their boots and dawned their can-do attitudes to set out into the Idaho backcountry for a week of trail maintenance.  Each year is completely different from one to the next and each brings its emotional and physical ups and downs.  

On our first trip Eric and I, three of our employees plus the support of Bill the cowboy poet and his string of mules hiked our tools, elaborate kitchen and chef prepared meals into Marble Creek with the Selway Bitterroot crew to work a section of the Idaho Centennial Trail. That trip was a doozy. If it wasn’t for the ridiculous menu our employee and grill master Torin cooked up, I don’t know if we would have made it out with morale and emotions intact. (Just to give you an idea, on one very rainy and blustery evening we yoked 40 eggs and made pasta carbonara in the field from scratch. It slapped as the kids would say) That trip was filled with daily rain, wet work clothes and boots, and endless miles of widening an almost nonexistent trail. It was also filled with silliness, ridiculous roasting and joke making, great food, and some serious inner and team growth for each of us. Doing hard things away from society can change your life if you let it. If you haven’t had the pleasure and opportunity to push your body and mind to their limits you may have never experienced this phenomenon. On this first trip our employee Sam underwent such a change. I’ll keep the synopsis of her rapid change here short. if you see her someday you can ask her yourself for more details. The long and short is that Sam went to the wilderness as one version of herself with one set of beliefs about where her life was going, who she was, and what she was made of, and she used the pressure of that intense week to break out of the self-imposed limits that had her in a vice. It was awe inspiring to listen to her as she processed and then watch as she took that momentum and literally create a new reality for herself as soon as she stepped foot back into Boise. To this day I still marvel as what she allowed that trip to do for her. 

Our second trip we headed out on the Alice Toxaway loop in the Sawtooth’s. This is the most backpacked section of Idaho wilderness and is a mega highway of foot traffic and width of trail in comparison to the infrequently traveled Marble creek trail. The Toxaway trip originally was supposed to be a project-based trip where we were to learn the skill of puncheon making (essentially low foot bridges that extend across marshes or shallow creeks) the Stanley fire that year had our resident puncheon professor away fighting fire so we instead were delighted to learned rock work from the one and only Scotcho of the Sawtooth Society. That trip we moved A LOT of rocks, used small hammers to break rocks into gravel (Sam and I did that and we dubbed our station “Sam’s Workshop”) after completion of our project we basically had the pleasure of hiking all around dispersing fire rings and oogling of the beauty that is the Sawtooth’s. That trip was dry, sunny, and we parked our tents right on the beaches of Farley Lake. It was still incredibly physically demanding and a stark contrast from the hazing that was Marble creek.

For this year’s jaunt into the woods I personally had the sugar plum dreams of our last trip rolling through my mind in a highlight reel as we headed out on again a very different adventure. Year one and two we had pack mule support, a boujee kitchen, communal meals and light packs. This year with Clay from ITA as our fearless leader we hiked with full packs filled with food for five days plus tools in tow. If you ever had the pleasure of meeting Clay I encourage you to ask him about his many through hikes and I hope you get to experience the love that he has for one hike in particular. That man is on a quest to bring Idaho’s own through hike, The Idaho Centennial trail into the awareness of the outdoor community. The amount of work he has done so far to bring this hike to the minds of hikers is awe-inspiring and we hope to jump on board to help further his vision (more on this later, it can be a blog of its own) Clay is known for leading the more intense and physically demanding trips to help clear section of the ICT that are under-loved and very remote. This trip we headed out past Grandjean to the Dry Saddle trail head were we, with tools in hand tackled “one of the toughest climbs of the whole 1,000 miles of the ICT”. It was many days of many miles and much elevation gain. This year I can only speak to the places within myself that were moved and molded. Just like Sam’s story I’ll keep this brief and if you see me (Sam Herrera) in the world feel free to ask and ill regale you with a much longer tale with a rich backstory. The long and the short of it is this trip made me dig DEEP. I proved to myself that this body that I live in is strong and resilient and that I can do incredibly hard things and come out the other side intact and proud of myself. I navigated hiking on a sprained ankle, my usual set of popping and evolving blisters and this year, I unintentionally found myself at a massive daily calories deficit ( upwards of 2000 calories per day).  The hikes were hard, and I was always at the back of the crew. If you know me, you know I am incredibly competitive and I loathe being last and I am not great when I am not the best at something. This trip a woman named Anne helped me flip a switch on this in a way that I have brought into my daily life. Anne hikes slow. She takes her time. She soaks in her surroundings and is an all around badass. I would see her balancing busting out an amazing amount of physical labor with interacting with plants, laying in slow drifts, and napping on rocks. On the last day of work, I chose to walk with her on our hike in and she said something so simple and at the time I didn’t realize it would become my mantra. She said, “Take time to look up from your feet, you may never be here again”. This is something that in my life as an entrepreneur and general player of daily whack-a-mole that I forget about. I often put my head down and just bulldoze through whatever obstacle I am up against. I often forget to stop and look around because it’s true, I may never be here in this experience/ moment/ lesson etc. again. I’m grateful for the reminder and for the permission to slow down and soak it all in. There is another layer to this that hit me a little harder than trail trips of past and probably trail trips of the future. My mom died when she was 36. This year in 2025 I reached that milestone age of 36 and it did a thing to my psyche. I realized how young she was when she left this planet and how much living she missed out on. It has given me a sense that each day that I live beyond 36 is extra time that has been gifted to me. I feel a sense of duty to use it well. Anne’s comment rooted me back into that and this trip showed me just how blessed I am to have this strong resilient body even when I am the last to make it to the top of the mountain and how important it is to look around and enjoy my surroundings on the way to the summit.

Cheers,

Sam Herrera