It would be easy to say that my favorite memory of llama packing was riding my trusty llama, Signal, over High Sierra bridges and looking down on a rushing river. Or getting to camp at Relief Reservoir and hunting for “dinosaur eggs.” Or maybe the overwhelming excitement of finding my favorite butterscotch candy left along the trail as encouragement by my fast-paced dad.

But my favorite memory of llama packing was the summer of 2018. My dad hurt his back from the seat in his truck (which is code for “I’m getting too old for this sh*t”) so he hired me to finish his deliveries for the season. A popular rental trip for llama packing is doing the John Muir Trail, or at least a section of it. But doing this type of trip means the client needs to be dropped off at one location and picked up at another. This particular year he still had about five drop offs and pickups to do with very limited mobility.

With a bottle of painkillers and my trusty Jack Russell Terrier, Charles Wallace, we drove off on the first delivery. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the previous year, I had become quite accustomed to being a speed demon in my cherry red Prius, but on this day, I magically transformed into Driving Ms. Daisy. Driving a Duramax Diesel GMC Sierra for the first time and towing a trailer with llamas earned me more than a few eye rolls both from inside the cabin and the cars behind me. But with a little time behind the wheel, I soon was just as comfortable driving the truck as my little car, Lucy.

Off we went, up and down the narrow and winding Sonora Pass, with a pit stop at the peak. Bonding over the band Joseph and podcasts about how to improve firefighting efforts, we pulled into Horseshoe Meadow. Being the only people with llamas in a campground full of horses, we had to take extra care to set up camp at a distance. In case you are wondering, horses are afraid of everything. Did you catch that? EVERYTHING. After parking the truck and trailer, which required me to back the trailer into the space and I totally nailed the parking job, we set up camp and hung out for the evening.

After spending the night at Horseshoe Meadows, I was amazed at how well I slept. I was even thinking, Huh, maybe this outdoor llama stuff really IS for me. Maybe I should take over the family business. Until my dad noticed that I had slept in the truck with the windows and doors nicely closed, creating some hypoxic bliss at 10,000 ft. Oh well.

We packed up, sans llamas, and headed back to homebase: Sonora, Ca. On the way back, we of course stopped at our favorite coffee shop, Looney Bean, in Bishop. We also stopped at Manzanar, the former Japanese Internment camp turned museum. Seeing the photos and walking through a hallway lined with quotes from survivors was a beautiful experience. Having their lives and accomplishments completely uprooted over irrational fear was an eye-opening experience, to say the least.

The three of us (Dad, me, and Charles) loaded up the truck and trailer 4 more times, heading back to Horseshoe Meadows, Onion Valley, and other various locations to pick up and drop off llamas. Frequenting the Looney Bean coffee shop and the Mobil Station in Lee Vining (serving some of the best road food EVER), we fell into a nice routine. We even had the excitement of having to divert on one of our return trips home due to a rapidly spreading wildfire over Sonora Pass. Whatever was thrown our way, we handled it together with ease.

On our final trip together, one of my dad’s clients casually deemed me “Greg’s Intrepid Daughter” while on the phone with his wife and those three words perfectly captured my feelings of this time spent with my dad. Growing up, my dad was the stay-at-home parent, but it had been years since we’d spent so much time together. I had grown up and moved away and started my own life, but getting to spend these few 1-2 day trips together made me reminisce over those days when I was a child, spending what felt like hours in the truck with my dad just running simple errands, watching the world go by as he told long stories from his childhood.