Date: 6 March 2015

PRE-CONDITIONS
(mind)Set: Positive, excited, ready
Setting (physical location): Hiking down the Grand Canyon
time of day: Morning
last meal: Very light “breakfast” 2 hours before trip

PARTICIPANT
Gender: (male)
body weight: (175lb)

BIOASSAY
Substance(s): PES Hawaiian Mushroom
Dose(s): 2.5 g
Method of administration: ground to powder and placed in 500mg vegi-caps

EFFECTS
Administration time: 10am
Duration: 4-5 hours
First effects: 15-20 minutes
Peak: 1.5-2.5 hour
Come down:2.5 hour
Baseline:4.5 hour

Intensity (overall): 6/10

Assessment
Pleasantness: (3/4)
Unplesantness: (1/4)
Visual Intensity: (2/4)


REPORT
This is the trip that little brother had planned for the week prior, but we were weathered out. The plan was to continue our training for the long backpacking trip that we will be doing later in the year. During that hike, we will hike about 25 miles a day for months on end and we will consume a healthy quantity of mushroom and DMT on the trail. The plan is to completely reset our social hardwiring and become truly influenced by nature rather than civilization or society.

As such, we have been practicing hiking a lot (about 50-75 miles a week with full gear) and we have been practicing tripping a lot, but we have not really mixed the two before this weekend. So after getting weathered out last weekend, little brother and I were very excited to finally try tripping while we hike to see the effect.

We are very blessed in that we live only a few hours away from Grand Canyon National Park, so that’s sort of become our hiking training grounds. I would like to note here, that I do not encourage any human being to do this—it’s just a bad idea. The Grand Canyon is extremely dangerous for hikers who don’t know what they’re doing. People get rescued out of there almost every day and each year there are a number of deaths. That said, I’ve hiked the canyon about 30 times and have a tremendous amount of experience with the trails there. So I was comfortable, and little brother has experience hiking the area too. Needless to say however, it was intimidating sitting up on the edge of a mile-deep chasm and eat a mushroom dose.

I almost always advocate eating mushroom on an empty stomach, but seeing that we’d be hiking about 20 miles that day, we decided to have just bit to eat before getting to the trail. We split a bagel and a protein drink about an hour before getting to the trail. Then we drank orange juice right before dosing and used the OJ to wash the mushroom tabs down too. Other than that, we were fasted.

We arrived at the rim just before 10am. It snowed heavily last weekend, so there was still about a foot of snow on the ground. We sat out a foam mattress and meditated together for about five minutes. Then we took out our pre-measured doses and they went down the hatch. I ate 2.5 grams (following last weekend’s 2.5 gram dose that left me absolutely floored in the come-up) and little brother ate 2 grams.

We immediately started hiking down the canyon after that. Our plan was to hike down to the river and then another 10-15 miles to a designated camp site that we were permitted for in the backcountry.

I felt the first effects very quickly—within about 15-20 minutes. Mostly what I felt was a slight body load, but I noticed that it wasn’t that pronounced, I think because I was hiking and my mind was staying occupied with the task of putting one foot in front of the other rather than how my mind was feeling. I will note however that I felt somewhat “weird” right along the time the body load started. It wasn’t unbearable at all, but I could definitely tell that something was going on. Just for the sake of curiosity and comparison, I asked myself, “If I were feeling like this and I hadn’t just dosed, what would I do?” The answer that I came to was that I’d sit the f*ck down and figure out what was causing me to feel so strange—and that’s how I knew it was working. Although the body load and “weird” feeling wasn’t heavy, it was heavy enough that I knew that I wasn’t feeling “normal” and that the mushroom was indeed kicking in.

Little brother, who had .5g less than I did noted that he did not feel any effect at this point—his trip didn’t begin until probably the 35-45 minute mark. Again however, we were hiking whereas we normally trip in the buddha pose, sitting on the floor for the whole come-up, so our being active made it more challenging to feel the early effects as they developed. I actually noted later in the trip that it was like the “come up” didn’t even happen; since we were moving through the entire first hour and a half, we never felt the heavy effects of the come up.

I did notice one thing that was kind of strange, although not surprising. As I’ve noted in earlier trip reports, I tend to vibrate/lightly convulse on high mushroom doses, and it even sometimes happens at low doses, just not as pronounced. So although I was all good while I was moving, any time little brother and I stopped to look at the scenery, my knees would rattle and shake—as long as I was moving it didn’t happen, but when I stopped, the shaking began lightly. I also should take note that I had a very slight “weak knee” feeling during that first hour of hiking down. I think that this is because of two things: 1) I was coming up on mushrooms, and 2) I hadn’t eaten nearly enough food considering how strenuous a hike we were starting. It wasn’t debilitating, but I don’t know that I would have been able to function adequately if I’d been at say a 4 gram dose.

There were a lot of people on the trail this—much more than normal, but little brother and I were still hiking faster than most, so we passed a lot of people along the way. It was weird because people were all there for different reasons and getting different things out of the hike. Some of them, it was obvious, were completely miserable, but others were quite happy. We passed these two really old guys who didn’t even hear us coming up behind them, so it took them awhile to move aside so we could pass. During the two minutes we were behind them however, we were just mind blown at how slowly they were moving. We were just way more perceptible to the slow pace because of the mushroom. They were really cool guys and were quite pleasant to us when we passed, but it was interesting how we got these glimpses into different people’s days. In another example that stuck with little brother and I both, there was this old guy who was hiking out of the canyon and he must have been carrying 65lbs of gear. It looked like torture, and especially since little brother and I are so devoted to light weight approaches to backpacking, it was hard to not stop and tell his guy how to enjoy his hike more. Little brother and I commented that this canyon probably makes a lot of people never want to hike again; they buy all this heavy gear, get to the bottom, then spend an entire day in hell hauling it back out and they decide that backpacking sucks. Too bad…

There were a lot of groups that we passed that I would have talked to if we’d have been sober, but I wasn’t quite comfortable stopping to chat. That was one good thing about being so versed in hiking on this trail—anyone we encountered, even if we said the wrong thing, would be behind us and probably wouldn’t catch up, so that took some burden off our shoulders as we worked our way up the trip.

By this time visuals were manifesting. Pattern recognition was pretty pronounced in the rocks on the trail and along the stone walls of the canyon. It needs to be stressed however, as it regards to visuals, that I’ve been tripping very frequently over the preceding month or so, and as such visuals have been significantly diminished. I’ve no doubt that if I’d been away from triptamines for a month and gone into this, it would have been a pretty heavy day.

As we rounded the bend at about the half-way point down the canyon, little brother and I decided to take a side-trail so that we could smoke a bowl. Since it had been so crowded on the main trail we hadn’t been able to smoke on the come up. As such, we both had some stomach issues and would have probably had an even better time if we’d been able to just find a place where we could get away from the group and smoke. There is such a side-trail that we were coming to presently, so we took it about a hundred yards and posted up for awhile.

I dropped my sleeping pad, stripped off my shirt, and sprawled out under the giant blue sky and hot sun. Although we’d started in the snow, we’d defended 3,000 feet and it was 70 degrees. Little brother busted out the other bagel that we’d bought that morning and we split it in half. He enjoyed eating it, but I was still tripping enough that it wasn’t pleasant. I hate eating while I’m tripping, so an everything bagel—even if I needed it—at that point wasn’t enjoyable, but I needed it for calories and to subside a bit of the stomach gurgling that I’d been dealing with after the an hour and a half earlier.

As we were sitting there in the sun and taking a break, someone did come walking by, and I noticed that he had a very rare backpack—the same backpack that I’d ordered and shipped back about a month ago. I’d never seen someone carrying it, so my mind went through a few thoughts in very rapid succession: 1) Hey, there’s that bag! 2) Am I tripping still? 3) Am I down enough to talk to him about that bag? 4) Yes, I think I am.

If I’d still thought I was coming up, there’s no way I would have called him to come back, but I was solid in my belief that I was coming down. We talked for about five minutes, and then he went off on his way. If we’d have been sober I would have liked talking to him longer, but I wasn’t sure how little brother was feeling about my chatting with some stranger while we were both tripping on mushrooms. It all went well though, and I mention it because it marks how much I didn’t expect what happened next in the trip.

After eating the bagel and smoking a bowl of TrainWreck, I stood up to piss. “Jesus Christ! I think that weed potentiated some sh*t!” I said, and as we packed up, we both decided that a second bowl was absolutely not necessary.

There was no question that we were tripping much harder all of the sudden, and although I first blamed the bud, as I thought about it over the course of the day I realized what happened: That morning we had a half a bagel and protein smoothie, and that got our digestive system going right before we dosed. Then we started hiking really heavy, but we weren’t eating nearly as much as we needed to be or as much as our bodies were used to from hiking those trails. As a result, our systems slowed way the hell down so that they didn’t burn off all available energy (simple evolutionary response). When we ate the other half of the bagel at the half-way point however, our systems started chugging back along again and that processed the rest of the mushroom dust sitting in our tummies.

From that point forward was what I would really call the “peak.” This would have been 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours. It was a bit overwhelming at times, only because I was alarmed to be tripping so hard after thinking that I’d finished my peak so long before. I’d never experienced such a second boost of the trip, but after looking back on the physiology of it, it completely makes sense. And this is why we came out to “practice” doing this before our big hike later this year—we want to have all of this figured out before we’re out in it *for real.*

I came to a point on that second half of the hike down where I got a bit emotional. I didn’t cry, but I certainly could have if I’d wanted to. I was reflecting back on my relationship with my ex-girlfriend and how she insisted we get a dog, and even talked me into it. My thought at the time that made me hesitant however was that it can only end one of three ways: 1) One of us—her or I—dies, 2) We break up and the custody battle sucks, or 3) the dog dies. I didn’t tell her that at the time though because that would have been a shitty thing to say. When we broke up however, that really kicked home. Well, that applied to me hiking down the canyon with little brother because I realized that this is just the same—one of us dies one day, or maybe we learn to hate one another, or… damn, I don’t know. But that’s just the way life is. Endings suck, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue things that bring us happiness. It’s better to love and lose than to never love at all. Ah, mushroom thought…

I also had another thought come to me as we were hiking down that second half of the canyon. Three weeks prior we’d also eaten mushrooms in the Grand Canyon, but we did so and just sat at a waterfall for the entire journey. It was magical because, well, I was tripping on mushrooms under a waterfall at the bottom of the Grand Canyon—that’s why. Terrence McKenna once said that “If you want a teacher, try a waterfall or a mushroom.” Well I tried both, and it was amazing. I learned a lot about life and temporariality—about how you can’t make a waterfall stop, even though it’s beautiful in each instant, you can’t freeze any of those instants; you just have to love them and let them pass.

Well, as I was hiking on this mushroom trip, I saw the trail just like the waterfall. It flowed under my feet just the same, but I could actually stop it if I wanted by stopping my legs. “And if I stop I can embrace it, but if I stop and embrace it, that’s miles and places and stones that I won’t see at the end of the day. You can’t just embrace or you’ll never see the world.” I was actually saying something very much along these lines as we bobbled down the trail—it was sort of my way of trying to remember the thoughts that came to me and communicate to little brother through the tone of my voice as to how my trip was progressing. “But then I need to remember that I can’t just keep going either. I got to embrace some things too or I’ll get to the end and see that I went the farthest and missed the most.”

Perhaps this is a good time to address a weird thing that happens to me on mushrooms that I’ve never heard anyone else discuss… and I don’t know how they could, it’s so weird. When i’m tripping, I get the Mitch Hedberg-esque speech. It’s a stoner, matter-of-fact jerky kind of speech, and it’s observations of normal things from a funny, usually simplified, perspective. When I was a kid I liked the comedian, but he was never someone I was “into.” I just watched a couple of his specials on Comedy Central. As a tripping adult man however, I’m sometimes very self conscious that people will think that I’m imitating him. It’s so strange. Anyone else (if you even know what I’m talking about) experienced such a thing?

By the time we got to the river about 4 hours had passed and we were pretty well down. I would say I was 90% down and little brother was 75% down. It should be noted that he also got the “second wind” of the mushroom trip after eating the other part of the bagel and smoking the TrainWreck.

As we were walking along the river, I was still getting pattern recognition, but mostly I was glowing in euphoria. As I looked to the river, I saw some rocks that looked like a person, then as I kept looking, I realized that it really was a person after all, then as I looked some more, I thought that this person looked to be completely naked, and as I looked and looked and looked, my theory confirmed. It was some naked-ass dude at the river, bush flyin’ and all. I turned to little brother just in time for him to look and confirm that it definitely was what I thought it was. I’ve been down that canyon countless times, and of course the one time that I’m down there hiking on mushrooms, I see a naked dude at the river. It was just a cherry on top of an already amazing hike and what had turned out to be a really great trip during the 2-3 hour mark as that second wave came on.

We walked through the village at the bottom of the canyon and I was having a hard time telling if they’d trimmed brush since we’d been there last or if I was just tripping—I’m pretty sure that it was the former.

Right outside of the tiny village there, we ran into a lady park ranger. I was in absolute after-glow at this point. “Hey!” I exclaimed, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. “I bet you can answer me some questions!” I had a grin from ear to ear, and although she was receptive, she was also hesitant.

I asked her if there was water at the trail we were headed to, but I mentioned the wrong trail name (the name of a trail 25 miles in the other direction) and she furrowed her brow and asked to see my permits. I was suddenly glad that little brother and I hadn’t been able to smoke much weed on account of all the people on the trail; even though I have a med card, that was federal land and you ain’t supposed to be smokin’ the dope there. Anyways, she checked our permits and realized that I’d just been mistaken on the name of the trail. We talked for perhaps 7 minutes and subtly wished that we could have perhaps hung out later that night, but she was hiking in the other direction, and I think that little brother, who is significantly quieter and less social than I am, would have weirded her out.

From there we climbed back up to about the halfway point on the other side of the Colorado River. We burned our second bowl of the day, that being way off the main trails, and we called the trip done. It was about 5 hours after we took the dose. We hugged and both enjoyed the hell out of our after-glow for the remaining 4 hours or so.

After that we actually spent another two days in the canyon and hiked about 60 miles over the course of the three-day-weekend. What was so unbelievable about the whole thing, and this goes to confirm why we want to do the longer trip later in the year, is that after dosing right at the start and being out alone in that country for days after, there’s no real societal or civilization pressure to bring you back to baseline. All throughout the weekend, especially after smoking a bowl, I could sit down, close my eyes, and just completely dissolve. Even while I was hiking I could make the rocks glow pink again, almost just like they had been after we started down the second half of the canyon trail that first day. Ah! So beautiful and just—real. I had a lot of thinking that I worked through in those three days, and it really was incredible starting off in such a wonderful way.

I really do not advise anyone try following what I outlined above (mostly because it’s 100% fiction) because there are really dangerous places that you can trip at but shouldn’t. The only reason I did this (allegedly) with little brother was because we were both experienced with hiking, the canyon, and tripping. Tripping outside is awesome and people should definitely try that, but do so in a safe place and please have a sitter, friends. I love y’all too much for any of you to get hurt.

Love.