Is failure at trailhead.... failure?

To rephrase the question: when I walked into the trailhead kitchen this evening to find three young men huddled around a pot of half-crunchy, half-burnt rice, trying to figure out what went wrong... Was it a bad thing?

Failure is what Trailhead is all about... sort of. The lessons that come from trying and failing are lessons that really get learned. Trying new things takes courage. It's easy to never attempt anything you aren't comfortable with. For some, its performing an oil change, and for others its hiking for two days in the snow. For three guys, its rice.

Each of these experiences represents a practical skill of course, but beyond that, the courage to learn from failure is a lifelong skill. I suppose we can say that failure at trailhead isn't failure unless we don't learn from it. Which means we still need to figure out what happened with that rice... 

Last week we hit the road for a quick snow hike. We entered the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness on Thursday about lunch time and returned to the van about the same time the next day. Two back-country log cabins provided housing and a place to have time with "just the guys." I had been meaning to chat about "man stuff" for awhile, and what better place than a wilderness log cabin with a roaring wood stove and everyone's wet socks hanging around? We're still not sure what the girls did.

 A couple pictures:

So now its back to business. We began Dave Ramsey's "Financial Peace for College Students" today.  Should be fun!