What the heck is BAM-T?

(I'm hoping to get more voices posting on here as we go along.  Hopefully even C.  Some digressions outside of the clinical day-to-day stuff since C is certainly more than just this crisis.  And to start that David wanted to share a story, or the beginning of a story.  Someday I'll teach folks to post on here themselves, but until then it'll pass through me.  Take it away, David...)




Let me tell you about a really unusual constellation of friends who mean the world to me.   The cast of characters is Dom (NASA crew chief), me (IDEO), C, Roger (Navy SEAL), Jim (film editor), and Gus (Navy SEAL).

Gus and I met thru work and he introduced me to Dom and Roger.  One day I got an invitation to join them in what they called the Bi-Annual Man Test (BAM-T) which was an idea to get a group of like-minded friends from different walks of life to go do something together.  One idea was to attend a boat building workshop.  The one that stuck was to go backpacking somewhere.  I joined the three of them on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia and we had a splendid time, telling stories and meeting people on the trail.   Would there be another?

It didn’t take long for the next trip to be in the planning stages.   Hoping to stretch the group composition, I asked if I could invite LA based Jim and C.   Now the group was part military, part artist, part zero-gravity-expert.  This chemistry experiment could have gone really bad, really fast.  But it didn’t.  This group has become friends for life.   Since then, some combination of the group has hiked slot canyons in Utah, the Lewis & Clark trail in Idaho, and a howling blizzard in the High Sierra.

In future posts, I’ll share some anecdotes from our Travels with C.  Its been a freakin’ blessing.