![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.riley.rackliffe.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/IMG_9193.jpg\" "\\"IMG_9193\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhen I come down from my perch I feel a sense of empowerment, a drive to rise a little higher and be a little better as President Hinckley told us from this pulpit. After hiking I feel like I understand my life better than I did before. I am tired, and dirty, and have slightly larger holes in my shoes yet I have more energy. Graduating from college is a lot like climbing a mountain. It is hard. It takes persistence and effort and lots of time. It\u2019s really helpful when your mom packs you a lunch. You may even have slightly larger holes in your shoes than you did before. When you get to the top the view is incredible. Your perspective has enlarged and you see things that you didn\u2019t before.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite mountains that I have climbed was about the same height as Y Mountain. I was with a group of BYU students. We got out of bed in the early morning, 4 am if I recall correctly. It was a three mile hike in the dark. The 80 of us, interestingly Chelsea was with me, joined hundreds of other pilgrims and Bedouins in the effort to be on top of Mt Sinai by the time the sun rose. The Bedouins each had a camel which they constantly offered to us for the rest of the hike. Declining the camel rides we summited by foot. We sat up there in the chill of the desert dawn and sang hymns as the sun lit up the barren world of jagged pink granite rocks around us. It was an incredible journey and a spectacular view.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Chelsea was the other speaker, we were in the same Jerusalem Study abroad group.<\/p><\/div>\n
After spending as much time up there as we could we finally turned our shoes to the trail and began the long trek down. This is where the environmental science major in me came out. Sinai is a volatile place where conservation is relatively unimportant. With thousands of tourists wandering the mountains trash is a major problem. There are a few small cans along the trail but they are largely ignored. Having been well trained by the boy scouts I pulled out my empty lunch sack and started filling it with empty water bottles and granola wrappers on the way down. I found my plastic sack filling far too quickly so I unloaded it in the nearest can. A Bedouin stopped me and asked me what I was doing. I explained I was just throwing away some trash. He seemed confused as I continued filling the sack with more trash.<\/p>\n
The same thing happened a few hundred feet later at the next trash can when I unloaded again. The Bedouins all looked at me with strange expressions. In that somewhat halting British English the Bedouins speak, I was told that I was a good boy as they acknowledged my efforts with approving nods. I felt like Americans picking up trash was one of the strangest things they had seen. <\/p>\n