#I love Star Trek Beyond so much you will have to pay me to shut up about it

[racingliners]

34, 39 <3

34. Which film is the most visually beautiful?

So I'm super biased but I adore the visuals of Star Trek Beyond. The warp bubble animation just looks cool and the whole sequence of when the Enterprise arrives at Starbase Yorktown is so stunning. The setting of Altamid is gorgeous too (They were filmed in Stawamus Chief Provincial Park and Nahanni National Park Reserve in Canada).

I've included some screencaps from Trek Core bc I can

39. In your opinion what is the most underrated movie?

ughhhhhhh this is hard because I haven't seen that many films compared to other people, but I do love Interstellar. It's also very visually stunning and while you do need to concentrate for the plot it's still really satisfying when all the pieces fit together at the end.

film asks

[chews-erotically]

Waxing Gibbous 

Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader

Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

       * Warnings: Assault/violence/ mentions of masturbation/ blood/ gore/ comfort/ injury

      * Summary: In the field, you are found. Ezra reveals his duality.

      * Word Count: 1611

      * I cannot begin to thank all of you enough for reading this. It means absolutely everything in the entire universe. For the first time in so very long I feel as though I’m doing something that makes me happy. I love you!! 

 PART THREE

     “Shit!”

    Acrid steam poured from the ruined sac before you. Unsure of how you could be so adept at harvesting while practicing in the tent, yet so clumsy in the actual field, you stood and stretched your back. It was unbearably hot today; your suit was clinging to your skin like cling film. It was stifling and you were tired.

    Ezra was soon to return with replenished water bottles, you supposed, having trekked south of you to a stream you’d come across a few days prior. You estimated he’d been gone around twenty minutes.

    Since the events with the Sater had transpired the tension between you had seemed to grow exponentially. You’d found yourself idling on Ezra’s face more than you cared to admit to yourself. You’d unintentionally begun cataloguing the nuances of movement contained in his hands, the reactions on his expressive face to the things you said. More often now, you took note of that dark intensity returning to flash across his features when he thought you weren’t looking. This did not scare you; rather, it left your skin feeling too tight for your body, your core aching and burning until you had no choice but to shut yourself in the refresher and furiously bring yourself off, biting at your sleeve to muffle your guttural scream when you came seizing and shaking on your fingers. Something you’d once thought shameful now left you somehow ravenous. When you’d re-entered the common space of the tent you’d done nothing to hide the flush in your face or mussed hair. You’d shot Ezra a wide smile as he’d quirked his brow, his expression otherwise unreadable. You’d exited the tent as you felt suddenly faint- is this who you were now? Ezra made you feel wild and alive, like you had finally managed to snap out of a trance. Or wake up from an unending, uninspired dream of safe decisions and mediocrity.

    You mused on this in your suit on the Green, the suit still bearing faint tepid stains from your original sin. You were not paying attention, having almost certainly made up your mind to make Ezra aware of your feelings when you returned from the day’s work.

    Thus, you were doubly taken aback when the stone connected with the side of your helmet. With a dull cracking noise you fell to the dust. Your head ricocheted against the interior of your dome. Your ears rang; you tasted blood. How did you get here?

    A steel-toed boot connected with your ribs, forcing the air from your lungs. You gasped, you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t force air in. Pain exploded once again, exquisite in its intensity. A cracking sound- bone or helmet? You curled in on yourself, stunned, trying to process what this was that was happening to you. 

    Get. Up.

    Part of you wanted this whole farce to be over. The Green, the tent, this unseen assailant. Just end it. If this is how it’s supposed to happen, who are you to challenge fate? You could only hope for quickness, the pain is too much, this life is too much, you are a fool, how could you even consider someone like Ezra could want you. You are a weak, sniveling, invisible slug. You are going to die. You will rot and fester and become toxic, like the air on this cursed moon. Unknown and forgotten.

    Get. Up.

    Another kick, this time to your kidney. This time you found your air, cried out. It was weak, pathetic. You noted the mist of blood across the window of your helmet, so similar to before, except this time it was on the inside. It was yours. It caused a switch to flip on in you, sudden panic blooming in your chest. All at once your body called back to its evolutionary directive to survive. 

    It took everything within you to move. Blinding pain behind your eyes like needles as you rolled onto your front, then onto your knees. Your stomach roiled- you swallowed bile as you craned your head upward to finally view your assailant.

    It was the Sater. Of course. The dose of sedative you’d shot into his thigh had not been enough to kill him, merely incapacitate him long enough for you to escape with the precious med kit. He had recovered and now he had found you, and he was going to kill you. This so perfectly encapsulated life on the Green that you could have laughed. It was almost poetic.

    You could not hear his words, but you could see his sneer. He cocked his leg back to land another blow to you as you squeezed your eyes shut and waited. The blow did not come.

    Instead, you heard the sound of bodies connecting, and an unearthly snarl.

    Ezra.

    You opened your eyes and Ezra was upon him, a frenzy of fists landing over and over wherever he could reach. The Sater was overcome, had no time to react. The sounds that escaped Ezra’s mouth through your connected channel were almost inhuman in their ferocity.

You watched through the pain of each shuddering breath as he yanked the air hose from the Sater’s helmet, then grasped wildly at the connecting clasps of the helmet. Finding the seal, he pried frantically, finally freeing the dome and exposing the Sater’s face to the atmosphere. His fists connected with whatever was revealed, ruining and rupturing. 

    You had known that Ezra had sometimes had to be brutal in order to survive here. You knew that you had had to do the same. But seeing him like this, the unleashed rabidity of his rage unleashed on another was almost too much. As Ezra exhausted himself upon the Sater’s demolished face you found yourself having to turn away. The blows finally slowed in frequency and intensity when it became increasingly apparent that the Sater was no longer breathing.

    Ezra stood and gazed down at the body of the Sater, his lip curled. He turned to you, to where you knelt in the dust, and his expression melted into a mask of pain. It was almost as if the Sater had been pummeling him. You blinked and then he was beside you, his hands were on you, so unbelievably gentle as he swept up your stomach, moved carefully across your shoulders and down your arms. You met his gaze, mortally exhausted, and thought that perhaps you could still die here. Your ears rang and your head throbbed. Your stomach and chest ached, and you wondered from a faraway place if you could be bleeding internally.

    Ezra was crying, his eyes were red and swollen. He must have been crying while he killed.

    Through the beating static in your brain, you heard his voice asking if you thought you could stand. 

    You had tried, but a wave of nausea and vertigo had you swooning back toward the ground almost immediately. Ezra caught you and held you close against the breast of his suit until you felt a bit steadied. His heart thrummed wildly in his chest, and it served to center you.

    “We have only to trek back to the tent, sweet Dove. I will carry you if need be, but we cannot negotiate an alternative option.” Your nod was almost imperceptible, and you began a stumbling, shambling walk back to your tent. Ezra kept his arm close around your waist and draped your own limb across his shoulders. When you finally entered the interior he assisted you onto your cot. He helped to divest you of your helmet and suit before hastily removing his own, his eyes never leaving yours. Each wince of pain was answered by his own sympathetic sounds and mumbled apologies.

    “I am so sorry, sweet girl. My Dove, my Star...I will spend the rest of my life and whatever is beyond making it up to you….”

    You were too sore and numb to be embarrassed as he undressed you, carefully inspecting every inch of your skin before covering you back up. He carefully cleaned the dried blood from your nose and mouth, pausing briefly to cradle your face in his large, warm hands. He rested his forehead against yours before placing the ghost of a kiss at your hairline.

    You knew you were concussed, and so Ezra kept you awake. Kneeling on the floor He used dulcet tones and soft inflections to keep you engaged. He told you what he knew of the ancient Greek myths and incestuous dealings between gods and men. He expounded on the constellations and how the old prospectors would time their harvests according to the position of the stars in the sky. He told you of his childhood home on Earth and growing up in a poor parish in Louisiana. He talked about his only sibling, his older brother Isaiah, who he’d worshipped and followed blindly into the realm of prospecting before drink and women left him dead in some back-planet alleyway, robbed and stabbed.

    Finally you begged in mumbling tones to sleep, your eyes weighed down and feeling full of sand. Ezra acquiesced, but not before pulling his cot to join with yours. He lay on his side next to you, grasping your hand carefully as if it were glass. He moved his thumb over your skin in circles that soothed you as your eyes closed and eased you into dreamless slumber while Ezra’s deep, even breathing anchored you to his side.

Tags: @yespolkadotkitty, @rzrcrst, @mrpascals, @cyaredindjarin, @ifimayhaveaword, @lackofhonor, @giselatropicana

[kinetic-elaboration]

August 28: 3x05 Is There In Truth No Beauty?

Several days later, coming back to write up these Star Trek notes. I feel like I never got to talk this episode through properly, or even think through it properly by myself, because mom went right into watching AHS on Thursday, and I was too tired to even sort through my thoughts and when we talked yesterday, it was… entirely about other things.

So, here at least are my liveblog thoughts, and maybe I’ll remember some more as I write.

Right off the bat, this is such a cool concept: the friendly alien Ambassador who no one can look at because his form is not fit for human eyes.

Love Spock’s silly looking little visor. Not sure I get why he’s wearing it right now, when the Ambassador is in his box, but okay.

Dr. Jones is so beautiful. I love her dress.

I’m sure Spock is thinking “If only all Ambassadors could be put into little boxes like this.”

Okay, Ambassador’s coming! Everybody quarantine!

Right, I JUST remembered the significance of the dress.

Spock has experience with mind links with other creatures—a lot of experience that ho. Is he thinking about the pleasure of connecting to Kirk, that “dynamic individual”?

“My life is here.” With the Captain???

I feel like this episode is implying, all but stating outright, that Spock is very good at mindlinking. Like maybe even more so than the average Vulcan. Which makes sense because he does it so often. And yet he still messes up with AOS!Kirk.

I love the effects for the Ambassador. I’m not even being sarcastic; I think they get across the experience of looking at him quite effectively.

Hmmm, some non-touch telepathy. I know Spock has a little of that. I guess it’s mostly him reacting to Miranda, though.

Gotta get a dig in at Dr. McCoy before he leaves lol. Spock, so predictable.

Kirk’s flirting is off the charts today omg. Tone it down man.

SCOTTY IN A KILT aw yeah.

She learned from the Vulcans how not to read thoughts. Exactly!! Their telepathy is such an underrated part of the whole Vulcan thing, including why they remain ‘emotionless.’

She’s so jealous of Spock.

Honestly this whole scene… there’s a lot going on here! I’m trying to pay attention to the Vulcan telepath stuff but the men won’t stop flirting at 11. Especially McCoy, laying it on extra thick.

She does hold her own very well, though.

A preference for beauty—one of our last prejudices.

“Sleep well.” So cute. (I’ve already forgotten but I’m pretty sure this is Kirk.)

“We’re all vulnerable in one way or another.” KIRK SHUT UP I LOVE YOU.

Girls don’t like guys, girls like Medusan ambassadors.

This guy is so jealous. I barely know who he is lol; this comes out of nowhere.

Interesting angle on the hallway shot. I feel like there are a lot of those in this ep, like these weirdly long shots of the hallways… Maybe I’m just not used to seeing them with one or no people in them.

Kirk and the squad. Work work fashion baby.

“Larry? Marvick? Why?” Okay that is some real Shatnerian inflection there.

SCOTTY FIGHT SCENE.

*Ship veers obviously*

And look at this weird-ass view of the bridge. Like what the hell, where is the camera? On the lift? It’s so disorienting!

Spock needs to fix some stuff, calls for his protégé Chekov, of course.

And this funky music. So bizarre.

WE’LL BE SAFE AT THE BOUNADIRES OF THE UNIVERSE. Drama queen

This is a nutty view, this “unknown void.” Like one would think beyond space there’s… just more space, not a Windows 98 screensaver.

Space time continuum?? They didn’t time travel (again), did they?

“He just simply died.” How convenient.

“An entertaining suggestion, Mr. Chekov, but not very helpful.” Honestly, I do think he’s entertained. Spock has grown so much over the course of the show.. like I know there was controversy with his IC-ness this season but in this case, I really do think it is growth. Compare this to the Corbomite Maneuver, where he had a sense of humor but it was… a little mean, a little arch. There’s a certain warmth to him now.

Her mind must be so engaged that she doesn’t notice the plan for Spock to meld with the Ambassador = Kirk will seduce her. Lol. Of course. Everyone’s favorite honeypot.

He has absolutely NO shame.

The man sure does love his flowers, though.

She’s never been to Earth. So she’s a human born on a colony, I guess? That’s such a throwaway line, but so interesting. Could that be part of how she’s telepathic?

Oh no! A thorn!

“Violent emotion is a kind of insanity.” Can I steal this?

Too ugly to bear or too beautiful to bear?

Let me spell it out for you: this is romantic. (Again, I’ve forgotten what this refers to, but I’m going to assume it’s something Kirk said.)

Lol Bones just dropping truth bombs. How did he know she was blind? Did he recognize the dress or does he have access to her files as the ship’s doctor?

And Kirk accepts it immediately. “Of course! It’s the only reasonable explanation as to why you weren’t attracted to me.”

The Ambassador is brought to the bridge and placed behind a covid wall, I mean, protective barrier.

And now, we meet the Ambassador for real.

“THAT’s Spock!” Bones is so happy. He’s really not comfortable with Spock being all… smiley and flirty. Or rather, someone in Spock’s body, I should say.

Kollos is VERY flirty. And he and Miranda have chemistry for sure. It’s weird, because I don’t get any sense of that between her and Spock (rightly so) but Spock as the Ambassador and it comes right out.

I love the characterization of him. The idea that the Medusans’ thoughts are supposed to be particularly nice to engage with…. I really see how that would be. He’s so soothing.

Kollos is enjoying his time in a human body, I think. Mostly. Not all of it. (I got a little teary at the part about loneliness, ngl.)

Time to go back? So soon?

Noooo the shield! It’s like forgetting your mask when you enter a building.

[Spock wails]

Honestly, even seeing the steps to the upper level of the bridge is really weir. Like, I’ve always known there are steps there… but I’ve never thought about what they look like.

Kirk is so skeptical about all of this. Spock is in danger and his brain immediately goes to the pessimistic scenarios—very unlike him!

He’s freaking out nervous.

“Are we supposed to wake him with a kiss?” Idk, it’s worth a try. Why doesn’t Kirk give it a go?

Does Kirk have a game plan with Miranda here, or is he just honestly freaking out?

…The answer is honestly freaking out, which is rather a disappointment.

Trippy.

Spock has a necklace version of the IDIC symbol this time.

Everyone’s exchanging all these highly formulaic, formal goodbyes and Kirk’s like “Peace.” Wow, really trying hard with that one. Still rattled, I guess.

Also speaking of these formulaic exchanges—this fits very well with the HAICG-verse. Just saying.

This episode was really good! I loved Miranda, I am a huge fan of the underlying sci fi concept, and I though the Spock characterization and the hints of Vulcan culture were very interesting (and very in keeping with my own characterization and world building, imo).

The only thing I didn’t like was Kirk’s characterization. He felt like a stereotype, like who AOS thought TOS Kirk was, rather than himself—the over the top flirting, the dramatic rage, how he didn’t really seem in control of anything or on his game at all.

But, even though he’s my fave, the interesting Spock characterization made up for that, and I really appreciated these insights into him, interacting with someone who, while not Vulcan herself, had a Vulcan cultural background, someone he approached similarly to how he would one of his own people. It was very polite but with a lot of unsaid beneath the surface, which is how I imagine Vulcans are.

The introduction of IDIC truly was pretty random! I did like the idea of Spock trying to compliment her and not really landing it, because that’s just the awkward nerd sort of thing he would do. But it’s weird that the phrase has never been introduced before, and also that even within this episode, it’s only obliquely explained.

I’m not actually sure if I’ve seen the next ep or not. I don’t think so, but it’s possible I did and just don’t remember it very well…

[zizeschmizes]

helping hand. | solo

WHO: lauren zizes (& antonio zizes) 

WHAT: help comes in the form of a call from home.

WHEN: 10/15; late afternoon

WHERE: outside of A Latte Fun Coffee

Lauren pushed out of the coffee shop, walking a few paces away from where patrons passed through into the busy campus spot and paused to put in her earbuds. Finding a job on campus and around town was proving to be a major pain in the ass. Everything from work study assignments to in town gigs had been snatched up long before she'd started looking. 

It was her own damn fault, really. Adjusting to the new reality of sophomore year was taking a lot longer than it did in her previous semesters. Then, she'd been lucky enough to snag a choice spot in the library. Working the front desk usually meant long stretches of time spent watching movies and doing her homework in between stacking books to be reshelved and answering the occasional question from a lost student. 

Now she was left scrambling. Her softball scholarship covered her tuition and the basics of housing (on campus) and meal plans, but the rest (like living) was up to her. Refusing to touch her savings meant budgeting herself to only the essentials but even those were starting to feel beyond her bank account. New camera lens, an extra external drive to house her pictures, a new fall coat...the dollar signs were giving her a headache. 

Lauren sighed. A Latte Fun was her last resort. She'd tried the barista thing back in New Orleans, slinging coffee the spring and summer before her freshman year and it wasn't terrible, just not ideal. Still, a job was a job, and the coffee shop would prove helpful. Not to mention workable with her schedule. She just didn't know when she'd actually sleep. Of course this was all pending, she wouldn't know about the job until later, but the interview had gone well. Still...she needed a backup, just in case.

There was a sharp pressure building at the back of her neck, a sure sign of stress and Lauren absently rubbed at the spot as she made her way back to campus, where a long night of editing was in her future. She'd picked up a side gig, snapping pictures of Homecoming Weekend for Ginsburg's Alumni Association and needed to get the files for last weekend's big game to the webmaster by morning. 

The sound of her phone ringing paused the music that played softly from her earbuds and Lauren was prepared to ignore the FaceTime request until she saw the name. She hit 'Accept' and the familiar sight of her eldest brother's face coming into view made brought forth the first genuine smile she'd had all afternoon. 

"Hey, Nono."

"Hey! You busy?"

Lauren shook her head and took a break from her walk to sit on a nearby bench. "Leaving the coffee shop. What's up? Where are you?"

Antonio flipped the camera, giving Lauren a brief glimpse of the gym in the background, decked out in LSU purple and gold before turning it front facing. “Just finished up, bout to meet Gabe for food. Haven’t heard from you in a minute.” 

“Yeah, I know” she replied, ignoring the tiny pinprick of guilt that followed. “Still tryin’ to get settled with school and stuff.” 

Brown eyes, much like her own, held a sympathetic gaze and Antonio shook his head in the camera’s view. “Figured you were busy that’s why I reached out. It’ll be your turn to hit me up next time. Everything okay?” 

“Yup!” Lauren nodded, backing up her strained response with a smile that wasn’t as bright as her first one, looking as tired as she felt, and she was seriously regretting a video call. Because she knew her brother and knew he’d pick up on her weird mood right away. 

“Something’s wrong. What happened?” 

There it was. The worry that she didn’t want to hear. She was fine to handle the problem (that wasn’t even a problem) on her own. As the first of the bunch, Antonio had the responsibility of wrangling the others and keeping them in line. He was their parents’ pride and joy, the dutiful eldest son who’d followed in his father’s footsteps. 

Star footballer, exceptional student, LSU’s twice elected homecoming king leaving college a legend, with a degree in hand and a top pick in the NFL draft. He was the blueprint the others were expected to follow and it drove Lauren crazy that on top of everything, her successful, saintly, stupidly handsome brother was also a total sweetheart. 

He was good for a deep talk, looking out for his siblings in a way that Lauren always appreciated...but not now. She didn’t want to hear about how ‘things would work out’. She just wanted to hide under her covers for a little while, just enough time to suck it up and stop feeling sorry for herself. 

“It’s nothing. Got a lot of work to do, and I’m still lookin’ for a job. But it’s fine, really.” This smile was better than the last, going for subtle as she continued, easing back into a drawl that matched his own. “Congrats on the game, by the way. Y’all ate Florida up.” 

Whether or not Antonio bought it, his face gave nothing away. Instead, his lips twisted into a grin that bordered on cocky and for some reason made Lauren miss home more than anything...if only to throw a pillow at his head and wipe it off his face. “Yeah, we did alright.” 

“Y’all are number one in the division, it’s more than ‘alright’. How’s Gabe?” 

He shrugged. “Still a jackass. You gotta come home sometime, get your brother together.” 

Lauren laughed. “He doesn’t listen to anybody.” 

“Yeah? Sound familiar?” He grinned at the ‘shut up!’ that followed and the laughter that came after. 

“I know he was on best manners with the parents there, though.” 

“Oh you know that. We missed you at Homecoming.” 

She shrugged. “It’s Homecoming here, now. Our game was Saturday too. We won, by the way.” 

“‘We’?” 

“Showing my school spirit. I had to take pictures of the events for the alumni association so I went to the game. And I gotta do a few other appearances. For softball stuff. Whatever.” It wouldn’t do to point out that her parents had yet to attend a homecoming at Ginsburg, despite never missing one, or any home game for her brothers at LSU. That ship had long sailed and Lauren had no intention of bringing up old shit. 

For his part, Antonio skirted past the topic, recognizing Lauren’s dismissiveness. Still, he couldn’t help but ask his next question. “You sure you’re okay? You don’t need anything?” 

“I’m fine. Just tired. Long weekend. Long week ahead.” 

“Okay. Well good luck with the job stuff. When’re you hearin’ back from them?” 

“I don’t know. Sometime this week.” The ‘hopefully’ was silent, but her tone said enough and Lauren shook her head at her brother’s look of concern. “I’ll be fine.” 

The angle of the phone changed slightly, Antonio’s face tilted upwards and he hummed an absent ‘Mhm’ at his little sister before the connection blurred and went on pause. 

“Antonio? What…” It was only a minute or two before he returned, now in the driver’s seat of his truck and grinning at a perplexed Lauren. “Where did you go?” 

“Check your phone,” he told her, ignoring the question altogether while setting his phone in the holder on the dash. “Should be getting an alert now.” 

Sure enough, the muted tone beeped in her ears and Lauren paused the video feed to check the text notification from her bank’s app, and the alert that $300 had been added to her account. The culmination of the rough day, and her brother’s kindness brought a lump to her throat and she swallowed it down, taking a deep breath before resuming the video. 

“You didn’t have to do that, Nono.” 

Antonio rolled his eyes as if Lauren’s stubbornness was a mild inconvenience and not the Zizes trademark. “Yeah, I did. You need it, I got it, and I know you ain’t askin’ anybody. Especially not Ma or Dad. I got you.” 

“Thank you. I’ll pay you--” 

“Nope. That’s yours. It’s fine. Just get somebody hot to play me in the movie you write about us, all I ask.” 

That made Lauren laugh out loud, drawing a few looks from people ambling on the sidewalks but she paid them no attention. “Issa deal.” 

“Good. I gotta get Gabe but I’ll tell him you said hey, okay? Love you, Lozinha!”

The call disconnected and Lauren paused her music. Antonio’s generosity wouldn’t completely solve her problems, but it made things feel a little less chaotic. She would still pursue a job, whether it was at the coffee shop or somewhere else because she wouldn’t rely on that kind of bailout, no matter how much Antonio insisted it was what he was there for. 

With a sigh, Lauren pushed off the bench and slinging her bag over her shoulder, began the trek back to her dorm and the mountain of work that waited.

[lenixsocial]

Captain on the bridge!

Okay so undoubtedly we will be doing a Sci-Fi Shuttle on this after the season concludes (unless I decide doing one on this subject strictly is warranted) but here goes...

As an unabashed, deep down, lifelong, trivia nerd Trekkie I want it known now and forever that the Enterprise bridge design from Discovery was...BRILLIANT.

Was there a small slice of me that was hoping beyond hope that the people at CBS had authorized the use of the Star Trek Tour sets in Ticonderoga, NY or even the STC sets in Georgia? I’m not gonna lie...yes there absolutely was. Because nothing would’ve made me happier than to shut every butthurt fanboy up as they waltzed onto the bridge we all know so well from TOS.

But you know what? That isn’t this bridge...because Discovery isn’t TOS. And I knew they’d make it look like everything else looked in this show. As awesome as it would’ve been to have seen the turbolift doors open up onto the bridge we all know and love so well, it would’ve looked shocking, garish, out of place and out of context.

It’s glossy, it’s lens-flare-y it’s typically Discovery in that way but look closer. Classic design cues are everywhere. Duotronic displays all over the wall (those famous multi colored blocks), the 60’s dish chairs, the color of the consoles and doors, the railings and step placement, the duty stations, and in all the other ways that matter too: the bridge noises, and the big chair looking as stately as ever with just a hint of Discovery chic thrown in for good measure. It does lack the gooseneck viewers but those could’ve easily have been removed after The Cage.

In fact canon provides us with a reliable answer to every naysayer who is about to rain hell down on me for liking this redesign. The bridge pods are interchangeable varying upon mission type. We can assume the Captain has some sway in what Bridge he gets. The one he had during The Cage (three years prior to this story) might’ve not been conducive to their next mission and it was swapped out for something more specialized.

In fact, if you look at the bridge between “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “The Corbomite Manuever” in TOS you’ll see more than a few subtle differences. In my headcanon they swapped the bridge pod out as their mission went from penetrating the galactic barrier to an extended five year mission of exploration. This also happens pretty much in EVERY SINGLE TOS MOVIE.

And the corridors change as well in every TOS film...sometimes subtly but it’s present. So there’s no reason to hate on that, either. I think the designers did a phenomenal job with providing a throughput to what the ship will become. Arches and colors of panels in bright primary colors...it’s all there if you look close enough.

They were never going to make it look as we remember it. This show is being made in 2019, not the mid-1960’s and it’s being made on a decent budget too, not a shoestring.

Ultimately you have to make it look like it belongs in the era with everything else we’ve seen and still pay respect to the iconic designs the fans have come to know and love from TOS and as far as this fan is concerned...they’ve done it and they’ve done it well.

🖖🏻

[davidcarner]

Reassigned Ch 13, Jedi Knight

A/N: Zettel said something to me in looking at the last chapter that gave me the idea for this one….I have a basic outline but as I typed this chapter, two characters that I just can't seem to get away from FORCED their way in. Forced I tell ya…Not a one of you believe me, do you? I give you Reassigned, Ch 13, Jedi Knight

Disclaimer: I don't own Chuck, but I do have 4 different media versions of the original trilogy

Chuck, Sarah, and Carina were looking around the shutdown Weinerlicious. Bryce had stormed out after hearing of the plan to turn it into Bartowski Solutions. Very little paperwork was involved with the NSA or DNI and the rent was much lower than Chuck thought it would be, a government perk. Chuck also became the preferred internet and computer consultant for government jobs in the area, giving him some guaranteed income that made him smile. Carina thought Chuck had thanked her at least half a dozen times in the past hour . Casey grunted a lot in approval, mumbled something about moving Beastmasters and headed to the Buy More.

"Wait, those two are still going to work at the Buy More?" Chuck asked. Carina nodded.

"Until we figure some things out on Bryce, I don't want him interfering with you," Carina said. Chuck hugged her again, making Carina give Sarah another amused smile. "You could take me to lunch if you really want to thank me." Chuck looked a little nervous. "As colleagues, Chuck. Really, do you think I'd cross blonde momma bear in her condition?"

"You do like to push things," Chuck replied.

"Chuck, I don't do suicide runs," Carina said winking. "Sarah, your boyfriend is taking his new employee to lunch." Sarah looked at her a minute.

"Carina, I'll say this once, if anything happens and Chuck has to talk to HR about being sexually harassed, you'll wish all I do is fire you," Sarah said. Carina started to open her mouth to say that she and Chuck actually worked for her, but she didn't. Instead, she nodded. The two took off and Sarah glanced over at the Buy More where she thought maybe it was time to smooth some things over and take someone out to lunch herself.

She walked over to the Buy More, and went inside. She stopped at the doorway. She looked at the nerd herd desk he used to inhabit, but he wasn't there anymore, he had moved on, to better things, with her. She looked around and saw who she was looking for. Bryce caught her eye and moved toward her.

"Help you find anything ma'am, or did you already see what you need?" Bryce asked as smoothly as she could.

"Oh, I already see it, thanks," she said, and continued to walk past him. Bryce looked on in shock. She walked up to Morgan, who was looking at movies. "Morgan," she said gently trying not to scare him. He spun, saw her, and his face lit up. "I hear you're the man to go to for some sizzling shrimp," Sarah said. Morgan's eyes got wide. "I wondered if I could buy you lunch?" Morgan's face went from happy to upset like the snap of a finger.

"Sarah Walker, how could you," he began.

"Morgan," Sarah tried to interject.

"Look, I understand, the hormones, the beard, sometimes you just can't control yourself," Morgan began. Sarah was so shocked she couldn't stop him. "But, Sarah, he's my friend, not just my friend, but I'm the Chewie to his Han."

"That's Star Trek, right?" Sarah asked.

"I know you do that jokingly," Morgan replied.

"So, no?"

"Funny," he said. "I get it, your wants, your needs," he said, never seeing the look of horror on her face. "But I can't hurt Chuck. I mean it's been a while since Jill," his eyes got wide. "Is it that bad?" Sarah shut her eyes trying to figure out how to process that question. "I can get him some books and videos how to be better," he mumbled, more to himself than Sarah.

"Oh, God, Morgan," Sarah began.

"See, he should be making you do that, not me," Morgan continued. Sarah shuddered. "The three of us can sit and talk, and mwphmh." Sarah had covered his mouth.

"I feel NOTHING for you or the beard, no offense," Sarah said. Morgan nodded, hand still covering his mouth. "I need your help with Chuck, not in THAT way, and I wanted to take you to lunch to see if you could give me some tips, since, well, you know, you're his best friend." Morgan's eyes lit up.

"I mean it will take a little more than my lunch time," Morgan began.

"Big Mike!" Sarah yelled seeing him. Big Mike stopped in his tracks. "I'm taking Morgan for a while." Big Mike nodded and went back to what he was doing. "We'll bring back some donuts and you'll be golden," she said to Morgan.

-ooooo-

Sarah moaned. Morgan was right, or it was the hormones, or both, but sizzling shrimp was so undervalued.

"Right?" Morgan asked, his eyes lighting up. All Sarah could do was nod and chew. "So if the problem isn't Chuck with the sex," he began. Sarah choked on her food with those words. He reached over and tried to pat her back, but he just couldn't reach. She waved him off. "I'm guessing the problem is Bryce." She dropped her utensil, and just stared at her plate. "I mean it's his baby, and now he's dead, and his twin brother who I've never heard of before, nor has anyone else, is suddenly at the Buy More. Plus I know you work in the government, John Casey has a jaw of granite, and Carina and her long legs are always over at the Buy More and not to see me, which I really can't figure out what else I need to do for her to notice me."

"What are you trying to say, Morgan?" Sarah asked.

"She's in to me," Morgan said like she had lost her mind.

"Not about Carina, about Bryce."

"Bruce is really Bryce," Morgan said nonchalantly. "And I'll go one step further, that whole cover was very comic booky, so I'm guessing Chuck came up with the idea." Sarah put her head in her hands. "No one else has any clue if that's what you're worried about, and he's a big enough of a jerk, Bryce that is, that he makes a perfect ass man." Sarah groaned. "My only question, did Chuck offer to step out of the way for you two to get back together or did you tell him to not even suggest it."

"No," she said sounding tired. She looked at Morgan, who had a look of understanding on his face. Of course he did, he was Morgan. Chuck's true best friend, the that was always there for him. He knew Chuck. "He offered, and I messed with him for a minute before I called him an idiot."

"He can be quite an idiot for someone so smart," Morgan replied with a knowing nod.

"This actually is good," Sarah admitted. "You knowing all of this helps, so now I can ask what I don't understand. Why does he keep trying to save Bryce?" Morgan studied her a minute.

"Do you remember in Return of the Jedi when Luke refused to kill Vader because he was his father?" Morgan asked.

"If I say yes would you know if I'm lying?" Sarah asked.

"No clue," Morgan admitted.

"Yes," Sarah replied. Morgan nodded

"So that scene perfectly illustrates what's happening here," Morgan said. Sarah made a mental note to go home and pay attention this time when Return of the Jedi was on. "See, Vader is Bryce, he's going to be a dad and Chuck wants him to have a chance, even though Bryce is picking the dark side over being a father." Sarah was beyond confused. "Plus, throw in the whole his father left him, and Chuck never wants to see a child go through that, Chuck will do anything to save Bryce from himself and the dark side. Get it?"

"No," Sarah said. Morgan sighed.

"Chuck will do anything for those he loves," Morgan explained.

"Chuck loves Bryce?" Sarah asked.

"Not like you, but like a friend, but yeah," Morgan replied.

"How? Bryce screwed him over, multiple times and Chuck is angry at him, he might even hate him, although if Chuck does hate Bryce it is the weirdest hate I've ever seen."

"Chuck has a lot of experience being angry with those he loves," Morgan said gently. "Chuck's angry at his mother, his father, Jill, Bryce, Stanford, and Harry Tang…although he doesn't love Harry Tang," Morgan said, realizing he was spiraling. Sarah had to agree with the entire assessment. "What I'm saying is, someone could walk in tomorrow with a gun to Harry Tang's head and Chuck would try and save him."

"He would, wouldn't he," Sarah admitted.

"That's why we love him," Morgan said. "Welcome to the club, Sarah Walker." Morgan raised his glass of soda. "The we love Chuck Bartowski and we're fortunate enough that he loves us as well." Sarah smile and toasted with Morgan. She had never met anyone like Morgan or Chuck before, and she was thankful that she now had.

-ooooo-

"When I said we could do or talk about anything, this really wasn't what I expected, Curls," Carina said. Chuck turned to her slowly.

"You don't think Sarah would think…" he trailed off, scared to finish that sentence.

"No, she'd understand actually," Carina said. "Truth be told, maybe a little relieved." Chuck looked surprised. "Us getting along, having some type of relationship," she paused, frowned, and continued. "Some type of NON-sexual relationship that is."

"Really?" Chuck asked, surprised. "I mean, I've obviously never lived the life you two have, but you two have an odd friendship." Carina shrugged.

"When you've both been through the thunderdome you recognize things in each other, and can comfort the other," Carina said softly. "Sometimes the only comfort you need is just knowing someone else knows what you're going through."

"You both made it, you both got through it, and you're both on the other side?" Chuck said. Carina nodded.

"Maybe we're not both all the way though it, but that's pretty close," Carina said. "Damn, Curls, you're getting deep today. So, why are we here?"

"This," Chuck said, picking up a black maternity tee shirt with the words My Nerd Game is Strong on the front.

"Okay, what's the problem?"

"I really want to get it, for Sarah, you know because she's got the nerd, but can I?" Chuck asked. Carina stared at him. "It's not my kid, she's pregnant with, and that's what this shirt is suggesting." Carina began to laugh. She burst into laughter and couldn't stop. She fell against him, and he had to hold her up she laughed so hard. She finally calmed down.

"Chuck Bartowski," she said, shaking her head. "Do you love that little girl that's not yet born?"

"Yeah, I do," Chuck admitted.

"Are you going to be there for her?"

"Yeah, you know I am."

"I know you are, or I'm going to kick your ass," Carina promised. "And I know she's going to marry you." Chuck shrugged.

"She loves me, everything else is icing on the cake, I got the greatest prize ever, Carina," he said with a smile covering his face. "The woman I love, loves me. What else could I ask for?"

"Her hand in marriage," Carina said dramatically with her hand against her forehead. He gave her a friendly shove. She grabbed the shirt and looked at it and then at him. "Yeah, her nerd game is strong, she snagged you."

"Carina Miller, are you saying I'm a catch?" Chuck asked.

"See, you can't say that to me and me not mess with you back," Carina retorted.

"I withdraw the question," Chuck said quickly and took the shirt up front to pay for it as Carina followed, laughing.

-ooooo-

Chuck opened the door to the apartment and started to give out his normal greeting when he heard very familiar noises. His eyes grew wide as he walked into the living room. There on the couch was his girlfriend, watching Return of the Jedi. Not just watching, but studying. He made a fist and bit his first finger trying to calm his excitement, but it wasn't working.

"Uh, Sarah," Chuck began.

"Shh," she said. The Emperor stood over Luke. "Now young Skywalker. You. Will. Die." She paused it and looked at Chuck.

"You've not Han, you're Luke, and Bryce is Darth Vader," Sarah said. Chuck gave her a look. "And the Emperor, he's….he's…life!" she said, her face lighting up. "And no matter how bad it gets you'll still do anything for him. You'd die for him." She paused. "I'm wrong, Bryce isn't Darth Vader, everyone you love is Darth Vader." Sarah looked up at him. "Ellie, Awesome, Morgan."

"You," Chuck said softly.

"Me," she agreed, nodding. "You need someone to protect you from doing something stupid."

"I wouldn't call everything I do stupid," Chuck responded. "I mean sure, there's several things, but not everything."

"No, not stupid," she said. She closed her eyes. "You'd give it all for someone you love, or even for someone you don't love, because you couldn't stay out of Castle because Bryce was in trouble, you can't help but help someone who needs it."

"If you saw a little girl about to get run over," Chuck began.

"I'd save her," Sarah said softly, and the look on her face said she was thinking about something. Chuck suspected it was something in her past. She had gotten looks on her face before when discussing the past, or things that reminded her of it. But he had no idea what this would be because he had read the entire file, and there was nothing in there about children, or little girls, or Return of the Jedi.

"What is it?" Chuck asked.

"What's what," she said, giving him a look. "Just thinking about how lucky I am."

"Ummm, no," Chuck said, shaking his head. "That was not a look that was thinking about how lucky you are." Sarah looked away.

"It was my last mission," Sarah said softly.

"The one where you destroyed the package?" Chuck said.

"Yeah," Sarah replied, and then turned to look at him. "Chuck I want to tell you, I do, but if I tell you, then you'll know and that will put people in danger. It's not that I don't trust you, it's just…" Chuck put his hand on her shoulder.

"I get it," he said, with a soft smile, but it really didn't reach his face. She knew this disappointed him, hurt him, but this was too big. He would never purposefully give away the information, but what he didn't know he couldn't tell. "Hey, this is for you," he said, handing her the bag, and headed off toward the bed room. She opened the bag and pulled out the shirt, melting. He had finally gotten to a place where he was comfortable enough to buy her something like this. Something that said he was hers, and then she went and told him she couldn't tell him. She took a deep breath and went into the bedroom. She walked in, sat on the bed, while he was looking for clothes for the night.

"I need to tell you the story about a baby girl, her name is Molly," Sarah said, tears coming out of her eyes. Chuck turned, slowly. "She was my last mission."

-ooooo-

It was some time later that Chuck thought Sarah had drifted off to sleep. Chuck's shirt was beginning to dry where Sarah had cried as she told the story of Molly, that was now kind of her sister, living with her mom. He was slowly rubbing her back, staring up at the ceiling. How could the US Government have done all of the things it had done to her and let like Ryker use her? Chuck really wanted to go find this Langston Graham and punch him in the throat. Not that Chuck would punch him, because if Graham was a member of the CIA there was every chance he was a much better physical specimen than Chuck, and Chuck really hated violence, but the things they did to Sarah made him consider it.

"Hate leads to the dark side," Sarah mumbled from under his hand. He froze his stroking off her back.

"First you watch Return of the Jedi, now you start quoting it to me," Chuck said. "You're working way to hard if you're trying to get into my pants." Sarah laughed.

"No, I had lunch with Morgan today," Sarah began. "We had sizzling shrimp."

"Huh, and I thought you didn't want to get married," Chuck said. She lifted up and put her chin on the back of her hand that was on his chest.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I think by the arcane Morgan laws, if you take him out for lunch and get him sizzling shrimp you are married," Chuck said. "I don't make the Morgan rules, Baby," he said shrugging. She chuckled.

"It doesn't apply when you're taking them out asking for help with his best friend," Sarah retorted.

"Please tell me he thought you were actually asking him out," Chuck said, grinning.

"How'd you know?" Sarah asked.

"That beard has given him an insane amount of confidence over the years," Chuck said. "It's mostly aimed at Ellie, but sometimes it hits innocent bystanders by mistake."

"Well, he did, and he went on for some time, but he told me you were like Luke and Bryce was Vader, and I didn't understand any of that until I came home and watched it," Sarah replied.

"Again," Chuck said. Sarah raised an eyebrow. "We've watched it twice."

"It's been on twice, I was otherwise occupied," Sarah said haughtily. Chuck gave a low growl and grinned. She bounced a shoulder. "The force was with me." He burst out laughing. "But, you are a Jedi Knight." He grinned at her.

"Really, I'm a Jedi Knight?" Chuck asked, grinning. "You saved a little girl, you went against your corrupt superior and hid her. Sarah Walker, you are a Jedi Knight, and you are my only hope."

"That's Star Wars, right?" She asked. A low growl came from Chuck and she giggled. "Chuck is that a light saber in your pocket?" She squealed as he wrapped her back up in his arms and kissed her.

-ooooo-

They pulled up in front of the house, and Chuck looked very nervous. For that matter, Sarah did to.

"Sarah are you sure about this?" Chuck asked. Sarah nodded.

"I read Carina in, she's part of the safety protocol now for my mom," Sarah said.

"I mean I get why you wouldn't want to visit, to keep your mom and sister secure," Chuck replied, sounding nervous. Sarah grinned at him.

"Chuck Bartwoski, are you scared of meeting my mother?" Sarah asked.

"Look, this may surprise you, but there was exactly one person before you that I was in enough of a relationship with to meet their parents, and that didn't work out so well," Chuck replied.

"Well, good news, I've already slept with Bryce and now I'm with you," she said. Chuck gave her a very flat look. "Too soon?" The look didn't change. "Too soon," she confirmed. "Chuck, I'm with you. I don't care what my mom thinks of you, but I know she's going to love you."

"How can you know?" Chuck asked.

"Uh, you are with me, while I'm pregnant with someone else's kid, that's kinda a big deal," Sarah explained, her hand gently caressing his face. "Chuck, I love you, and she's gonna see that."

"If you say so," Chuck replied. They got out of the car, and walked up to the front door. Sarah rang the doorbell. Chuck stood there nervously as the door opened. The lady Chuck could only assume was Emma stood there holding a little girl in her arms. Chuck quickly saw the look on her face as she saw Sarah, the obvious pregnancy, and then the glance at him. Chuck gave a wave.

"Hi," she said, extending her hand. "Nice to meet you, Bryce," Emma said. Chuck winced and so did Sarah.

"Mom, this is Chuck," Sarah said. Emma gave her a look. "Bryce and I are…actually we really never were."

"So this is your doing?" Emma asked Chuck. Chuck gulped.

"No, this is Bryce's doing, but Chuck is helping me," Sarah said. Chuck saw Emma's expression change and then she glanced to her daughter. "He actually knew Bryce, and Bryce was a jerk to him, just like he ended up being to me."

"Told you," Emma muttered. She stepped out of the way, a smile on her face for Chuck. "Please, come in." Chuck walked past and entered the home. As Sarah did, he heard Emma mutter, "I assume everything is okay?" He didn't hear an answer but felt a bit of ease of the tension in the room, so he assumed Sarah had confirmed everything was okay. Chuck was standing in the living room. "Please have a seat." Chuck sat, and Emma seemed to make a decision. "I hate to do this, but since you're about to help raise one, and I really need to speak to my daughter in private, do you mind watching Molly?" Emma placed Molly in Chuck's arms before he had a chance to say anything. He wondered if his eyes got as big as Sarah's.

"I would be glad to," he said to Emma. He turned to Molly. "Hey gorgeous," he said. She giggled and wrapped her arms around Chuck's neck.

"She never likes anyone," Emma said, stunned.

"Chuck has that effect on people," Sarah said softly. Emma turned to Sarah, her eyes turned soft.

"We really need to talk," Emma said, nearly dragging Sarah away. Chuck turned to Molly.

"So, you're gonna have a niece in a few months, and that will make you and aunt," Chuck said to the grinning toddler. "Are you okay with that?"

"Yep," Molly said. Chuck nodded his head at her.

"You know they're in there talking about me, right?"

"Yep," Molly said, and snuggled into his lap. Chuck smiled, and ran his hand through her hair as she shut her eyes.

-ooooo-

Sarah came out of the back bedroom behind her mother. She was a bit exhausted, but it was a good exhausted. Sarah told her mom everything. She blamed it on Chuck. Since he came into her life it was like she had verbal diarrhea. Emma was absolutely excited and asked if she was going to get married. She had rolled her eyes and Emma had scolded her for it, but Sarah could see in Emma's eyes and on her face, she didn't mean it. Emma was happy. Sarah realized she hadn't worn her "spy mask" the entire time, and Emma had probably seen all the happiness in her when talking about Chuck. She nearly crashed into her mother at the entrance to the living room she was so lost in her thoughts.

"I think you picked a good one, Sarah," Emma said. Chuck was there, Molly asleep in his lap and he just looked so at peace. Something inside Sarah fluttered, jumped, and was just happy. Happy in a way she didn't know she could be happy. Chuck was integrating into her family the same way she was into his. He was real, this was real, and for the first time since she was sixteen, and had met Langston Graham, she began to believe she could have everything she wanted.

"I know I did, Mom," she said. Emma put an arm around her. She had found home, all because of Chuck Bartowski.

A/N: Steampunk . Chuckster and I got to talking/watching vs The Suitcase and I saw where Morgan was talking about things and he figured out how everyone was CIA. Inspiration. Maybe I made him too observant, but I have to wonder, if his best friend was moving in with Sarah, would he have straightened up? Maybe I'm off, I don't know, but man that was fun to write. BTW that 2 min scene in the hotel room closet is GOLD. If you haven't seen it in a while, watch it. Yvonne's almost eyeroll and sarcasm is amazing! Hope you liked it, reviews and PMs are always welcomed…Til next time!

DC

[samingtonwilson]

Return - Part 12 - Jim Kirk

Part 11

Summary: series following the events of loot– takes place during events of star trek beyond. in this chapter, you learn what MACO stands for.

Warnings: language

A/N: we’re gettin’ close to the end, friends. part 15 will be the final part!

You weren’t surprised to learn that it wasn’t nerve-pacifying to sit in a ship that broke through the surface of a river only to be pelted with three enemy ships. It was especially not nerve-pacifying when you were told three hull breaches were detected— one on deck three, one in the cargo bay, and the last in the engine room.

And it seemed the unnerving news was unending as the two crew members that were sent to the cargo bay and deck three, Sulu and Chekov, informed you all that there was no sight of Krall— only of a victim killed in his wake.

Seeing one of the victims only moments later was unsurprisingly worse than hearing about it, your hand flying to cover your agape mouth when Jim shined a light upon the sullen, paled, emaciated corpse in the engine room.

Uhura explained the occurrence as an energy transference— an energy transference she’d seen Krall carry out while on his base.

“He must still be on board,” Jim said, shining the flashlight on the many wires that hung in an almost snake-like fashion from the ceiling. “We would’ve seen him leave.”

You hummed despite the thudding of your heart against your ribs. “Very comforting, Captain. Good to know the man that choked the living daylights out of me is still on board.”

Uhura’s almond-shaped eyes widened as she turned quickly to face you, her long, dark hair scattering over her shoulders as a result. You chose to pay attention to her question rather than to what Jim said into his communicator. “He did that to your neck?”

“Who did you think did it?”

She shrugged. “I thought you two just really missed each other.”

“Hickies don’t look like this!”

“Hickies are like snowflakes,” she told you, smiling a little. “No two are the same.”

“They should fade in the next day or two, right?”  

She frowned and leaned closer to you, staring at your neck. “I don’t think so— maybe a couple of weeks.”  

You sighed heavily. “Fantastic. That’ll help me get dates.”

Jim eyed you for a moment silently before motioning to the deck’s exit. “Let’s go.”

You stepped in front of Jim on your way to the mess hall, rolling your eyes at his protesting. “I’m the security officer, Captain. You have to let me do my job some time.”

He held up his hands in surrender, watching as you pulled out your phaser and held it up, your arms stretched before you so a sharp jolt of pain shot up your injured limb. You shook your head and ignored it, rounding the corner as the only sounds were your footsteps and Jim’s heavy breathing.

“You’re dating?” he asked as you held your hand out to halt their steps when you thought you might have seen an odd shadow and heard a collection of unfamiliar soft voices echoing.

You let your hand find the handle of your phaser again. “Does that seem like a good question to ask right now?”

Jim’s arm wrapped around your waist to steady you when your foot caught on a broken deck plate, his breath caressing your cheek until you stood up straight and took several steps away from him. “Nothing to do right now other than walk and talk. So, are you dating?”

“No, Captain, I’ve been a chaste rose since the moment you and I parted ways two years ago,” you mumbled dryly, turning the a corner. “You’re dating, why can’t I?”

“It’s barely dating,” he explained. You could hear the rustling of his survival suit’s jacket as he shrugged. “Just casual... stuff.”

You hummed, looking to your left and motioning for him to pass you his flashlight. “Fruits of the same tree, you and I.”

“I knew you’d eventually come to see that.”

You smiled to yourself as he placed the light in your hand, a brief scan of the corridor allowing you to turn the final corner you’d need.

“So, you still planning on stealing that bike for me?”

You passed him the flashlight. “Do you want me to?”

He clicked his tongue. “I don’t need you going to prison again.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” you said, holding back a gasp when your wrist hit the wall beside you. “Prison-mandated therapy was pretty eye-opening.”

“I was wondering how you’d gotten to be so intuitive.”

You both entered the mess hall once a brief scan with the flashlight showed an empty room with all screens powered up. You assumed the sounds you heard in the corridor must have come from them as videos of the Franklin’s original crew played on loop.

You gasped when you heard a pop a few inches from you, sparks flying out from the source of the noise. “Fucking hell.”

Uhura entered the room last, her steps carrying her directly to one of the screens. She watched for a few moments, turning the knob to rewind over and over. “Captain,” she called, looking over her shoulder to confirm that you were already there.

You felt Jim step behind you as Uhura rewound once more then slowed the video, rewound another time then slowed the video more. Eventually, the voice of the ship’s former captain turned into the viscous like honey, prickly like a cactus voice you were so terrified of.

Uhura pointed at the face depicted on the screen. “It’s him.”

Jim immediately flipped his communicator open, the chirp startling you until he said, “Scotty, I need you to link into the Franklin database. Find out what you can about Balthazar Edison.”

He motioned for you to follow him, your hand finding Uhura’s so you could pull her from the screen.

The three of you raced down the corridor, your injured hand fighting through the pain and clutching onto your phaser as you did so.

“The captain of the Franklin?” Scotty asked. “Sir, he’ll be long dead.”

“No, he’s not. I don’t know how, but Edison is Krall.”

You reached the transporter room in record time, out of breath as Jim asked Scotty what he could find. When Scotty explained that Edison was once a Major in the United Earth Military Assault Command Operation, Jim sighed out to say Edison was a soldier.

“His military service came to an end when MACO was disbanded,” Scotty explained further, reading off the screen displaying Edison’s picture and information.

“Why, what happened?” Jim asked, still a bit breathless.

“The Federation, sir— Starfleet. We’re not a military agency. They made him a captain and gave him the Franklin.”

All it took was for Jim to ask to see Edison’s logs and you bore witness to the crumbling of a man.

What started off as a man with square shoulders, a handsome face, and alert eyes, ended as a man with hunched posture, a face contorted with exhaustion and apathy, and dead eyes. His deep voice explained he was not assisted in his distress and he’d lost all his crew except for three members.

That final admission led to a burst of anger, his eyes finally alive but with rage.

“The indigenous race abandoned this planet a long time ago,” Edison continued, the deep rasp of his voice sending a shiver down your spine. “They left behind sophisticated mining equipment and a drone workforce. They have some sort of technology that prolongs life,” his voice emphasized the final word, his eyebrows rising. “I will do whatever it takes for me and my crew. The Federation do not care about us.”

The video ended with a sad man, face crumpled and voice breathy, stating, “You’ll likely never see me again. But, if you do, be ready.”

The screen went black and you could see the horror in each of the reflections.

“Why hasn’t he used his weapon yet?” Jaylah asked, the first to break a painful silence.

“He’s not looking to use it on a small crowd,” you said, surprised at how softly you spoke. “He wants to take out millions, inflict as much damage as possible.”

“He needs a distribution system,” Uhura added, looking at you and Jim as she spoke.

Jim caught on quickly. “They need to circulate air here, right?”

“Aye, sir,” Scotty replied. “There’s an atmospheric regulator at the core.”

Jim turned back to Uhura. “Lieutenant, contact Yorktown. Make sure they shut it down until we find Krall.”

Uhura rushed away immediately and Jim looked at you next. “You, too, Ensign.”

“But—”

He clicked his tongue and let his eyes meet yours. There was a sadness there, a fear you thought might take you out at the knees if you looked at the dulling blue much longer.

“Go with Uhura. I won’t—” he sighed and shook his head as he took your hand, lacing your fingers together. “I won’t be able to do what I have to unless I know you’re okay— you’ll stay safe this way.”

“Captain, —”

“Go, please.”

The beating Jim could feel against his ribs grew softer as your hand slipped from his, almost feather-like as you stepped backwards twice. When you turned and left the room, there was no pulse in his chest, no blood rushing in his ears— the beating, the thudding, the pulsing left with you like it always would.

Over the course of the previous two days, he’d been wondering why the angry part of him was so silent, so calm in your presence. A little thought and even less investigation made him realize the part wasn’t birthed from anger— its red came from fear. You’d left him behind once before, and he was so damn afraid you’d do it again.

He knew the fear was irrational, he knew the fear was child-like, but fuck if he could watch you ruin yourself again, push yourself away from him again, literally and figuratively lock yourself away from him again.

He’d spent two years learning to be okay without you. He accepted every hardship he faced in the process because he thought it would lead to something better, something happier. It took two days around you, though, for him to realize that the something better and the something happier didn’t exist without you, that maybe taking the easy route and allowing himself to love you would have a result just as great.

He needed more time with you— two days weren’t enough, two months weren’t enough— and he would only get that time if you were safe and if he was able to do all he needed to.

He needed to tell you that he loved you, that he would do anything for you, that everything he wanted started and ended with you.

But that had to wait.

He bit down on his bottom lip for a moment, shaking his head before turning back to Scotty. “How would he access the core?”

“Uh, well, there’s a maintenance tower at the station’s gravitational nexus. That’s the only way.”

He nodded. He cleared his mind, he took a deep breath, and spun on his heels— he had work to do. “Scotty, you get over there. Make sure it gets shut down.”

Jim, running as fast as his legs could carry him, raced through the Franklin until he could burst through the door of the bridge.

There were certain things that couldn’t wait.

You spun around at the harsh noise and held your phaser up, your eyes narrowed as you looked ahead of you.

He held his hands up in surrender, his heart, once again in his chest, thumped with life. “It’s just me.”

Smiling sheepishly, you lowered your phaser and shrugged a shoulder. “Sorry, reflex.”

“Have you been able to contact them, Lieutenant?” he asked, still staring at you.

“I have,” Uhura replied, her eyes on the screen before her. “They’re saying it’s near impossible to shut it down and the senior engineer in charge is off-planet.”

“Scotty’s on his way there now— hopefully he has more luck.” He cleared his throat and looked away from you. “You two should get off the ship, make sure the rest of the crew is okay, get your own injuries looked at.”

“Yes, sir. As soon as I make contact with Commander Spock, I’ll deboard the ship.”

“Good.” He brought his eyes back to yours. “Can we talk? Just for a minute— in private.”

You nodded slowly, watching as he stuffed his hands into his pockets and shifted nervously on his feet. “Lead the way.”

He nodded back and motioned for you to follow him out the same door he entered.

You stared at the tension in his back as he led you into the hall, following that to his features when he turned to face you. You almost jumped at the hissing of the shutting door behind you, hiding your shock with a clearing of your throat.

“This isn’t your fault.”

You tilted your head. “Wh—”

“You’ve been blaming yourself since the minute Krall attacked the Enterprise— none of it is your fault.” He placed his hands on your shoulders, he shook you a little. “The artifact would have ended up on the ship sooner or later. I’ve told you before, there’s nothing left to atone for, no one left to ask for forgiveness from. Okay?”

You blinked twice. You nodded— you would’ve agreed to everything he told you if that was what he wanted. “Okay.”

Jim placed his hand against your neck, his thumb caressing the bruises that weren’t hidden under the high-neckline of your uniform dress. He stared at them for a moment. “If something— If something happens, it’s still not your fault. Don’t think, even for a second, that it is.”

You swallowed over sudden tightness in your throat. “Captain, —”

His eyes left the angry marks and found yours, unbelievably deep, unbelievably expressive. “It wasn’t a lapse in judgement. Falling in love with you wasn’t a lapse in judgement.”

“It wasn’t?”

He leaned forward, sighing. “No, I’ve never thought that it was.”

Before he could say anything else, you took hold of the lapel of his jacket and pulled him closer, your body moulding to his as he took a step to back you into the wall. It took one more small pull and his lips found yours, his arm winding around your waist tightly to hold you both together while his other hand left your neck and held onto the wall behind you.

You weren’t surprised at how much you missed being kissed by him, being held by him. The depth of his kiss was greater now, as was the tightness of his embrace. While you could feel yourself growing lightheaded, it seemed Jim was finding his oxygen within you.

He refused to take his lips from you after you broke the kiss, pressing them along your jaw and to your neck as if he was gently soothing the sting of the bruises you could no longer feel.

“Jim?”

He hummed against your skin, the vibrations traveling up the column of your throat.

You sighed out, your eyelids heavy as you tried to hold them up. “It’ll be hard to stay optimistic if you kiss me like that.”

He smiled and nuzzled his face into the crook of your neck, both of his arms wrapping around you. “Like what?”

“Like this is it.”

PART 13

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[j0sgomez-blog]

By Michael Lanza

An unforgettable campsite can define a backcountry trip. Sometimes that perfect spot where you spend a night forges the memory that remains the most vivid long after you’ve gone home. A photo of that camp can send recollections of the entire adventure rushing back to you—it does for me. I’ve been very fortunate to have pitched a tent in many great backcountry campsites over nearly three decades of backpacking and trekking all over the U.S. and the world. I’ve boiled the list of my favorite spots down to these 25.

I update this list every year, and each time, it becomes more difficult. Below my top 25 list you’ll find a second list of campsites that were previously in my top 25. Each campsite photo below includes a short description of where it is and the trip, and most have a link to an existing story about that trip at The Big Outside.

In a few cases, the photos from these places show the view a few steps from our tent, rather than the site itself.

I share a brief anecdote with each photo because, for me, each campsite isn’t merely a beautiful scene: it is a story and a memory. Because that’s what camping in the wilderness is all about.

I’d love to read your thoughts about any of these places, or your suggestions for campsites that belong on my list; I’m always looking for trip ideas. Share them in the comments section at the bottom of this story.

Sweet dreams.

Sahale Glacier Camp, North Cascades National Park, WA

We slogged up Sahale Arm into a cold, wind-driven rain, unable to see more than a hundred feet in any direction. But as my friend David Ports and I reached Sahale Glacier Camp (see lead photo at top of story), the rain and wind abated and the clouds dropped below us, giving us a view of the earth falling away into a bottomless abyss a few steps from our tent door. A mountain goat strolled past our camp.

Perched at the top of Sahale Arm and the toe of the Sahale Glacier, at 7,686 feet, the highest designated campsite in North Cascades National Park overlooks what appears to be a boundless, wind-whipped sea of sharpened peaks smothered in snow and ice, among them Johannesburg, Baker, Shuksan, Glacier Peak, and in the far distance, Mount Rainier. See my Ask Me post about backpacking in North Cascades National Park for more photos and information on how to take this trip.

The campsite by Royal Arch (which is behind the photographer) in the Grand Canyon.

Beside Royal Arch, Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

Backpacking the 34.5-mile Royal Arch Loop, the most remote and arguably the most rugged and lonely established South Rim hike in the Big Ditch, three friends and I put in a monster first day to reach the campsite beside Royal Arch—and was it ever worth the effort. We descended Royal Arch Canyon, which involves slow, strenuous, and exposed scrambling in spots—but is also lush with hanging gardens growing along its vibrant creek, which plunges through several crystal-clear pools—until we came into view of the arch, the Grand Canyon’s largest natural bridge (it’s water carved, so technically a bridge, not an arch).

Royal Arch campsite, Grand Canyon.

We passed beneath the tall, thick arch (which provided ample shelter during dinnertime rain showers) and walked just beyond it to a flat ledge more than large enough for our two tents, directly beneath a towering sandstone pinnacle. Just steps beyond our ledge loomed a vertical, 200-foot pour-off dropping into the lower section of Royal Arch Canyon—a reminder not to wander far from the tents after dark. Come morning, dawn light would set the red walls of that lower canyon ablaze. For the four of us, all longtime backcountry explorers, this was an all-time best campsite.

See my feature story about backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Royal Arch Loop, with lots of photos, a video, and information on how to pull off this trip, and all of my stories about the Grand Canyon at The Big Outside.

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Johns Hopkins Inlet, Glacier Bay National Park.

Johns Hopkins Inlet, Glacier Bay National Park, AK

For one of the trips for my book about taking our kids on wilderness adventures in national parks facing threats from climate change, we took a five-day sea kayaking trip in Glacier Bay, where cliffs shoot straight up out of the sea and razor peaks smothered in ice and snow rise thousands of feet overhead. We watched bald eagles and other birds flying overhead, harbor seals popping up out of the water near our boats, Stellar sea lions honking and carrying on while sprawled on the rocks of South Marble Island, and brown bears roaming rocky beaches looking for food.

We spent two nights at this campsite near the mouth of Johns Hopkins Inlet. From there, we kayaked up the inlet to within about a quarter-mile of the mile-wide snout of the Johns Hopkins Glacier; a thousand or more seals occupied floating icebergs or swam around the inlet. Throughout the evenings and mornings in camp, we listened to that massive glacier calve another bus-size chunk of itself into the sea every 20 or 30 minutes, with an explosive sound the native Tlingits called “white thunder.”

See my story about sea kayaking in Glacier Bay for more photos and a video, plus information on how to pull off this trip.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside, which has made several top outdoors blog lists. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip. Please follow my adventures on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube.

The Narrows, Zion National Park, UT

It was one of the most glaring omissions in my resume as a backpacker: I had never hiked The Narrows of the Virgin River in Zion National Park. (I actually had a permit to do it in October 2013, when Congress shut down the federal government, closing all the national parks and temporarily crushing my hopes of finally ticking off that classic hike.) Then an unexpected opportunity arose: I had a window for a four-day trip in early November and saw an unusually good forecast for southern Utah. I broached the idea of backpacking The Narrows to my friend, David Gordon, he leapt at the chance, and we got a last-minute permit for a very popular trip at a time of year when there are far fewer people either competing for a permit or dayhiking from the bottom.

Campsite no. 1 in Zion’s Narrows.

I shot this photo and video of David at our campsite, Narrows no. 1, in early evening; the slot on the left side of the photo is The Narrows—we had emerged from that slot, hiking downstream, just an hour or so earlier.

Read my story about backpacking The Narrows of Zion National Park, with many more photos, a video of the trip, and tips on pulling it off yourself.

Score a popular permit using my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”

Precipice Lake, Sequoia National Park.

Precipice Lake, Sequoia National Park, CA

It almost seems unfair to compare other places to mountain ranges like the Tetons, High Sierra, and North Cascades, or to the Grand Canyon; those four destinations dominate this list in part because I keep returning to them, but I think the photos speak for themselves. On a six-day, family backpacking trip in Sequoia National Park, we camped at two alpine lakes that deserve placement on this list: Precipice Lake and Columbine Lake (below).

Precipice wasn’t even part of the planned itinerary; we intended to go beyond it, over Kaweah Gap, to camp in the Nine Lake basin. But when we reached Precipice in late afternoon on our third day, we decided within minutes to stop for the night. Cliffs of clean, white granite with black streaks ring much of the compact lake’s shoreline. The mouth of the outlet creek provides an excellent pool for a chilling dip. Granite ledges above the lake have flat areas for tents or to just lay out bags and sleep under the stars (as my 12-year-old son and I did). The evening alpenglow on the cliffs reflected in the lake, and on 12,040-foot Eagle Scout Peak towering above Precipice, put the icing on the cake.

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Columbine Lake, Sequoia National Park.

Columbine Lake, Sequoia National Park, CA

Whichever direction you approach this lake from, you will pay for the privilege of a night here with significant toil. Filling a stone basin at nearly 11,000 feet, below the distinctive spire of Sawtooth Peak and an arc of snaggletoothed mountains, Columbine is reached either via a 600-foot hump up through dozens of switchbacks from Lost Canyon; or a much harder 1,200-foot scramble, sans a maintained trail, up a steep mountainside of sliding scree from Monarch Lakes to 11,630-foot Sawtooth Gap, where a primitive but better path leads down to Columbine. (We took the former and descended from Sawtooth Gap to Monarch Lakes, and were glad we were not carrying backpacks up that route.)

Once there, though, your effort is (mostly) forgotten. We explored the granite ledges on the north shore of the lake, where crevices and small bowls in the granite hold tiny pockets of water and you sometimes have to scramble on all fours over short, vertical walls. Alpenglow painted the peaks a salmon hue in the evening–of course–and sunrise cast an unbelievable pallet of orange, yellow, and reds onto a curlicue sculpture of clouds hovering just above one jagged ridge nearby. While not easy on the legs, Columbine Lake is very easy on the eyes.

See my story about this six-day backpacking trip, which included Precipice and Columbine lakes, with many more photos, a video, and information for planning this trip yourself.

Get the right pack for you. See my picks for “The 10 Best Backpacking Packs” 

and the best ultralight, thru-hiking packs.

Death Canyon Shelf, Grand Teton National Park.

Death Canyon Shelf, Grand Teton National Park, WY

I could rattle off a list of gorgeous campsites in the Tetons, a park I’ve visited somewhere between 15 and 20 times and never get tired of. But I decided to include just the two camping zones I consider the best places to bed down in the Tetons backcountry, that can be reached by trail: Death Canyon Shelf (at right) and the North Fork of Cascade Canyon (below).

I’ve camped a few times in different spots on Death Canyon Shelf, a broad, three-mile-long bench at about 9,500 feet. With the earth dropping away abruptly into Death Canyon on one side, cliffs rising some 500 feet on the other side, and views across the jagged peaks and canyons of the Tetons—reaching all the way to the Grand Teton—there are few spots with such sweeping and dramatic panoramas. I’ve watched moose in Death Canyon through binoculars from the cliff tops and was awakened one night by a bull elk outside our tent. On my most recent night here, with my family and a couple of friends, we watched one spectacular sunset followed by an equally glorious sunrise.

After the Teton Crest Trail, hike the other nine of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”

North Fork Cascade Canyon, Grand Teton National Park.

North Fork of Cascade Canyon, Grand Teton National Park, WY

We backpacked over Paintbrush Divide, at about 10,700 feet, and descended through switchbacks into the North Fork of Cascade Canyon, gaping at the view of the sheer north face of the Grand Teton rising several thousand feet above the deep, green trough of the canyon. I’ve hiked all over the Tetons, including over this pass a couple times before. This spot gives one of the best views on a trail in all of the Tetons.

Passing Lake Solitude, ringed by a horseshoe of cliffs, we hiked down into the North Fork camping zone and grabbed the first available campsite. The shot above is of the creek flowing a short distance from our tent, looking down canyon at the Grand. In the morning, we continued down the canyon, passing several more established campsites in the North Fork camping zone that would have easily made this list as well.

See my story about backpacking the Teton Crest Trail, with more photos, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Dying to backpack in the Tetons? See my e-guides to the Teton Crest Trail and the best short backpacking trip there.

Lake Ellen Wilson, Glacier National Park.

Lake Ellen Wilson, Glacier National Park, MT

Our weeklong backpacking trip had featured too many wildlife sightings to count—including bighorn sheep and numerous mountain goats, not to mention that we had an impending date with a sow grizzly bear and her two cubs. The scenery blew us away every day. I would have forgiven Lake Ellen Wilson, our final night’s campsite, for being anticlimactic.

But upon arriving there, we soaked tired feet in the lake’s cold, emerald-colored waters, a 20-second walk from our campsite, gazing around at a basin ringed by thousand-foot cliffs with several waterfalls pouring off of them. Then we laid down on the sun-warmed pebbles on the beach, which felt like a heated bed with built-in massage. For my friend Jerry Hapgood and me, dropping off into an afternoon nap on them was the default setting. It turned out to be our best campsite of the trip.

See my story about backpacking my modified and expanded version of Glacier National Park’s Northern Loop, with more photos, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Get my expert e-guides to the best backpacking trip in Glacier and backpacking the Continental Divide Trail through Glacier.

At Wanda Lake on the John Muir Trail in the Evolution Basin (above Evolution Lake).

Evolution Basin, John Muir Trail, Kings Canyon National Park, CA

We walked up to the shore of Evolution Lake after dark, laid out our sleeping pads and bags on granite slabs under the stars, and quickly nodded off. So we didn’t catch a glimpse of our surroundings until first light the next morning—which actually made it more magical, I think, because we got to watch daylight slowly reveal this magnificent alpine valley to us.

Thru-hiking the John Muir Trail in a week, trying to knock off an average of 31 miles a day, we rose the next morning in the dark to begin another long day on the trail. We departed Evolution Lake by headlamp, but soon the approaching dawn began slowly illuminating a starkly beautiful landscape of rock, water, and sky. Dawn struck the line of jagged peaks on the horizon first, then eventually found us, the only people already on the trail that day. At that hour when many backpackers are still fast asleep, we hiked through one of the most stunning stretches of the JMT, the Evolution Basin, in its richest light.

See my story about thru-hiking the John Muir Trail, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip (at any pace).

Got a trip coming up? See my reviews of the best gear duffles and luggage and 7 best hiking daypacks.

Our campsite in Titcomb Basin, in Wyoming’s Wind River Range.

Titcomb Basin, Wind River Range, WY

The views kept getting better with every mile on the first day of a three-day, 41-mile loop that two friends and I backpacked from the Elkhart Park Trailhead in Wyoming’s Wind River Range in mid-September. But as we entered the long, alpine valley called Titcomb Basin to find a campsite for the night, craning our necks to see the cliffs and peaks towering overhead, we immediately realized it was one of the prettiest backcountry spots any of us had ever seen.

An alpine valley at over 10,500 feet, Titcomb Basin sits below mountains on the Continental Divide that soar more than 3,000 feet above the Titcomb Lakes in the valley, the highest of which is 13,745-foot Fremont Peak. In fact, high peaks flank the valley on three sides like a long, narrow horseshoe. The only easy way in and out is via the trail entering the mouth of the basin. The next day, we hiked an off-trail route over Knapsack Col at about 12,200 feet, at the upper end of Titcomb, descending another trailless alpine valley speckled with wildflowers. Every time I return to the Winds, it feels like a reminder that I need to get there more often.

Read my feature story about that 41-mile hike, “Best of the Wind River Range: Backpacking to Titcomb Basin.”

Dome Glacier, Glacier Peak Wilderness.

Dome Glacier, Ptarmigan Traverse, Glacier Peak Wilderness, WA

The first four nights of camping on the Ptarmigan Traverse are in the alpine zone with 360-degree views of some of the most severely vertiginous and heavily glaciated and snow-covered peaks in the Lower 48. With clear skies, any of those camps might among the most memorable you’ve ever had. But besides White Rock Lakes, my other favorite campsite on the Ptarmigan was on the Dome Glacier, base camp for our climb of Dome Peak. Throughout a clear evening, with a sea of clouds filling the valleys below us, we looked south to the white pyramid of the volcano Glacier Peak, glowing above the clouds in the dusk light.

Getting There Climbers traditionally begin the Ptarmigan Traverse at Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park and walk south, largely hewing close to the Cascade Crest. Beyond Dome Peak, from the Cub Lake area in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, the route descends to the Downey Creek Trailhead on Suiattle River Road. The route is mostly off-trail and crosses six glaciers; expert skills at glacier travel and navigating off-trail through mountains are required. See an excellent route description at summitpost.org/ptarmigan-traverse/154644.

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Great Sand Dunes National Park.

On the Dunes, Great Sand Dunes National Park, CO

Not long into our first day backpacking across the massive sand dunes of this park—which tower several hundred feet tall—I was already convinced that carrying a pack loaded with food and gear for three days as well as two gallons of water up giant dunes was not a brilliant plan. Our group of editors from Backpacker Magazine marched a few miles over the rolling, sometimes steep dunes until we found a relatively flat spot to pitch our tents. Then the magic show began.

It was November, and the light of late afternoon and early evening transformed the shifting, mountainous dunes into three-dimensional works of abstract art. I wandered a wide perimeter around our camp in the evening and early morning, shooting photos of frost on multi-colored dunes that often came to a peak as sharp as on the roof of a house. At times, sand avalanching downhill under our boots made an eerie sound, a phenomenon known as “singing.” I decided the dunes more than made up for the effort expended getting there.

See my story, with more photos, about backpacking at Great Sand Dunes for information on how to pull off this trip.

Get the right tent for you. See my “Gear Review: The 5 Best Backpacking Tents” and my “5 Tips For Buying a Backpacking Tent.”

High camp at 12,000 feet below the East Face of California’s 14,505-foot Mount Whitney.

Below the East Face of Mount Whitney, CA

In frigid blasts of wind raking the snow-covered mountainside in April, our party crested a steep slope to find ourselves facing one of the most-photographed and unforgettable mountain vistas in America: the East Face of California’s 14,505-foot Mount Whitney, highest peak in the Lower 48. On a flat pan of snow at 12,000 feet below that jagged skyline, we pitched our high camp, from which we made a successful ascent of Whitney’s Mountaineers Route the next day. Spending two clear, starry nights in that camp, we saw the East Face in the varying light of all times of day, from dawn to sunset, dusk to dark. When I mentioned to one of our climbing partners that Whitney’s East Face was the only place I’ve seen that conjures mental images of the peaks of Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia, this man—who’s also been to Patagonia—told me that he’d been thinking the same thing.

See my story about that trip, “Roof of the High Sierra: A Father-Son Climb of California’s Mount Whitney.”

Campsite by Hance Rapids, Grand Canyon National Park.

Beside Hance Rapids, Colorado River, Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

The first day of a three-day backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon with my 10-year-old daughter, Alex, and two other families was a tough one: descending nearly 5,000 vertical feet in five miles on the rugged New Hance Trail, then walking another 1.5 miles (and 700 feet downhill) to campsites beside the Colorado River. Everyone was tired. But sometimes it takes a hard day of hiking to reach a magical spot, and a this lonely corner on the floor of the Big Ditch was a pretty good place to rest tired legs.

Our front porch offered a view of redrock cliffs just across the river. The gravelly drone of Hance Rapids drowned out all other noise. Night fell like a black curtain to reveal a sky riddled with more bullet holes than all the road signs in Arizona combined. Morning brought a sharp chill to the air—it was November—and the slow, patient unfolding of dawn light descending like very tired backpackers from the South Rim a vertical mile above us to the mid-canyon geologic layers and, finally, bathing our campsite in warmth. We left there completely rejuvenated.

See my story from this backpacking trip, with more images, a video, and tips on planning it yourself.

Click here now for my expert e-guide to backpacking the Grand Canyon rim to rim or my expert e-guide to dayhiking rim to rim.

Camp Schurman, Mt. Rainier.

Camp Schurman, Mount Rainier National Park, WA

Camp Schurman sits at 9,460 feet, on the very tip of Steamboat Prow, a cleaver of busted volcanic rock and dust. Two massive glaciers, the Emmons and Winthrop, part around this stone prow in a way that illustrates how frozen water behaves much the same as its liquid form. More than four square miles of moving ice, thousands of years old, and stretching over nearly 9,000 feet of elevation, the Emmons is the largest glacier in the Lower 48; the Winthrop isn’t much smaller. When two friends and I set off to climb the Emmons in early August a few years ago, with much of the snow melted off the glaciers, they displayed heavy scarring: huge, frighteningly beautiful crevasses as plentiful as waves on a storm-tossed ocean.

A two-foot-high, oval, stone wall shielded our tentsite from the irrepressible, bone-chilling wind. Standing outside our tent, I was struck by the mind-boggling scale of Mt. Rainier. Looking up at the mountain, I couldn’t fit it all within my peripheral vision. And yet, I knew I was looking at a tiny fraction of Rainier—which made me feel both very small and very fortunate for just being there.

Getting There From White River Campground at 4,400 feet, five miles past the White River ranger station (get a climbing permit there), hike the Glacier Basin Trail 3.2 miles to Glacier Basin Camp, at 6,000 feet. Follow a climbers’ trail up into the basin, reaching the Inter Glacier (good training ground for new climbers) at around 6,800 feet. Climb to Curtis Camp on the ridge north of Mt. Ruth, then descend off the ridge onto the Emmons Glacier and continue to Camp Schurman at 9,460 feet.

Map/Guidebook Trails Illustrated Mt. Rainier no. 217, $11.95, (800) 962-1643, natgeomaps.com. Mt. Rainier—A Climbing Guide, by Mike Gauthier, $18.95, mountaineersbooks.org.

Contact Mt. Rainier National Park, nps.gov/mora.

Hike stronger and smarter. See my stories “Training For a Big Hike or Mountain Climb” and “10 Tricks For Making Hiking and Backpacking Easier.”

At Big Spring, Paria Canyon.

Big Spring, Paria Canyon, Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, AZ-UT

I’d known that Paria Canyon could hold some surprises. But our two-family party found a little more adventure than we’d anticipated—which became evident when the other dad in our group, Vince, plunged hip-deep into quicksand on our first afternoon. But he managed, with considerable effort, to extricate himself; and by the next day, the kids had figured out how to identify shallow quicksand that they could stomp around in, howling with laughter. (Before the trip was over, Vince’s wife, Cat, and I would also take a quicksand dip.) We hiked for five days, mostly in the cold but usually ankle-deep Paria River, through a canyon that ranged from narrow with sheer walls to a big, open chasm between distant cliffs. While every campsite was really nice, the one at Big Spring (above), on our second night, took first prize.

Paria, which meets the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (where we finished our hike), at the beginning of the Grand Canyon, is unquestionably one of the great, multi-day canyon hikes of the Southwest—partly explaining why it’s so difficult to snag a permit to backpack it. But before you register a complaint about that with the Bureau of Land Management, which administers the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, bear in mind that the permit system preserves an unusual degree of solitude and a unique wilderness experience: We saw very few other people over five days, and spent much of that time on our own. (The BLM allows 20 people to start backpacking the Paria daily; we grabbed nine spots.)

See my story, with more photos, about backpacking Paria Canyon;for information on how to pull off this trip.

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Upper Lyman Lakes, Glacier Peak Wilderness, WA.

Upper Lyman Lakes, Glacier Peak Wilderness, WA

On the second day of a five-day, 44-mile family hike through the Glacier Peak Wilderness, we ascended a long finger of snow and crossed the pass that represents the crux of this trip in terms of technical difficulty, Spider Gap, at 7,100 feet. From there, we descended snow into the head of a valley sculpted and scoured by ice just a geologic moment ago, the Upper Lyman Lakes basin.

The Lyman Glacier poured down the cliffs of 8,459-foot Chiwawa Mountain into the vividly emerald waters of the uppermost lake. Barren, snow-speckled peaks and cliffs ringed the valley on three sides. A creek leapt from the lake’s far shore, crashing over stones and a small waterfall, below which some of us took a frigid and very brief bath. Wildflowers sprung hopefully from the few, shallow patches of soil. We pitched our tents on a grassy knoll near a copse of conifer trees, with an unobstructed view of that entire basin. And we spent most of the evening watching the shifting light across the mountains until sunset lit the clouds afire, watching a pair of bucks and a few doe wander through our campsites, and, well, swatting mosquitoes. (It was late July in the North Cascades, after all.)

Read my story about this five-day backpacking trip, with more photos and information on how to pull off this trip.

Plan your next great backpacking adventure using my downloadable, expert e-guides. Click here now to learn more.

On a hike above “Kid Rock” campsite, Stillwater Canyon, Green River, Canyonlands.

“Kid Rock” campsite, Green River, Canyonlands National Park, UT

We made up the name for this campsite; it doesn’t have a name that I’m aware of, though it is an established and large campsite on the Green River in Stillwater Canyon, seven miles above the confluence with the Colorado River. We gave it that name because, minutes after we landed, the eight kids in our five-family crew—ranging in age from four to 12—immediately planted their figurative flag on this boulder at the edge of the campsite and christened it “Kid Rock.” We all now remember that site by the name the kids gave that boulder.

Really, there are many special campsites along this lazy stretch of the Green, which passes through a canyon of soaring redrock cliffs and spires. But besides being spacious and scenic, this one sits at the bottom of a trail that climbs about three miles uphill to White Crack, one of the most spectacular campgrounds on the White Rim.

See my story about floating for five days down the Green River through Stillwater Canyon in Canyonlands National Park, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Alice Lake, Sawtooth Mountains.

Alice Lake, Sawtooth Wilderness, ID

In the last week of June—not yet summer in the mountains—my son, Nate, and I backpacked with two friends to one of the gems of the Sawtooth Wilderness: Alice Lake. While the ground was mostly dry and snow-free in the valleys, we had a frigid ford of a creek running knee-deep and fast with snowmelt, and then encountered up to three feet of snow still on the ground for the last hour or so to Alice Lake, which sits at 8,598 feet below an eye-catching row of granite pinnacles. We found Alice still partly frozen over. But the calm of late afternoon and then the next morning served up a glassy reflection of the snowy peaks beyond that illustrates why this area is a favorite among Sawooths aficionados.

I’d been to Alice Lake a few times before, as had Nate, on his first wilderness backpacking trip—and one of the first of our annual “Boy Trips”—when he was six years old. In fact, on this recent visit, I recognized and pointed out to Nate the campsite where, seven years earlier, I hurriedly threw up our tent just before a violent thunderstorm rolled in. This time, we just spent one night out there, early enough in the season that we had a chilly night and no mosquitoes.

Read my story “Jewels of the Sawtooths: Backpacking to Alice, Hell Roaring, and Imogene Lakes,” about that hike and one with my daughter, with more photos and trip-planning info. Also, check out my story, “Ask Me: What Are the Best Hikes in Idaho’s Sawtooths,” which provides more info about Alice Lake (and has a lead photo from Imogene). And see my “Photo Gallery: Mountain Lakes of Idaho’s Sawtooths.” Lastly, don’t miss two more photos from Sawtooths campsites that I’ve had to bump to my list of Past Favorite Backcountry Campsites (see below)—which tells you something about the Sawtooth Mountains lakes.

Benson Lake in Yosemite National Park.

Benson Lake, Yosemite National Park, CA

At dusk on the second day of a four-day, 86-mile backpacking tour of northern Yosemite—the park’s biggest swath of wilderness—my friend Todd Arndt and I strolled up to perhaps the most unlikely sight deep in the mountains: a sprawling, sandy beach that looks like it got lost on its way to Southern California. After hiking almost 23 miles that day, the trip’s longest, wiggling our toes in the cool sand and standing in the icy lake water in our bare feet reduced us to cooing babies.

A longtime backcountry ranger in Yosemite had told me that I’d find the park’s best backcountry beach at Benson Lake—but I never would have imagined such a vast expanse of fine sand deep in the mountains. It was one of many surprisingly gorgeous backcountry secrets I discovered over seven days of backpacking 151 miles through Yosemite’s most remote corners.

See my story about that trip, “Best of Yosemite, Part 2: Backpacking Remote Northern Yosemite,” and my story about the three-day, 65-mile first leg of that odyssey, “Best of Yosemite, Part 1: Backpacking South of Tuolumne Meadows.”

Yearning to backpack in Yosemite? See my e-guides to three amazing multi-day hikes there.

Compromise Camp on the Green River in Whirlpool Canyon, Dinosaur National Monument.

Green River, Dinosaur National Monument, UT-CO

Long shadows leaned over the steadily sliding river as we pulled into our first campsite on a four-day rafting trip on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the Utah-Colorado border. From the floor of Lodore Canyon, we gazed up at burgundy cliffs soaring a thousand feet overhead. One friend said to me, “This is probably the nicest campsite I’ve ever seen.” But what was truly amazing was that the second night’s campsite was better than our first—and the third night’s site was even more breathtaking than the first two. For that reason—and because many campsites on the banks of the Green in Dinosaur are equally beautiful—I’m simply lumping all of them together for this list.

See my story about that trip, “Why Conservation Matters: Rafting the Green River’s Gates of Lodore.”

Tiger Key, Everglades.

Tiger Key, Everglades National Park, FL

Songbirds chattered and flitted among the trees along the shore. Cormorants and brown pelicans skimmed the water’s surface. Egrets glided overhead. In one secluded cove in Tiger Key, an outermost island of the Ten Thousand Islands in the Everglades, we sat in our canoes and watched 10 brilliantly pink roseate spoonbills perched in a tree, watching us. In a small bay, we sat rapt while a dolphin swam wide circles around our canoe for about 20 minutes. Every evening, we stood in the warm beach sand watching the blazing red orb of the sun slowly sink into the Gulf of Mexico.

Another of the trips I took my family on for my book, paddling the Everglades was one of the most magical for all of us—for the scenery, the exotic birds, and the unique experience of having a wilderness beach all to ourselves.

See my story about kayaking the East River and canoeing and wilderness camping in the Ten Thousand Islands of Everglades National Park, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Unnamed canyon, Capitol Reef National Park.

Unnamed Canyon, Beehive Traverse, Capitol Reef National Park, UT

An hour into a three-day, cross-country traverse of the Waterpocket Fold formation in Capitol Reef, my friend David Gordon and I had already taken our first wrong turn, seen a bighorn sheep, and I’d dislodged a boulder that nearly crushed David. (We were off-route.) The incidents were omens for the days to follow, navigating our way through a maze of canyons, cliffs, domes, and towers, where it was not unusual to spend 20 minutes or more hemmed in by seemingly impassable cliffs before finding the narrow ledge or the break in the wall of rock that indicated the direction of our route.

My friend, local guide Steve Howe, spent many seasons working out this cross-country hike, which begins at Grand Wash and zigzags south a very circuitous 17 miles to Capitol Gorge. He calls it the Beehive Traverse, for the type of sandstone towers encountered along the way. He shared a map and GPS data with David and me to let us attempt it ourselves; very few people have hiked the route before us, and most of them were guided by Steve. On our second night, we camped in this unnamed canyon below flying buttresses of golden sandstone.

See my story, with lots of photos and a video, about backpacking the Beehive Traverse in Capitol Reef.

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Toleak Point, Olympic National Park.

Toleak Point, Olympic National Park, WA

On our second day of backpacking the southern Olympic coast, we had already marveled at a massive boulder in the intertidal zone on the beach that was wallpapered with hundreds of mussels, sea anemones, and vividly orange or purple starfish. We had also climbed down an 80-foot cliff on a rope ladder that was missing several rungs at its bottom.

Late that afternoon, we found a spot for our tents on the beach at Toleak Point, where dozens of the rock pinnacles called sea stacks rise out of the ocean just offshore. As the kids played in a tide pool, a sea otter emerged from the pool’s other end and flopped across the beach to plunge into the ocean. A seal cavorted in the waves near us. When I went to explore the sea stacks exposed at low tide, a great blue heron lifted off of one and soared away over the beach like a winged dinosaur. Another of the trips my family took for my book, this three-day hike on the Olympic coast is still remembered by our kids, as well as my wife and me, as one of our all-time favorite trips.

See my story about backpacking the southern Olympic coast, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

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Past Favorite Backcountry Campsites

As I visit new places, I occasionally add new campsites to the list above, and have to remove some great spots from the list (to keep it to 25, a somewhat random but sensible number). But bumping a site from my list doesn’t diminish its attraction, of course. So I will keep those former favorites in the list below, to give you even more ideas and goals for future adventures.

Granite Park, John Muir Wilderness.

Granite Park, John Muir Wilderness, CA

On the second night of a three-day, 32-mile, partly cross-country traverse of the John Muir Wilderness from North Lake Trailhead to Mosquito Flat Trailhead, we pitched our tents in Granite Park, an aptly named high valley speckled with scores of alpine lakes and tarns and encircled by an arc of 12,000- and 13,000-foot spires of barren, golden stone. In the evening, the sinking sun painted the peaks, lakes, and granitic landscape in a shifting, vivid light that was absolutely captivating. We couldn’t tear our eyes from the light show that went on for a few hours. When the last alpenglow faded away, night brought a sky riddled with stars.

In the morning, we set out early and I got the above shot of my friend Jason Kauffman passing a lake minutes from our campsite.

See my story and more photos about backpacking a 32-mile, partly off-trail traverse in the John Muir Wilderness for information on how to pull off this trip.

Rock Slide Lake, Sawtooth Mountains.

Rock Slide Lake, Sawtooth Mountains, ID

Having lived in Idaho since 1998, I have explored much of the state’s best-known mountain range, the Sawtooths. But it took me 13 years to finally backpack into the deep interior of the southern Sawtooths, an area speckled with mountain lakes that lies a solid two days’ hike from the nearest roads in any direction.

So when my friend Jeff Wilhelm and I carved out four glorious September days to finally explore this area, we found deep, clear lakes filled with lunker trout, ringed by jagged peaks, and trails that don’t receive many boot prints. Walking through the bright, airy forest there, filled with granite outcroppings, reminded me of the High Sierra—without all the people. We used Rock Slide Lake as a base camp for two nights to give us a day to explore with daypacks, and spent hours on its shore, marveling at the dawn and sunset light there.

See my story about a four-day, 57-mile in the southern Sawtooth Wilderness for more photos and information for planning this trip.

Coyote Natural Bridge, Coyote Gulch.

Coyote Natural Bridge, Coyote Gulch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, UT

My memory of my wife’s and my first backpacking trip in Coyote Gulch 16 years earlier was cloudy when we returned recently with our 12- and 10-year-old kids and another family. Sometimes revisiting a place doesn’t measure up to a fond recollection of it; not so with Coyote Gulch. It was more scenic even than I remembered. Soaring, red rock walls tower along its length. A steady creek pours over several short waterfalls, its year-round flow keeping the canyon bottom lushly green. And then there are features like Jacob Hamblin Arch and Coyote Natural Bridge.

My plan had been for us to spend our second night at one of the campsites below Jacob Hamblin; but the team was a little too pooped by the time we reached Coyote Natural Bridge to push on more than an hour farther. It turned out to be serendipitous, because we had the sandy beach area around the bridge to ourselves (whereas the campsites at Hamblin are popular). The kids played for hours in the creek and some adults took an evening hike while the others laid down on the warm sand with a book.

See my story about backpacking Coyote Gulch (and hiking slot canyons in the Escalante and at Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks), with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

White Rock Lakes, Ptarmigan Traverse, Glacier Peak Wilderness.

White Rock Lakes, Ptarmigan Traverse, Glacier Peak Wilderness, WA

It was the third day of our six-day trip on arguably America’s premier mountain haute route. A multi-day walk along a high mountain crest, the Ptarmigan Traverse crosses six glaciers and stays high above treeline until the fifth day. We camped by lonely alpine lakes—one of which was still completely frozen and snow-covered in mid-August—below jagged summits in possibly the most vertiginous mountains in the country.

My climbing partners Stefan Kinnestrand and Wes Cooper and I ascended two of those glaciers, the LeConte and the South Cascade, in whiteout conditions on that third day, navigating by GPS while watching very carefully for crevasses. Then we scrambled from another pass down a precarious slope of loose rock so steep that a slip might have concluded with a tumble of several hundred feet right to the bottom. Most of the ground surrounding the White Rock Lakes remained snow-covered that August day, and the lakes were still almost completely frozen. When the fog finally lifted, we got a view across the deep valley of the West Fork of Agnes Creek to the Dana Glacier and Chikamin Glacier pouring off a ridge connecting several rocky peaks and spires. I’ll eventually post a story and more photos from the Ptarmigan Traverse.

Getting There Climbers traditionally begin the Ptarmigan Traverse at Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park and walk south, largely hewing close to the Cascade Crest. Beyond Dome Peak, from the Cub Lake area in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, the route descends to the Downey Creek Trailhead on Suiattle River Road. The route is mostly off-trail and crosses six glaciers; expert skills at glacier travel and navigating off-trail through mountains are required. See an excellent route description at summitpost.org/ptarmigan-traverse/154644.

Spring Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park.

Spring Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park, UT

Southern Utah’s Capitol Reef has scenery to match its siblings in the National Park System—but when it comes to crowds, this place ain’t no Zion or Yosemite. In the visitor center at the outset of a three-day, family backpacking trip, a ranger told me that we were the only party getting a permit to backpack into Spring Canyon that day.

We hiked below towering, burgundy cliffs with patches of white and orange and black water-stain streaks, passing enormous boulders piled up below the cliffs. More than four hours after setting out from the Chimney Rock Trailhead, we pitched the tent on a grassy bench in Spring Canyon, beneath cliffs topped by domes and spires soaring hundreds of feet overhead. Staying there for two nights, with a day of exploring in between, we saw no other people. If that kind of solitude is rare in the backcountry of many national parks, it’s especially unusual in a spot reached with relatively little effort.

See my story about dayhiking, slot canyoneering, and backpacking in Capitol Reef National Park, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Lagunas Chevallay, Dientes Circuit, Patagonia.

Lagunas Chevallay, Dientes Circuit, Chilean Patagonia

The 35-mile Dientes Circuit through the Dientes de Navarino (“Teeth of Navarino”) on Isla Navarino (Navarino Island), at the southern tip of South America, is chock full of ends-of-the-Earth moments and beautiful campsites. With my friend Jeff Wilhelm and 22-year-old Puerto Williams-based trekking guide Maurice van de Maele, I hiked for four days through a wild, wind-battered landscape of incisor-like rock towers and alpine lakes that gets visited by just a handful of people every year.

About halfway through the trip, the Antarctic wind blew us through Paso Ventarron (Ventarron Pass) as the late-day light pierced clouds above the Lagunas Chevallay. We descended the rocky trail to camp beside the large, unnamed lake shown at the head of the valley in the photo above.

See my story about trekking the Dientes Circuit, with more photos, for information on how to pull off this trip.

East Fork Owyhee River.

East Fork Owyhee River, ID

Guiding our kayaks between tight canyon walls on Deep Creek, we didn’t see the confluence until we practically fell into it, the swift waters spitting us out into a deeper, wider channel: southwest Idaho’s East Fork Owyhee River. The four of us immediately landed and dragged our boats up onto a spacious beach on river right, tired and wet. I felt chilled in my wetsuit from a day that had seen us spend eight hours or more paddling through rain, snow, hail, and wind.

Perhaps a football field’s distance downriver, the East Fork made a sharp left turn and plunged into unseen quarters between sheer rhyolite walls. As evening descended, those cliffs became a study in contrasting light—some in dark shadow, some edged with sunlight, and the white rock of the farthest one glowing as if lit by some internal power source. Though just one of many scenes of staggering natural beauty from an eight-day, 82-mile adventure on the upper Owyhee River system, from Deep Creek to Three Forks, that one has stuck with me.

See my story about kayaking the upper Owyhee River, with more photos, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Little Frazier Lake, Eagle Cap Wilderness.

Little Frazier Lake, Eagle Cap Wilderness, OR

Sometimes the destinations closest to home are the ones you neglect for too long. That was the case for my family with the Eagle Cap, just a half-day’s drive for us, but a place we had not yet backpacked in (with the exception of one disastrous attempt, when our son was a toddler, that was aborted due to a nasty stomach virus. But I have skied the backcountry of Norway Basin in the Eagle Cap with friends.) So last summer, we finally took a five-day, 41-mile loop in the southeastern corner of this 350,000-acre wilderness.

We hiked up broad, U-shaped valleys and camped by boisterous streams and lakes that offered mirror reflections of dawn light and alpenglow on rocky, 9,000-foot peaks. I made the side hike up 9,572-foot Eagle Cap for its 360-degree panorama overlooking much of the range; the kids played in streams and had the treat of one of the most spectacular thunderstorms of their lives on our second afternoon. Our third campsite, at Little Frazier Lake, sat near the lake’s outlet creek, where my son worked for hours rearranging rocks; my daughter and I scrambled high up some nearby ledges. And in the morning, the lake offered up a perfect reflection of the stone basin cradling it. I will eventually post a story, with more photos, about this trip.

See my story about this five-day, family backpacking trip in the Eagle Cap, including more photos and a video, for information on planning this trip.

Fishing at Lake 8522, Sawtooth Wilderness.

Lake 8522, Sawtooth Wilderness, ID

We backpacked the Alpine Creek Trail less than three miles up a sunbaked valley flanked by cliffs to where it ends abruptly in ponderosa pine forest. A steep headwall loomed above us, 500 vertical feet or taller, capped by rocky ledges—a daunting obstacle that would logically turn away most hikers. But I had been told that the basin of unnamed lakes just beyond the pass at the top of this earthen wall was worth the effort of reaching it. So my son, Nate, almost 11 at the time, and I, joined by his buddy, another Nate, and that kid’s dad, Doug Shinneman, clawed and high-stepped our way up a faint, very steep user trail, grabbing branches and slipping in mud, and scrambling up exposed ledges.

At the top, we saw that I’d gotten good advice. A cool forest embraces one side of the blue-green waters of Lake 8522; a granite cliff juts straight out of the water on the other side. We found a spot in the woods for our tents and spent the next couple of days fishing, exploring the higher lakes in the basin, and taking in some sunrises and sunsets that kept my camera busy.

Getting There From ID 75, about 20 miles south of Stanley and 40 miles north of Ketchum, turn west onto Alturas Lake Road and follow it about seven miles to its end at the Alpine Creek Trailhead. Hike the Alpine Creek Trail roughly 2.5 miles to where the maintained trail terminates. Follow a faint, very steep and rough user trail that climbs almost straight uphill several hundred feet, with some scrambling, to a pass that leads into a lakes basin. Lake 8522 is a short walk beyond the pass. This area has some user trails and established campsites, but is not managed like official trails; minimize your impact.

Map Earthwalk Press “Sawtooth Wilderness,” $9.95, (800) 742-2677, omnimap.com.

Contact Sawtooth National Forest Stanley Ranger District, (208) 774-3000, fs.usda.gov/sawtooth.

Hall Arm, Doubtful Sound, Fiordlands National Park, New Zealand.

Doubtful Sound, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

It was a typical summer day in Doubtful Sound: alternating spells of light mist and steady rain punctuating brief periods without precipitation. The shifting gray overcast delivered about 10 minutes of sunshine the entire day. But the air was warm and the water flat, its dark surface as clear as a just-cleaned mirror. Tendrils of ghost-like clouds floated around granite cliffs that rose straight out of the sea up to 4,000 feet high; and the cliffs wore long coats of thick rainforest that seemed to defy gravity.

Our small group pitched our tents behind a rocky beach, in the forest of podocarp trees and punga tree ferns. After a mild night of periodic showers, we woke and walked to the beach to see the water still and glassy, reflecting the sea cliffs and misty clouds.

See my story about sea kayaking Doubtful Sound, with more photos and a video, for information on how to pull off this trip.

Tonto Trail, Grand Canyon.

Tonto Trail, Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

If there’s a bad campsite in the Grand Canyon, I haven’t found it yet. But my favorite (so far) is this spot just off the Tonto Trail, on the plateau between Lonetree Canyon and Cremation Creek. We camped here on the last night of a four-day, late-March family backpacking trip from Grandview Point to the South Kaibab Trailhead (another trip my family took for a chapter of my book).

While we were exposed to the wind—which can blow pretty hard—and had to carry water to that camp, those were small tithes for a 360-degree panorama reaching from the South Rim to the North Rim, with countless named temples and buttes within view, most prominently the Zoroaster Temple (visible in the background of the photo above). While the kids played with rocks in the dirt and my wife read, I walked around with my camera, finding an amazing background in every direction.

See my story, with more photos, about backpacking in the Grand Canyon for information on how to pull off this trip.

Indian Basin, Wind River Range.

Indian Basin, Wind River Range, WY

Six friends, 500 pounds of gear and food for a week, one horsepacker to haul our stuff the 15 miles from the trailhead to Indian Basin—and plenty of alcohol, which figures prominently in this adventure tale. We had grand ambitions for several rock and snow climbs of peaks along the Continental Divide that week. We didn’t plan on daily, cold morning showers or the violent afternoon thunderstorms that would dump a couple inches of hail in 30 minutes and threaten to blow our tents to Iowa.

Though we never tied into a rope all week, we did tag a few walk-and-scramble-up summits, including 13,745-foot Fremont Peak in cold wind and fog, and 13,517-foot Jackson Peak. Mostly, though, we huddled in all of our clothes under a tarp in camp, plowing through our alcohol supply and laughing uproariously over things I barely recall. I got the above shot during one of the rare moments of glorious sunshine that made us optimistic about climbing—until the next storm cell drove us back into our tents.

Getting There The Elkhart Park trailhead is 14.5 miles from Pinedale. From US 191 (Pine Street), in Pinedale, turn north onto Fremont Lake/Half Moon Lake Road. In three miles, bear right on Skyline Drive. A short distance beyond a viewpoint overlooking the high peaks, bear right at a fork to parking for the Pole Creek Trail. Follow the Pole Creek, Seneca Lake, Highline (for just a quarter-mile), and Indian Basin trails about 15 miles to Indian Basin.

Map Earthwalk Press “North Wind River Range,” $9.95, (800) 742-2677, omnimap.com.

Contact Bridger National Forest Pinedale Ranger District, (307) 739-5500, fs.usda.gov/btnf.

Dog Lake, Seven Devils Mountains.

Dog Lake, Seven Devils Mountains, ID

A fresh September snowfall had just blanketed the Seven Devils, which rise to over 9,000 feet and form the east rim of Hells Canyon in west-central Idaho. My friend Geoff Sears and I started our three-day hike in thick fog, at first catching only glimpses of the craggy peaks.

But the weather slowly cleared through the afternoon, as we leapfrogged surviving segments of a long-abandoned, faint trail leading to Dog Lake, where we put our tent up in a small basin that rarely sees human visitors. That evening and the next morning, under blue skies with no wind, the lake offered up a sharp reflection of the snow-plastered cliffs of black rock.

See my story about another backpacking trip in Hells Canyon.

Getting There From US 95, a mile south of Riggins, Idaho, turn west onto Squaw Creek Road (CR 517). Drive 16.5 miles to Windy Saddle Trailhead, a half-mile before Seven Devils Campground. Hike south on Boise Trail 101 for 7.4 miles. Just after crossing Dog Creek, turn west and look for traces of the faint trail leading about 1.3 miles to Dog Lake; you’ll be mostly bushwhacking through semi-open forest with some blowdowns obstructing the way.

Map The Hells Canyon National Recreation Area map, $6, Hells Canyon NRA website (below).

Contact Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, Riggins ranger district, (208) 628-3916, fs.usda.gov/detail/wallowa-whitman/recreation/?cid=stelprdb5238987.

Above our campsite on Mount Baker.

Mount Baker, WA

It was a wretched campsite, actually. We’d had no intention of staying there, but weather left us without a better choice than to endure an interminable night on that cold ground of sharp stones. The wind-tortured, 9,000-foot saddle separating the Coleman and Deming glaciers on Mt. Baker was simply where we ended up when Plan A—camping on the summit—crashed in the sea of ambitious dreams. My wife, Penny, and I were climbing our first Pacific Northwest volcano years ago with our friend Larry Gies, through thick fog that reduced visibility to less than 100 feet at times. By late afternoon, we gave up on reaching the summit, pinned our tents to the ground, and dove inside.

But two hours later, a mountain fairy granted us one of those rare, magical events that occur when least expected: Sunshine lit our tents. We stepped outside to see the cloud ceiling below us. We tagged the mountaintop as the setting sun strafed that sea of clouds with red and orange light. You can’t distinguish our tents in the photo above, but they’re in the saddle below us—that miserable, serendipitous spot.

Getting There From I-5 north of Bellingham, follow WA 542 for 33.8 miles. One mile past Glacier, turn right onto Glacier Creek FS Road 39, and continue eight miles to parking for Mt. Baker (Heliotrope Ridge) Trail 677. The trail ends after two miles, at 4,800 feet; continue on the climbers’ trail up the Hogsback to a tenting area at 6,000 feet on the edge of the Coleman Glacier.

Map Green Trails Mt. Baker no. 13, $7, greentrailsmaps.com.

Contact Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest outdoor recreation information, (206) 470-4060, fs.usda.gov/mbs.

[mst3kproject]

1203: Lords of the Deep

 As if to drive home my point that Atlantic Rim was merely the most recent incarnation of a phenomenon that MST3K has been visiting from the beginning, here is Roger Corman’s lower, slower, nearer, less answer to James Cameron’s The Abyss.

It’s the year 2020, and humans have fucked up the land pretty much beyond repair, so we’re moving on to the ocean.  At one of these undersea habitations, Martel Neptune, Dr. Claire McDowell has found something gelatinous, glittery, and apparently hallucinogenic. She’s going to have plenty of time to study it, too, because an earthquake has damaged the base and apparently killed the relief crew, meaning everybody’s stuck down there for the time being.  Not only stuck down there, but menaced by demonic-looking red-eyed stingray creatures that seem to be killing them off one by one... or are the stingrays really trying to save them?

This is a surprisingly obscure film.  I’d never heard of it before the trailer dropped, and when I went looking for bonus material before the season actually debuted (if you don’t think I sat down and watched all six movies as soon as we had an episode list, you haven’t been paying attention), I found only one post with the title as a tag.  Even now it's been a couple of weeks, there's almost nothing on tumblr, which means I had to get a little creative. Nobody has ever heard of this movie, and that’s honestly a shame.  I wouldn’t call it good, but I quite enjoyed it.

My first impression of Lords of the Deep is that’s a very cheerful, colourful, optimistic little movie. Even when awful things are happening they’re rarely as bad as they seem.  It begins with whale songs and Paris Metro font, and ends with McDowell’s hopeful smile. Something about the colourful uniforms (which look right out of an 80’s music video) and rows of blinking lights remind me of The Green Slime or Terror Beneath the Sea.  If it weren’t for the haircuts and mustaches, Lords of the Deep would look like it had been made in the 60’s, not the 80’s – the special effects are on about that level, too.  Being as this is a post-Alien movie, when Hollywood decided the future had to be gritty and practical, it’s a nice little breath of fresh air.

Actually, I think what Lords of the Deep really reminds me of, at least on a visual level, is TOS Star Trek.  Maybe it’s the colours, or the low-tech high-tech look of it, or the aliens, which for some reason make me think of the fried egg creatures in the episode Operation – Annihilate!.  Or maybe it’s the final fight between McDowell’s boyfriend O’Neill and Commander Dobler, which is completely lacking in choreography and as a result is the Shatneriest thing I’ve ever seen that didn’t actually have William Shatner in it.

Scientists in movies are often cold and unemotional individuals, so it’s also nice that McDowell is a very warm, caring, and intuitive person, full of love for her team-mates and wonder at nature.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t come across as terribly intelligent.  Part of this may be because we think of movie scientists as coolly logical, but I think a large part is how the first time we see her, she’s pulling a glove off and sticking a hand in her sample jar with her eyes shut.  This seems like a very childish thing to do, and since it’s our introduction to her, it colours our later perception.  The annoying part is that it’s not even an essential scene – McDowell later gets the goo on her during an earthquake, which again induces a vision.  Cutting the earlier scene wouldn’t have lost anything, and made McDowell look much more professional.

Second impression – wow this is cheap.  The sets inside Martel Neptune are made of plywood and cardboard, with moving lights across the ceiling that make me think of a backyard swimming pool more than they do the deep ocean.  The extraterrestrial glitter goo looks like it would appear in somebody’s ‘moonstone stimboard’.  The miniature submarines are okay, partially hidden as they are by the murky water, but the alien colony is clearly spray foam over some pipes and the set appears to be maybe ten feet square at best, with the entire cast crammed onto it for the closing scene.  Is this the reason why we never find out what happened to the relief crew, because they couldn’t fit any more actors into that shot?  The alien in the tank looks silly, and the alien out of the tank even sillier.

Yet in one moment that really counts, it actually works. This is when the aliens surround and guide McDowell’s minisub on her way to the colony.  Their movements here are graceful and natural, and they look startlingly alive.  A moment later, when McDowell gazes at the weird organic shapes of the alien colony, that looks pretty good, too.  Although what an underwater creature needs with all those bubbles, I’m not quite sure.

The aliens at first suffer from a problem they share with other underwater space creatures like Zigra – it’s hard to imagine how something with no limbs capable of gripping could develop any technology.  The movie actually has a brilliant solution to this, though, when we learn that the aliens can break apart and re-shape their bodies.  This does not appear to be a fast process (as illustrated by the one in the tank, which takes several hours to go from lump of goo to creature with recognizable structure), but it’s not a totally implausible one – right here on Earth, a sponge can be broken down into individual cells which, given time, will re-assemble themselves into an animal. The way Lords of the Deep presents this solution is actually nice and subtle, too.  Inside the colony, Chadwick tells McDowell that the walls are made of the same substance as the goo she’d been examining – and in between the foamy bits are glowing red areas, like the aliens’ eyes.  The safe haven they’ve prepared for the humans is made of their own bodies.

Much less subtle is the message the aliens have for us.  They want humans to survive so we can ‘fulfill our destiny’, whatever that is, but there’s nothing much to the message itself besides clean up your damn room.  We don’t need aliens to tell us we’re making a mess in here – we know that.  What we need is real motivation to clean it up, and I don’t think that’s gonna come from a soft voice whispering over psychedelic imagery.  Soft voices whispering about cosmic harmony while colours flowed by was basically the entire sixties, and it didn’t help at all.

What is kind of interesting here is how the movie manages to be so optimistic and so pessimistic at the same time.  The optimism comes in the portrayal of a world in which humans are managing to stay alive despite catastrophe, and the friendliness of the aliens – they admit that they went through the same period of self-destructive behaviour, and they survived even if only by finding another home.  If they did that, so can we.  The pessimism lies in the assumption that the Earth will be nigh-uninhabitable by the year 2020.  It’s already 2018 and most of Earth is still livable.  The ozone layer is the least of our problems at this point.

Finally, let’s talk about Lords of the Deep as a ripoff.  I’ve seen parts of The Abyss but I’ve never watched the whole movie all the way through.  I can definitely recognize the borrowing of the basic premise, though: female scientist in underwater lab makes contact with friendly aquatic aliens.  A true maestro like Corman, however, isn’t going to limit himself to ripping off one movie at a time – so let’s talk about the many, many things Lords of the Deep also takes from Alien.

We have a creature that comes aboard by making use of a crew member – the xenomorph inside Kane, the creature in Lords of the Deep in Chadwick’s dive suit.  It roams around by making use of the utilities, where it cannot be tracked. A member of the crew and a computer that’s less trustworthy than it seems have an agenda related to the creature, which the others don’t know about.  And the maps with blinking dots to represent the locations of the crew members are strongly reminiscent of the motion detector displays from the 1986 sequel Aliens, though they are not used to the same terrifying effect.

Yet despite all that, these moments don’t make me roll my eyes the way Mac and Me and Atlantic Rim did.  Part of the reason why is because any movie with a small group of people trapped in an enclosed space with an unknown is going to include certain points reminiscent of Alien, and this doesn’t always mean they’re purposefully copying it.  Some of the beats Lords of the Deep hits are, of course, more specific than that – but it still doesn’t bug me, and I think that’s because Lords of the Deep uses these references for a purpose.  The writers assume that their audience has seen the Alien movies, and they use what we remember about them to manipulate our expectations.

After all, Alien has a very different ending from Lords of the Deep.  By reminding us of Alien, the movie tries to make us fear that McDowell’s visions are a lie, and that the aliens really are here to destroy the humans who stumbled across their colony.  Unfortunately, the whole movie is just too lightweight and cuddly to really scare us, but I can tell what they were going for and the principle is sound.

Of all the Season 12 movies, I think Lords of the Deep is my favourite.  It’s kind of a movie mousse: a sweet little treat that doesn’t weigh too heavily.  It’s not particularly memorable but that’s okay – sometimes all you want is a snack for your eyes.

[barce-fabu-lona]

Neymessi Oneshot 3

Hello tumblr people! I finally managed to finish one of  my requests *cheers*. Well anyways, the lovely @jarvisrocks requested this Neymessi fic with our French angel Antoine Griezmann on the side (I paired him with Koke lol) and that’s what I did. Also there is a bit Ronaldo/Ramos if you like squint. The whole idea is based on the Samsung Galaxy commercial where football saves the planet. If you haven’t watched it yet you should do so here. It’s very weird at times but it’s actually kind of amazing.

Neymar and Messi on their way to the second “Humans vs. Alien” match & the final minutes of the game. (I’m sorry I was too lazy to write the whole game, I hope you enjoy anyways.)

“I never thought they would come back.”  

Neymar looks up from his phone when he hears the soft Spanish words with the hint of a French accent. Antoine Griezmann, one of his rivals on the pitch in Spain but one of his teammates in the Galaxy 11, is standing next to him, looking a bit awkward.

“Can I sit?” Antoine asks and gestures to the seat next to the Brazilian.

“Of course.” Neymar says and hastily collects his stuff, dropping it onto the floor between his feet.

“Thanks.” Antoine gives him a shy smile and then takes a seat beside him.

He doesn’t say anything else and because Neymar doesn’t know what to say to him either, he just contents himself with staring out of the window into the never ending darkness of the universe.

The longer he keeps on looking outside, the less he is able to comprehend that he is currently on board of the most advanced spaceship mankind has ever managed to construct. The view is amazing but scary and everytime Neymar recalls where they are bringing him, an invincible hand closes around his heart, squeezing until his ribcages feels like it’s on fire.

“I never thought this was possible.” Antoine suddenly speaks up again.

Neymar turns towards his voice, latches onto it and focuses on the Frenchman next to him, suddenly thankful for his company because the pressure in his chest is back and he feels like he can’t breathe.

Antoine is not looking at him, his azure eyes fixed on something beyond the glass window of the spaceship. Neymar busies himself with watching Antoine’s gaze move around the galaxy until their eyes meet again.

“Neymar, you need to calm down.” He says immediately when he realizes that Ney’s panicking.

He has been since the moment he opened the door to Pep Guardiola to be honest. He knew that it was coming; he knew he would be selected to defend the planet earth and yet he was not prepared for it. Hell, he doesn’t feel prepared now and their spaceship is actually coming straight from the trainings center where he has spent the past three months of his life.

“I can’t.” He admits and squeezes his eyes shut for a moment.

He suddenly feels very hot in his high-tech spacesuit, which is supposed to keep his body safe until they arrive at the stadium. That one stadium, that actually belongs to a colony of aliens that now for the second time in a few years, have decided to destroy earth if the humans didn’t agree to play a game of football with them. And they had to win as well.

If Neymar thought about it too much, his head started to hurt.

“This is all so crazy.” The Brazilian mutters desperately.

His hands find their way into his hair, tugging and pulling until his scalp hurts. He just needs something to ground him, needs something to make him feel human because floating through space in giant-ass spaceship is definitely not.

“I know, I know.” Antoine says somewhere above him.

Ney’s eyes are still closed but he appreciates the soothing tone in Antoine’s voice. He hasn’t talked to the Frenchman much, but he already likes his voice. It’s mostly soft and the ways the words roll of his tongue have something elegant to them. He is French after all.

“I feel like I’m stuck in one of those horrible Science-Fiction movies I used to love.” Neymar groans, continuing to rake a hand through his short hair. “If we come back alive, then I’m never fucking watching them again.”

Antoine chuckles a bit at that, an innocent sound that somehow doesn’t belong here but makes Neymar feel better anyways. His teammate seems so normal, like he is a piece of the real world, the old world, while Neymar feels like he has already lost himself in space.

“Some are good. Always liked Star Trek.” Antoine says nonchalantly. “Also, stop pulling your hair out. It weirds me out and you want to look good for our victory photo.”

“Sorry.” Neymar drops his hands to his laps and starts fiddling with the fabric of his spacesuit instead.

Griezmann sits next to him in silence again before pulling out his phone as well and starting to flip through a few photos.

“Why are you so cool about this?” He has been dying to ask that since Antoine first sat down.

“I’m not.” The Frenchman mumbles, not lifting his eyes of the screen of his phone.

Neymar leans over a bit, wanting to at least catch a glimpse of what Antoine is looking at. The young man lets him and together they go through his iPhone gallery, looking at pictures from Antoine with his friends and his family, the team and also Koke.

“He’s not here.” Neymar says slowly when another picture of the two of them illuminates the screen.

“No.” Antoine sighs deeply, his blue eyes glazing over with something that looks like tears to Neymar.

He swallows and carefully reaches over, patting his back awkwardly.

“It’s okay, he knew he wasn’t going to be called up.” Antoine says but his voice is laced with silent pain. “And we both knew that they would come knocking at my door eventually.”

“I knew as well.” Ney says, trying to comfort the Frenchman a best as he could. “I knew if they would take Leo, they would take me too.”

Antoine nods, looks up and scans the large cabin for a sign of Messi. He’s nowhere to be seen.

“He’s with Ronaldo.” Neymar informs him bitterly. “Has been glued to his hip since the day they shipped us off to the trainings center.”

Antoine glances sideways and Ney avoids his eyes this time. He knows how he sounds, rancorous, frustrated, and maybe even a little bit desperate. He doesn’t want to really, but Leo not paying much attention to him always rubs him the wrong way. Especially in a situation like this. The first few nights in the trainings center Neymar almost went crazy. He couldn’t sleep because everything felt so clinical and strange, the only thing familiar in the large, modern department was Leo but he didn’t spend his nights with Neymar and during the day he was off training with Ronaldo. They were the new dream team, the stars and earth’s biggest hope. The rest of them were just sidekicks.

“You know that’s not true.” Antoine’s words are back to being soft and reassuring.

“Did I say that out loud?”

“Most of it.”

Neymar tries to laugh but ends up make some sort of pitiful whining sound.

He’s scared, okay? He has been since the beginning and he is now and he wants Leo to come and make him feel better because he has been through this once already but fucking Messi is still nowhere to be seen.

“Don’t worry.” Antoine tells him and lightly pokes him in the side. “I don’t like Ronaldo either.”

Neymar actually has to laugh at that and if he remembers right, it’s the first time he really did since the aliens arrived on earth. And it feels good, it feels like freedom. At least for a few seconds.

“So that makes two of us.”

Antoine shrugs and nods toward the window.

“And a lot more people down there.”

Neymar follows his motion and finds himself staring at their home planet. The earth looks so small and insignificant from where they are, like it’s just a blueish dot in a black mass of nothingness.

“A lot of people don’t like me either down there.” He mumbles and leans his forehead against the cool glass.

“Well, you are a cool guy and Ronaldo is too, to be honest.”

“Seems like Leo thinks that too.”

“They are the two most talented and capable players in the world after all. And they’ve been through this already. It’s logical that the coaches, no hold on, that the whole world relies on them and I bet they know that as well. They will lead us.”

Neymar spares one more glance for the earth and then turns back around.

“Do you think we can win?”

“Oui.”

“Why?”

Antoine’s expression is grave all of sudden.

“Because we have to.” He picks up his phone, unlocks it and turns it towards Neymar. “I have to.”

Quietly Neymar looks at Koke smiling at him from the screen of Antoine’s phone and when he opens his mouth to give a reply, the sliding door at the end of the cabin opens and Leo and Ronaldo walk in, side by side. Leo’s eyes find his for only a brief second but it’s enough to make Neymar’s heart throb with desire but also fear.

He nods at Griezmann.

“I understand.”

Neymar doesn’t realize he has fallen asleep until he wakes up again. His head is resting against the glass of the gigantic window looking out into space and the only sign indicating that they have moved at all, is that he can no longer make out earth in the distance. A shiver rolls down his spine, makes his toes curl and his fist clench. He feels lonely all of sudden, like he is the last person to exist. It’s an overwhelming feeling, way too much to handle for his brain that is already in constant panic mode and the invincible hand returns, squeezing his heart tightly.

“Ney, just keep breathing.”

Neymar almost bursts into tears at the sound of the oh so familiar voice.

“Leo.” He whimpers softly and shifts in his seat so he can bury his face in the crook of the older man’s neck.

He had really enjoyed Antoine’s company but at this moment in time he is fucking joyful the little Frenchman had given up his seat to Leo. Leo who is now wrapping one of muscular arms around Ney’s body, pulling him close. Neymar feels the sudden urge to climb into Leo’s lap and let him rock him back and forth like a baby but he resists, only nuzzles his cheek against Leo’s neck.

“Are you okay?” The older man asks him, his voice toned down to a whisper.

Only now Ney notices that the cabin lights above their heads had been turned off. He can barely see across the little corridor that is separating the rows of seats, but after a few seconds he is able to make out Cristiano’s sleeping form across from them. He’s surprised to find his head resting on Ramos’s shoulder.

Only then does Neymar remember, that he was supposed to be mad at Leo.

And when he does, he suddenly can’t ignore the acid feeling that has been seething in the pit of his stomach any longer and pulls back from their little, intimidate moment.

Disappointment washes over Leo’s face when Neymar returns to his previous position but he doesn’t hold him back and doesn’t reach out again.

But he does whisper “I’m sorry” into the crushing silence and it makes the Brazilian feel somehow better.

“I know I haven’t been there for you.” Leo follows up his statement, his eyes watching Neymar’s face with a spark of hope for forgiveness.

“But you had to be there for yourself first, I get it.”

“Ney-“

“No, I do.” Neymar cuts him off. “I really do. You must be carrying a lot of pressure of those slim shoulders of yours.”

“Yours are not that much broader.”

Neymar doesn’t answer that, just keeps staring at Piqué’s head that is peeking out over the seat in front of him.

“I am sorry.” Leo tries again and carefully reaches towards his boyfriend, fingers gently touching to Neymar’s jaw. “I know I left you to fend on your own.”

“I guess I need to learn how to do that at some point.” He replies softly and casts his eyes downwards when Leo manages to turn his face towards him.

“Neymar.” The Argentinian protests weakly. “Don’t shut me out, por favor.”

“I didn’t do anything, you shut me out.”

“No, I didn’t.” Leo coaxes his chin up until Neymar was forced to look him in the eyes. “But you are right, I am carrying the whole world on my shoulders. We all are actually but Cris and I are the captains, we’re responsible for all of you. I had to focus so I would be able to protect you when we’re up there.”

Leo leans forward then and presses their lips together in a chaste but meaningful kiss. Neymar discovers that that kind of touch calms down his racing heart and aching stomach so he chases after Leo’s lips instead of talking, connecting them once more. They kiss for a while, no tongue, o teeth, just their mouth sliding together in silent comfort.

“You can’t protect me.” Neymar breathes when they finally part. “You can’t protect everybody.”

“I don’t want to protect everybody.” Leo whispers in return and wraps his arm back around Ney’s shoulders. “I just want to protect you.”

The lights are so bright they are hurting Neymar’s eyes.

His jersey is sticking to his back, sweat is running down his face, dripping down his chin and onto the pitch. His body hurts, his muscles are screaming but he can’t and won’t stop now.

Leo is by his side, not looking much better then him. His hair is all messed up, his cheeks are puffed out and burning red. He’s rarely like this, normally always has some breath left in his lungs that will help him go on, but today even he is panting.

“This game- it’s not even fair.” Antoine is standing on his other side, a bottle of water in his hand.

He is shaking from exhaustion.

“They’re so much taller and stronger.” His arm goes up, waving into the direction of their opponents.

“They have better stamina then us.” Leo comments, gulps down some more water.

Neymar doesn’t say anything, just watches the medics treat Ramos who had literally been ran over by one of the monstrous alien things that were planning to burn down their planet. Ronaldo and Piqué are by his side while the rest of the team is using their chances to spare the little energy they have left and fill up on their water supplies. Neymar notices that Cristiano even has a hand resting on top of his shoulder, massaging gently.

“Are they a thing?” Neymar blurts out, pushing his fingers beneath the sweat slick fabric of his jersey and solving it from his skin.

“They might be if we survive this.” Antoine says and pours the rest of his water over the top of his head.

His hair is dripping when they walk back onto the pitch.

Neymar glances up at the holographical clock. They have five minutes left to play, five minutes to win, lose or stay tied and go into overtime. He would prefer to win because he knows if he keeps up running much longer his legs will just give out under him and that would be it.

Normally overtime is no problem for him and, he doesn’t even need to push himself at the end of most game but this one, this is different. With their alien opponents obviously having a natural advantage Neymar needs to run like he is a sprinter in the fucking Olympics.

Also the lovely alien-human-whatevers are not playing fair like, at all. They push and pull and scratch and since the damn referee is just another holographical thingy, flickering across the pitch every now and then, it’s no wonder not everything gets called.

When Ramos was taken down a few minutes ago, Neymar heard him scream for the first time in, well, ever. He didn’t even know that Ramos could scream.

“We have to score again.” Leo takes him back to the reality. “We can’t compete with them much longer. We need to score as soon as possible.”

He steps closer, puts a hand on Neymar’s back and splays out his fingers.

“Ney you need to score.”

“Me?” Neymar squawks. “Why me? You should- or Cris. You’ve both already scored once.”

“Ney.” Leo’s voice is not much more than a whisper. “They won’t let us go through. They guard us the whole time, I feel like the next time we lead an attack they will our legs.”

Neymar swallows.

“So you want me to get my legs broken instead?”

“No, of course not. You need to be fucking careful, okay? But they don’t pay as much attention to you. We will trick them into thinking we will go up to the goal but in reality you will, okay?”

“Or me.” Antoine steps up to them and gives both of them a pointed look. “The Frenchman is still here, okay?”

A small smile spreads across Leo’s lips.

“Sure. Either Ney or you. We just need a goal.”

He takes his hand away from Neymar’s back and he immediately misses the warmth. A few seconds later he realizes, that if they won’t win this he will never be able to feel Leo’s warmth anywhere on his body. And he really can’t allow that to happen.

“We will die in overtime.” Antoine is saying, still standing next to him.

Neymar breathes deeply, watches the clock, watches the additional time being held up, hears the referee machine blow the whistle, watches Leo start moving again.

“We won’t go into overtime.” He replies and then starts running.  

Everything after that is a blur of sound and colors. Neymar remembers himself running, Antoine hot on his heels. He doesn’t remember how he gets to the goal exactly, only recalls suddenly being in front of the two goalposts. It’s like he has a mini blackout once more, that comes to an end abruptly with Leo passing the ball towards him. He watches it sail through the air, hears Antoine scream something in Spanish behind him, hears the roar of the crowd when he goes up and then feels the ball hit his head hard. He doesn’t see where it goes because he crashes down on the pitch in an ungraceful heap and doesn’t have the energy to get back up. His ears are ringing and the world only stops spinning when Antoine leans over him.

His azure eyes are huge and he is crying tears of joy, well maybe its sweat, but who really cares anyways? How Neymar knows that he scored and they’ve won? He has no clue, it’s just a feeling that flows through his veins like liquid joy and his face breaks out into a euphoric grin. They’re alive.

Then Leo is suddenly above him, pulling him up and into his arms, screaming words into his ear that Neymar doesn’t understand. His mind is overloaded with all kinds of different emotions, visuals and sensations and his brain is going into panic mode once again. Neymar feels like he’s in a dream, exhausted and happy to just hold onto whoever is hugging him right now.

At some point Leo crowds back into his personal space, warps his arms around his trembling body and presses his lips to Neymar’s in a fiery kiss.

“I love you.” He says and Neymar smiles, because those words he would recognize everywhere.

[malarkiness]

Saw Rogue One. Spoilers galore.

And I thought it was.... okay.

Well, alright, here’s the stuff that I thought was great:

The CGI characters were amazing. I didn’t pay attention to most of the press surrounding this movie, so I totally missed any news about them animating characters, but I was pretty impressed with the final product. I actually missed 99% of Tarkin’s dialogue because I spent all of his scenes going back and forth with myself over whether or not he was CGI; there was something sort of unnatural about his facial movements, like I don’t think his eyes ever really focused on anything, and something about his expressions seemed too... fluid? I can’t put my finger on it, but even if I could tell it was CGI, it was still well done CGI. Leia looked perfect, though, like they absolutely could’ve fooled me with that one.

Seeing walkers stomping around on a beach was pretty cool, ngl.

“Are you kidding me? I’m blind!” made me laugh.

The score is nice. There were a few tracks that were a bit jarring at times  (because they evidently just took music from the original trilogy and changed a note here and there), but the score itself is good.

I liked seeing the Star Wars universe’s equivalent of an archive. That was neat.

The ending. Jyn and Cassian holding each other and waiting for the end, Vader laying waste to all those troops like it’s nothing, Leia’s line about hope– all good choices, A+, very nice.

Since Diego Luna plays Cassian, and Zoe Saldana plays Uhura in the Star Trek reboot, I always see their characters singing whenever I listen to that last song in The Book of Life. 

And the not-so-great:

I could almost swear this movie shared a writer with Jupiter Ascending what with how much PLOT PLOT PLOT it tries to spit at you as quickly as possible. There is 0 time allotted to just give the characters (and the audience) time to process the weight of new story developments. It just blazes ahead no matter what.  Like there’s this one scene when they get back on the ship and Jyn’s all pissed at Cassian for trying to kill her dad, and he gives this one line that I can’t remember exactly, but it’s essentially, “you only started caring about the rebellion five minutes ago, you don’t know what all I’ve sacrificed to bring us this far, so get off your fucking high horse,” and it’s a GREAT line that should really make Jyn shut up and think for a second, but lol guess what, it doesn’t. She just says he’s dodging the real issue and the argument just... drops. Cool. Cool cool cool. And do we ever find out just what kind of darksided shit Cassian had to do for the greater good? Or anything about why he joined the rebellion in the first place? Nope! There’s no time for any of that because PLOT.

Chirrut’s use of the Force was such an interesting idea, but it wasn’t really explored at all. His first scene has him talking to Jyn about her necklace, showing that he can ~sense it’s there even if he can’t see it, so like... What else could he’ve sensed? Could he’ve maybe been able to find the Death Star plans in the archive so they wouldn’t have had to search for it? Could he’ve sensed where they should go once they’d infiltrated the base? I feel like they could’ve done SO much more with his character rather than just giving him a couple of good fight scenes and killing him off.

The only character who gets any kind of development at all is Jyn, and it’s just... not good. Like she suddenly starts caring about the rebellion just because she found out that her dead father cared about it, and that’s literally it. Rather than, I dunno, having her become attached to the other characters and wanting to help them with their cause, the writers just stake all her investment in the rebellion in her relationship with a character we barely see. Awesome.

Honestly, why was Jyn even in this movie? They could’ve given Cassian her backstory, and that’d explain his devotion to the rebellion: the Empire killed his mother and took his father, and he wants justice. Boom. Done. Or they could’ve had Jyn grow up to be the rebel with a droid sidekick rather than just making her some randomass criminal. Or Cassian could’ve also been the ex-imperial pilot. Seriously, there was just NO NEED for this movie to have all the characters it did. They could’ve easily collapsed a couple of them into each other and developed them as they were; instead, we waste all this time being introduced to one unnecessary character after the other. Like I get that the writers probably wanted a Ragtag Bunch of Missfits to go on this adventure, but if you want that kind of ensemble, you need the characters to have actual chemistry with each other, and these characters just don’t. Beyond Chirrut and Baze’s relationship (which is already established by the time we meet them), none of these people ever form any sense of camaraderie with each other; they’re literally only together because the plot needs them together.

And while I’m harping on about characters, Krennic is one of the most forgettable villains I’ve ever seen in any movie. The only interesting things about him were his cape and that one scene where he got choked (and tbf, Vader could’ve choked anyone in this movie and I’d’ve been equally impressed, so whatever). I’m sure the writers didn’t want to distract from Darth Vader with another villain, but... It’s fucking Darth Vader. No bad guy’s going to undermine him, alright, you can afford to write a more interesting beta villain.

idk, I was just really looking forward to this one after loving TFA so much, but Rogue One just didn’t grip me the way the other movie did. I think most of that is just because TFA introduced us to, what, four new characters? And we got to know all of them pretty well (okay, maybe not Poe so much, but he was still very likable and engaging enough with the little screen time as he got). Like we know all of Finn’s motivations from the get-go, we see him go through a HUGE change within like the first ten minutes of the movie, and then watch him continue grow until his final battle. And we got to know Rey really well, too; they kept her past a mystery, but we still sympathized with her longing to belong somewhere. As for Kylo, his motivations weren’t really... understandable or sympathetic lol, but they’re at least interesting (in the parallel that they set up between him and Anakin if nothing else).

I suppose TFA appealed to me a lot more because it had FAR fewer new characters to introduce and therefore more time to make me care about them. I didn’t care that the story was just a recycled Episode IV; the characters carried it so well that it just felt natural for the storyline to play out the way it did. With RO, the storyline steered everything, and the characters seemed to just exist to carry it out. 

I definitely think this story would’ve done better as an EU novel or a miniseries on Netflix, but eh. I didn’t hate it, and I am glad that it’s doing as well as it is box office-wise. And I do like a lot of the fanart/headcanons coming out the fandom rn, so I can at least get into that.

[gayleefiora]

i don’t... know where to start. i suppose we’ll just do a log: - sunday: went to hang out w louie, we walked past skillet so i saw u at work. i was like sooo... there’s a wrestling thing... maybe i could come watch it later? and you were like funny, bc i was literally just about to text you to do that. yes. great. so we did. it was a fuckin awesome wrestlemania. generally a v good night. talked to b at the end of it bc she kept pushing me to have a conversation, make it ‘real’. so i of course am like dude, you need to move out before you get kicked out. don’t do that to yourself. start taking control. - monday. i sleep over. make breakfast in the AM, do some dishes. i am on the couch reading Star. nic is doing something. b comes in at approx 1:30 and is like “we need to have a conversation.” then starts yelling, being like shut up, can it, etc, dont talk about my relationship, i dont remember too much honestly. just that she kepy being so hostile and i was like ‘if you dont wanna talk to me, don’t talk to me. don’t say that about me; thats insulting. bye’ except of course... she did keep going “youre going to come in and do this is MY house?” and i couldn’t help myself, i went “o you pay for this?” so. its real awkward. i keep reading. we all sit in silence for a while. then nic and b go upstairs to talk. apparently nic reams b out for talking to me like that. they come back. more silence until b finally leaves. me and nic talk for a long time, ates also shows up. nic realizes that they have to do all the things. i tell them they can come stay at my house and they accept. i go meet up w tat and give them some time alone and then later that night they showed up. monday/tuesday/wednesday: you live at my house. you come meet me at skillet after work. you sleep on my pillows with my blanket. i make you food. we talk constantly. we watch a lot of star trek. i silently ponder how i have been unable to sit at that spot on the couch for the last week without imagining holding you in support and watching star trek.  wednesday: you break up with b. you tell her she has to move out and it’s done. you meet me at twice sold tales after. you look so sad; you are like my poor fallen prince. we go home. home is my apartment. we smoke a lot and watch more star trek. we have a way of cuddling without touching that is nice. i love you. thursday: i wake up this morning and hang out with you on the couch before you go. our connection is so good even in the morning. im just beyond love at this point. wow. i have def spent like the last 3 and a half days with you. it was great. you’re great. you’re great and (my blog and god knows how long ive been waiting to type this) YOU BROKE UP WITH B!!! YOU DID IT!!! THAT MEANS YOU CAN START HEALING!!! AND ALSO YOU LOVE ME AND I MAKE YOU FEEL SAFE WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT BUT ALSO: YOU DID IT!! YOU BROKE UP!!!!