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Life Buoyed By The National Parks

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Bob Mishak kayaking Yellowstone Lake/kjr

National park landscapes, and waterscapes, were a favorite of Bob Mishak/Paddling Yellowstone Lake, Kurt Repanshek

“We are all travelers in the desert of life, and the best we can find in our journey is an honest friend.” — Robert Louis Stevenson.

Bob Mishak had been an honest friend. For going on 40 years, he and I had been heading into the mountains, out onto lakes, and through forests and along coastlines in the National Park System to revel in the wilderness and just spend a few days catching up on life without the encumbrances of society.

Together we both heard our first wolf howl in the wild, shared a hillside with a grizzly, and saw a black bear cub drop like a big furry rock from a tree as we hiked along a trail. It was a well-padded bear, too, for it bounced once before bolting away.

We paddled into sunsets, rose to the morning sun burning fog off lakes, and hiked through snow and sleet. And we just sat together in the woods and listened as the wind blew shook the trees and rains quenched the soils.

We were introduced while I was working at an outdoors gear store in downtown Somerville, New Jersey, during college breaks. Two teenagers looking to leave town behind. While the store didn’t make it in the long run, Bob and I did.

Bob Mishak in the Lewis River Channel during one of our three trips to Shoshone Lake/Kurt Repanshek

We were young men who shared a common love of the outdoors. Through the decades we visited a lot of places that many folks only read or dream about. We backpacked into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Shenandoah, and slung packs onto our backs in Yellowstone National Park, and paddled Lewis, Shoshone, and Yellowstone lakes.

We huddled together, trying to stay warm, during a snowstorm on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, sat out a day of rain in a lean-to on the Appalachian Trail in Shenandoah National Park, and pitched our tent not far from the 260-foot Albright Falls in Yellowstone’s Cascade Corner.

We also found time to kayak off the coast of Maine and traveled to Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras national seashores in North Carolina with my oldest brother, Larry, and another good friend, Bob Janiskee.

Over the years, we had more fun than two Jersey boys were entitled to. In Maine's Muscongus Bay one morning we paddled into a fog bank…and sat there in our boats, bobbing up and down, listening to buoy bells, and waiting for the sun to come out. Along the Appalachian Trail in Shenandoah National Park we spent one night with seven women - well, seven Mennonite women - who also were hiking a portion of the trail.

Deep in the backcountry on Yellowstone Lake, we shared a huge sprawling hillside with a grizzly bear, fell asleep to the chortling of sandhill cranes roosting nearby, and awoke in the inky pre-dawn blackness to the howling of a lone wolf.

Those were some of the experiences national parks hold out to you, places where roads don't go, where you hone, and rely upon, your self-reliance, where you soak in nature.

Bob and I lived for these experiences. We had planned so many, many more.

It was just about two years ago, after he and I had returned from a canoe trip in the backcountry of Yellowstone with my two sons, Jess and Sean, that Bob learned he had cancer. It was a body blow. While the medical world is making great strides in fighting cancer, by the time doctors diagnosed Bob's cancer, it was Stage IV.

Somehow, he remained optimistic. But that was in his make-up.

"They're making strides every day, finding new ways to fight cancer," he told me one day. On another, he said that while he might not beat cancer, perhaps it could be managed, giving him precious more years. When a medical procedure this past March left him paralyzed, he told his physical therapists that he would walk out of their treatment facility and join me on a float trip this fall.

Through the past two years, we always made time to talk about trips we hoped to make into the parks. Thinking about checking more trips off our decades-long to-do list gave Bob a reprieve from his doctor visits, the testing, the nausea brought about by chemo, the inevitable. We enjoyed spare moments to laugh while holding back the tears, and tried to look forward.

I had hoped to show him the red-rock canyon country of southern Utah. There, descending into a rift in the landscape, we'd visit the ancients. At another passageway through a vertical crack in the earth we'd wander into one of the park system's most magnificent "parks," Chesler.

We talked about hiking the Appalachian Trail end-to-end, a goal of a lifetime, of snorkeling the colorful waters of Dry Tortugas National Park off the coast of Florida, of spending a week sailing the Caribbean on a barefoot charter.

There were lots of trips on the drawing board, trips that kept our souls young, which let us get away and spend a few days or a week catching up in warm camaraderie. We realized over the last two years that we might not make some of those trips, but we still talked about front-country car camping with some easy day hikes, and long hours spent in front of the campfire at night.

It was in the splendor of the backcountry in national forests and the National Park System that our friendship was forged, and made stronger over the years. The forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, and coastlines that are preserved within the park system provided, for us, a perfect backdrop to both exploring the natural world and coming to a better understanding of ourselves, of each other, of the world around us.

And, really, that's what these landscapes hold out to anyone who ventures into them.

The day Bob passed away last month, it was snowing in the high country of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. We had hoped to explore that park’s backcountry one day, too.

I have a sense that he’s watching it snow, and waxing his skis, waiting for a bit more to fall.

They say that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. One day down the road I look forward to again seeing Bob’s smile, hiking with him, and simply catching up.

Portsmouth Village, Cape Lookout National Seashore/Bob Janiskee

Bob Mishak and Kurt Repanshek at Portsmouth Village, Cape Lookout National Seashore/Bob Janiskee

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Comments

Simply beautiful Kurt.  My condolences.


I always like the idea of taking a small token of a lost loved one with me when I make those future trips. I'm not embarassed to admit to having had late night conversations like "Well, Dad, you made it here after all."


So sorry for your loss, Kurt. You are fortunate to have found each other, and to have had so many wonderful experiences together in the national parks. Thank you for sharing some of the memories of your great friend.


Bobbie was a cousin that I never got to know.  I'm so glad that you did and shared it with us.

Your last paragraph about energy resonated with me to the core because I've always believed that after death our energy lives on.  Lives on in others as well as the universe.  Our energy is what keeps the universe in perspective......and real.....and alive.

Thank you for sharing.  I know it helped you to grieve.  It helped all of us as well.

Love those you love until there is no more to give.  You and yours so deserve it.  No matter what, life is good.

With our condolences,

John and Helen Petras


Thank you Kurt

For keeping my brothers passions alive 

F Mishak 


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