{"id":12,"date":"2020-10-14T01:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T01:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/34.10.140.215\/?p=12"},"modified":"2025-12-04T01:06:50","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T01:06:50","slug":"memorial-john-skorpen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"Memorial: John Skorpen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My father, John Skorpen, passed away in April 2020. He was 78. Below are my remarks from his memorial service this past August.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, I was up in the Adirondacks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a break in rain storms, Kathleen and Abby and I hiked Mnt Catamount. It\u2019s a mountain I hiked with dad maybe a decade ago. I think it was the last big mountain we hiked together. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve ever hiked a mountain with dad, but whenever you got to the summit, he\u2019d immediately look to the horizon, searching out other mountains. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Look,” he\u2019d say, “there\u2019s Ampersand! There\u2019s St. Regis! Ah, that\u2019s Lion mountain \u2026 you\u2019ve got to bushwhack to summit that one!” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He always could name every peak, and seeing them on the horizon would get him fired up. He\u2019d immediately start plotting a route up. The more off-the-beaten path, the better. Every hike added to his backlog of adventures. He had a list of adventures a mile deep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years ago, when I was in fourth grade, we took a family trip to Europe. Dad joined Evan, mom, and me in Switzerland, and we headed south to Italy. Every night in Italy, he\u2019d pour over the local maps, and he\u2019d find us adventures \u2014 a little castle icon, just a few hills over. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019d set out in search of these Italian Castillos. He\u2019d have us driving for hours down tiny Italian backroads, and we\u2019d finally come across a small, ancient, but not-too-impressive walled village. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the decade\u2019s since, dad\u2019s hunts for Castillos have became a running family joke. He\u2019d come up to the Adirondacks, and in a conversation with some local \u2014 despite being pretty introverted, he was so good at talking with anyone \u2014 he\u2019d hear about a waterfall or a swimming hole. He\u2019d spend the rest of the week winding his way down remote dirt roads to discover the Adirondack Castillo and finding a route to share. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My last visit to the Adirondacks, to Mossflower, was a bit bittersweet, since it really was my last visit. You get a different lens on a place when you\u2019re leaving it behind. I went through dad\u2019s library of Adirondacks books \u2014 books we left up there, and I hope are appreciated by the next owners \u2014 and all across the margins were his scrawled notes, identifying his finds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For dad, I think, the journey was way more important than the destination. The destination was just an excuse for the detective work, the camaraderie of sharing his plan, the preparation, the journey. And this was how he approached all his life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, it was hard for him to hike or paddle. But he\u2019d still search out new put-ins and trailheads. He\u2019d spend a summer working on a broken motorboat engine, in anticipation that his grandchildren would use it to putt putt out to Saranack Lake. He spent years building different braces for his feet to prepare for one more hike. He spent months caring for wounds so that he could get his legs wet while on one more paddle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he was at it to the end. Two weeks before he died, he was telling me about a trip to the Caribbean he was planning with mom \u2014 when she was understandably a bit skeptical, he told her he was going, with or without her \u2014 and interesting drives he\u2019d uncovered in the Tetons, near where Evan\u2019s getting married next summer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathleen, Abby, and I drove across the country to get here. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. I know that if he were here he\u2019d want to hear all about the journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And gosh, Dad, let me tell you: It was some trip. America the beautiful. I really loved Southern Utah and Colorado. They were gorgeous. There were a bunch of rivers I want to raft, and I think I spotted a few trailheads we might hit on the way back. You would have loved it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My father, John Skorpen, passed away in April 2020. He was 78. Below are my remarks from his memorial service this past August. Last week, I was up in the Adirondacks.  In a break in rain storms, Kathleen and Abby and I hiked Mnt Catamount. It\u2019s a mountain I hiked with dad maybe a decade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/61006456217__4A1EBE7E-1182-4B10-85C2-465F80B90B3C.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/13"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}