High in the Sierra Nevada, at the end of the scariest road I have ever driven on – one lane, sheer drop, no guardrail and maniacs pulling boat trailers – there is a lake formed by the first dam on the San Joaquin River. For $25 round trip, a boat ferries backpackers across the lake to pick up the trail into the John Muir Wilderness.

About six miles in from Florence Lake, Han and I met two young men wearing the uniform of the U.S. Forest Service. One of them, packing an old timber saw, asked me where I was from.

"Pennsylvania," I said.

"What part?" he asked.

"State College," I said.

"Nittany Lions!" he exclaimed.

Turns out he's a Penn State senior named Dan Neff who's studying outdoor recreation management and interning with the Forest Service by tromping through the wilderness dismantling illegal campsites, clearing trails, packing out trash and checking wilderness permits (we had one).

Everyone knows that the network of Penn State people is so vast that members of Nittany Nation routinely speculate about how much longer Joe Paterno will coach when they bump into each other while trekking through Highland New Guinea or deepest Amazonia. But this was one of my better PSU sightings to date.

We started hiking at 5 p.m. the first day, trudged three miles while acclimating to the thinness of the air and the weight on our backs, and made camp before nightfall. The second day we hiked another three miles, pitched camp, then hiked three more miles without backpacks, then hiked back to camp. The third day we hiked the six miles out, for a total of 15 miles for the three days. Compared to the grizzled old through-hikers who were making their way northward along the 2,500-mile Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican to the Canadian borders, we were taking a quick stroll around a glass of water, as my dad would put it.

Still, when I consider that at this time last year I was going through a back and leg pain episode so intense that I could neither lie down nor sit in a car, I felt pretty delighted to be out there at all.

That said, I'm not crazy about lugging 30 pounds of gear through steep terrain. Nor do I sleep as well in a tent as I do in my own bed. And for personal hygiene, I much prefer a hot shower to a frigid dip in an alpine lake. But the discomforts and inconveniences of backpacking are always worth it.

At one point I was sitting on a rock and pumping river water through a filter into our water bottles. It is a vastly more complicated way to stay hydrated than going to the kitchen sink and turning on the tap. But the appreciation of the drink is so much keener when I'm out in the woods.

The same goes for food. Dinners of couscous and chicken in a foil pouch become great feasts. Almonds and dried cranberries become as delicious as hot fudge sundaes.

And then there's the rest of the sensory feast: the jagged peaks of the High Sierra, the wildflowers in the Alpine meadows, the snowmelt-fed San Joaquin, so tame and utilitarian in its journey through the orchards and vineyards of the Central Valley, so wild as it spills down from the mountains in the northwest corner of Kings Canyon National Park.

I'm not sure which was brightest, the plumage of the scarlet tanager I saw as we drove over Kaiser Pass on the way back to civilization, or the meteorite that streaked across our field of vision as we lounged on a boulder after the sun went down on our first night in the wilderness. It was the largest and longest-lasting shooting star either of us had ever seen. And the stars, of course, out there beyond the lights of town, are mind-boggling (though I'm always disappointed that the constellations don't look more like the pictures formed by connect-the-dots puzzles, the way the Big Dipper does).

True, there are places you can drive to and see the peaks, the flowers, the night sky without shouldering a pack or battling the mosquitoes. But the view is always better when you attain it after a hard climb, just as the coffee's always better when you drink it while standing in the first shaft of sunlight on a cold mountain morning.

For that matter, the pleasures of a soft bed, a hot shower and a restaurant meal are also keener after you've done without them for a few days.

These are the lessons of backpacking, obvious to anyone who's ever done it, but the lessons of appreciation are ones that we need to learn over and over.