The forest was dense, sweat was rolling down my forehead. I knelt down and grabbed the water bottle out of one of our bag as I wiped my brow. I grabbed my map once again and looked at the contour lines, evaluating how close the river was to the ridge we were near. I knew we were close, weeks before I had studied the book "The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring" by Richard Preston and his hint on where the Grove of Titans was that it was at "The bottom of a hidden notch-like valley, near a glade". That kept running through my mind.
We had just gone the opposite way, going down a steep ravine and knew we had to turn around. We went back to our starting point and I started doing a pace count off of how many meters it would be based off the map.
I made it to my estimated pace count and stopped. The trail turned to the right, and I saw nothing to my left.
"It has to be around here" I said, my girlfriend looking around.
"This way", she said.
I replied, "Are you sure? It doesn't look like anything is over there"
"It has to be", she said.
We walked into the wood line, walked past a behemoth tree, and stopped. This looked oddly familiar, but we couldn't quite make it out.
Behind us, as we slowly turned around, was "El Viejo Del Norte".
We made it! We couldn't believe it. It was so surreal.
This was long before tourists had been leaving social clues, and before the parks recreation started to make a real trail for visitors. Now you can visit the Grove of Titans in a safer way.
We knew that the trees were sensitive, with the roots shallow, so we tried to be careful.
We kept walking, climbing over giant turned over trees, when right in front of us, was what we were looking for, the Screaming Titans.
We walked around the area and explored the many other trees in the vicinity.
But I had a plan, and I came all this way to fulfill it.
I was going to propose to my girlfriend of 6 years.
I set up my NX1000 Samsung Camera on a tripod, and I told my girlfriend I wanted to take a picture of us in front of the screaming Titan looking up at it. I said it was going to take a serious of photos, one right after the other.
She found it silly that I wanted to do that but understood that I wanted to take a picture of us together in front of the tree.
While I was setting everything up, she took a picture of me setting everything up.
Once everything was prepared, I pressed the shutter and ran over to her. I waited until the first photos were taken and knew it was time. I knelt on one knee and looked at her.
She was completely surprised, not knowing what was really going on but quickly got it. I asked her, "will you marry me?" She quickly said "yes!" and we I got up and kissed her. The moment was perfectmand I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.
And decided we wanted to go on another adventure for our honeymoon, Peru.
