Bored to Bliss

"Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"is the kind of film that an ordinary audience will find so boring that they'll either leave halfway through or focus their eyes on the dull glow of their smartphone. But this film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is, if you're patient enough, a methodic, dream-like meditation on life, death and karmic reinvention.
Uncle Boonmee is a Thai man suffering from kidney failure who  has enlisted his sister-in-law and a couple of young men to care for him while he bustles on with his regular duties on his tamarind and bee farm. One night, Boonmee's deceased wife appears at the dinner table followed shortly by his vanished son, who has taken on the form of a kind of mythic ape. As Boonmee's time of death creeps out of the ubiquitous tangled jungle we are taken on an almost lackadaisical tour through a few surreal vignettes, including one where a princess is seduced by a charming catfish.
Mr Weerasethakul has a knack for this sort of filmic magical realism. As wonderfully bizarre and sometimes startlingly strange things go on his characters, behaving as if in a dream, don't react like you'd expect. No one screams when an ape man sits down at the dinner table; they offer him leftovers and show him photo albums. The result for me was almost like when I've finally finished a boulder problem that's felt impossible for years; a feeling of blooming content.
"Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"is well worth it's two hours on the screen, though I did check the time once or twice. If you're a fan of David Lynch or Terrence Malick, I'm prepared to say you'll enjoy this film, but if your favorite filmmaker is David Fincher, you'll be bored to death and probably quite annoyed by that catfish.
Uncle Boonmee trailer

Imperfect Betsy

With a new storm huffing at the door,  I trudged out to Middle Elden with friends Matt and Spence. Middle Elden lounges in the sun all day and even when it's cold enough in town for snow, it can be almost warm enough in the protected canyon to take your shirt off, find a nice rock to sit on and drink tropical cocktails out of coconuts. Well, it's not really that warm, but the snow melts fast.

Not fast enough, it turns out. After warming up we labored up-canyon in search of Entering Betsy. There was enough snow on top of Broken Symmetry, a beautifully pure line of crimps, pinches, and slopers up a steep wall with a flat landing, that it would be impossible to top the problem out.
Whatever, we had Betsy on mind and she was all that mattered. Matt  and I had spent the day before at the Waterfall plugging cams and climbing cracks. He'd spent most of the afternoon talking up this problem and the area.
Betsy is a problem named as some kind of male assertion on another after one stole the others girlfriend. Entering Betsy is the tastefully crude name of the low-start. It begins with a large dynamic move from underclings to a hueco and then climbs sloping crimps to an enigmatic top-out. It looks like a three-star problem worth twice the hike.
But somehow, in the few hundred feet between Broken Symmetry and Entering Betsy, we got hopelessly, miserably turned around. Matt, the only one of us who'd been to Middle Elden before, seemed to have no idea where he was anymore. He dropped his pad and wandered through the snow and the maze of jumbled boulders and never found Betsy.
I did, long after our muscles were cold again and the snow was seeping through to our socks. I saw a small cave and, since one of the walls was covered in a glossy patina of ice I wanted to get a closer look at, I climbed through and found Betsy on the other side. Of course, the top of the problem was coated in a thin veneer of snow.

The buzz of climbing was gone, though we tried to find something dry for another hour. After climbing one, kind of loose problem way up on one of the canyon's sides, we decided to leave and try Broken Symmetry on the way out.
Walking back down I wondered if the rest of Broken Symmetry would be wet. Earlier, it's snow cap was melting so fast it was pouring off the lip of the boulder and leaving all the face holds dry. now though, it had cooled down and the snow underfoot gave a satisfying crunch with each step.
Matt's dog, Roxanne raced ahead, occasionally turning back as if to say, "come on, this way."
Contributing to the comedy of errors, only the crux hold of Broken Symmetry was wet. It was enough to make the problem unclimbable and to make all of us smile.

Some days just don't come out of the mold shaped for rock climbing the same way some days, like today, don't allow decent writing or perfect luck. I once spent a stubborn week in the back of my truck in Red Rocks reading The Grapes of Wrath and waiting for it to stop raining. My summer was spent racing thunderstorms to the various bouldering areas in central Colorado, races I usually lost. And what I remember about all those days isn't the frustration with imperfection and rotten luck, but the tight comfort of my sleeping bag and the taste of wild raspberries I picked while wandering around in the rain and repeating the mantra, "at least my skin is waterproof,"a thought that can get me through most moist discomfort.
Going to Middle Elden was a bust, but it was still fun, and in my mind, worth every minute of unbalanced walking and cold feet. What I'll remember about this first trip to Middle Elden is the comedy of errors, the glossy ice near Entering Betsy and how much fun a dog can have running in the old crunchy snow. Next time, I'll bring the tropical drinks.

Rest Days and Drive-Bys

Winter sunrise in The Tanks. It's that time of year once again, when the desert crawls with smelly people, when Foosball and Bocce become spectator sports, El Pasito is standing room only and all the new kids can't stop talking about how good the tortillas from the Vista are. Hueco Tanks is a place of hard bouldering, a place of Pull Down, Not Out top outs, of bruised fingertips and cracked cuticles. At The Tanks you have to rest, there are no weeks straight of bouldering. No, rest days are essential and sometimes it's those days that become cemented in mind while the others melt away like sand from an hourglass.
I've never spent a full season in El Paso, but I've done a couple month-long trips down there. I turned 18 by the fire pit at The Rock Ranch, climbed my hardest graded boulder problem, and sustained my biggest climbing related injury falling off that same problem on one of my many tries.
Saying that I broke my back is a bit dramatic, but I did indeed fracture a vertebra. Stress fracture, so tiny it will never heal. But in Hueco, even after I fell so badly, I didn't know how hurt I was. The pain was something awful, like my vertebra was simply not in the right position anymore and every time I moved the serrated edges of the break cut deep into the surrounding tissue.
But I was on a climbing trip so I kept climbing, kept falling, kept hurting more and more. I was forever picturing the source of pain deep in my back and hoping every night before I fell asleep that the pain would be gone by morning.
I started taking more and more rest days, eventually reading through all the books I'd brought. I sat by the fire with a couple guys from New York, Frank, Yuri, and the usual Rock Ranch fixtures. I spent days with the New Yorkers in their site and shooting at kangaroo rats with an air-soft gun. We found a bottle of glue and glued rocks together so we could try to rip them apart again. The word Boredom was  growing in font-size in my mind, and my back, even after a few days of immobility, still shot ice up my spine if I moved wrong.
I had just a few more days left in The Tanks and decided to give the whole rock-climbing thing another try. I was paralyzed with fear that whatever I was doing to my back was permanent, that I'd tweak it in some way and never move my legs again, or something. But I went on a tour anyway. When I was hitting the last hold of Three Years Dead, I felt something separate. I mantled and tried to stand up strait. I couldn't, I was stuck in a hunch like some ancient man. I needed help taking my climbing shoes off.
That night I drove into El Paso and, guided by that giant star on the hill over the border, to the hospital.

The muscle relaxants I was prescribed made my hands feel like they weren't attached, as if there were balloons tied to my wrists and my arms hung limp in the air. There was nothing left for me to do in Texas but sit watching TV, drooling.
Then Yuri and the New Yorkers asked me if I wanted to go shoot some guns.
Hell yes I did.
A few cars full of people sped across the desert to someone's trailer where some illegal activity took place behind closed doors. We were ready to be Irresponsible, to lay all NRA approved shooting rules aside and, beer cans beware, practice our gangster skills.
Armed with a 9mm and a 30-30 we moved quickly from your standard slow trigger squeeze to the hollywood approved sideways approach and the hip shot. Someone appeared with a camera and started to go through tremendous efforts to get the right shot. He lay on his back is the soft dust, changed lenses every thirty seconds, and stared at his camera screen with a seriousness lost on everyone else. We were having fun. Laughing, smiling trying to come up with more ways to make things more ridiculous.
"What about a drive-by?" someone suggested.
Brilliant. We set some cans on the hillside next to the road.
A group piled into a mini van with the guns and the driver turned up the radio, which happened to be tuned to NPR. The van turned around and gravel flew from under the tires as it gained momentum. The back door sprung open and someone shouted, "Break Yo'self,"before unloading a clip into the hillside while Diane Rehm's wobbly voice screamed from the stereo.
When the ammunition was gone and everyone had had a turn we all went to El Pasito to celebrate. I didn't think of my back or find myself in any places of great narcissism. Boredom wasn't even in the fine print. It was a simple, fun day narrated by the whims of a bunch of rock climbers with too much time on hand and an entire desert at their disposal.

Even though I didn't climb my project that trip, even though I couldn't climb for half a year, it's still the most memorable time I've spent sleeping in my truck, if not for anything but the friends I made and the feeling of firing a gun out of a moving car.
Winter is here again and the New Year is, as of now, unplanned. I'll be driving south with fingers so sweaty they slip on the steering wheel and NPR turned way way up so the voices crackle. Soon, I'll be back in the desert after a two year hiatus from Hueco, and I couldn't be more excited. People wonder if the restrictions ruin it, if it's just too much trouble. Maybe it is for some, but for me, the smell a rare desert  rain, the sight of an escaped Ibex, and winter sunrises' make it worth it. Plus the bouldering is good too.

Children and Aliens

Aliens and monsters, the undead, paranormal and supernatural happenings, some of my favorite things about the movies. My dad schooled me in the essentials; I'm on a short list of names of people who saw both the 1951 Howard Hawk's The Thing and John Carpenter's 1982 remake before age 13.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind had me building Devil's Tower out of my mashed potatoes and Reese's Pieces will never be the same after E.T.
Last year, while practicing the Butt-In-Seat school of writing, I spent a good deal of time procrastinating by watching movie trailers. They were my two-minute breaks, of which I need quite a few of. It was on one of  these breaks that I first watched the trailer for the new JJ Abrams film Super 8. This film seemed to revel in ambiguity and I hoped  Mr. Abrams, who gained more of my faith with Star Trek, could produce another worthwhile piece of entertainment.
And he did, sort of. Super 8 follows middle schooler Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his friends Charles, (Riley Griffiths) Cary, (Ryan Lee) Martin, (Gabriel Basso) and Preston, (Zach Mills) while they, led by Charles, try to make a zombie movie. Joe has just lost his mother to an accident in the steel mill of this 1979 ohio town. His father, Jackson Lamb, (Kyle Chandler) doesn't really know how to raise a middle schooler.
Charles, brings in Alice Dainard ( Elle Fanning) to be a love interest for his protagonist. The group of children go to the local train station to film a scene. This scene within a scene is one Super 8's most mesmerizing. After they witness a train crash the film loses its originality and become little more than a string of hat-tips by Mr. Abrams to films like E.T. tied together with shadows and witty dialogue.
Super 8 never really pays off the way it seems to want to. It feels shallow and sometimes even soulless with the exception of a scene having to do with a locket and a giant magnet. There are no lasting images like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T, movies Super 8 tries too hard to emulate. Mr. Abrams   obviously admired these films as do I, and this is my favorite part of this film, the nods to classics and that the characters almost know they're in a movie, especially once while riding in a car, staring out the windshield at the audience and passing each other Redvines.
 

The Black Hole

Yesterday I got the chance to watch icicles form, to feel snow melting in my hair, and to climb some new problems at Priest Draw. I went out in the morning prepared with a full thermos of tea and an extra layer to meet my friend Matt, who is showing me all the various boulder problems and link-ups on the assorted roofs in The Draw and surrounding area.
Matt is the kind of person whose excitement is uncontainable and who almost needs to be interrupted to take a breath. He climbs around the same level as I do and I think climbing with someone who, personality wise is polar to me. Matt gets me thrilled to climb something, and I make him pause between tries and rest.
 In a few ways, he reminds me of Jarod, a guy I spent years with in the car driving great distances to Hueco, Bishop, even Colorado. We shared the futon in the back of my truck, pressed against opposing sides of the camper shell, because who knows what might happen if one of our legs brushed the others in the middle of the night. We explored Bishop together, spotted each other on our first V10s, I even watched Jarod get arrested for an outstanding traffic ticket and picked him up from jail a few days later.
Now Jarod lives in Mammoth, California, where he spends as much time as possible on a snowboard flying through cold air at incredible speeds.

So yesterday after warming up in light flurries, Matt and I headed down to The Black Roof where, despite the snow, most of the problems were still climbable. The snow became more intentional and began to stick. Matt's dog, Roxanne, wandered the field and came back wet, shivering and happy. Conversation circled climbing, as always, but mysteriously diverted to apocalyptic subjects like volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts.
The snow continued to fall and Matt showed me how to do The Black Hole, which, after I figured out how to keep my feet on, I climbed quickly. The Black Hole climbs well at first on large edges and pinches but the last few moves are awkward and the ending unsatisfying. We then worked out the moves on The Antimatter Traverse, which follows the same line of holds as The Black Hole but backwards to a different top out.
At a break in the snow we walked over to PBR roof, one I'd never been to. There are many exceptional looking problems on this roof including Cosmic Tricycle and the massive, thirty-foot long Pink Lightning.
I needed to get home so we walked back to the cars.
But my keys were gone.  On the way down a steep bank I'd slipped and pulled my hands out of my jacket pockets, unknowingly dropping my keys in the snow. So we went back to look for them while the snow became more serious. Roxanne immediately ran laps over the area I'd fallen, her tracks looking exactly like what I imagined the print my keys would have made. While I combed through the snow I wondered what I would do if Matt weren't there and an emergency ride home for my extra car keys wasn't in order. My phone was nearly dead and there's little service in the area anyway. I'd have to enter the played out horror movie scenario of knocking on a strangers door and asking to use the phone because my keys had been swallowed by the storm. I'd be that guy, desperate and wet, stumbling out of a blizzard into some family of cannibalistic chainsaw enthusiasts. At least my tea was still warm.
After a few minutes of desperate sifting I found my keys under a footprint in the snow exactly where I thought they'd be. Driving home on the icy roads I turned the heat way up and smiled, grateful to see the snow falling and happy that I'd taken the trouble to wear that extra layer.

The Snow is the Remedy

Rain and snow, frequent visitors to Flagstaff this time of year, appear to be on their way. Dark clouds are boiling up over the Pacific and quietly rushing over the Mojave to get caught up on the crags of the San Francisco Peaks. Pressures are changing; Christina has a headache, and I'm hoping to get out to the forest to climb before the snow weighs down the needles on the Ponderosas and icicles hang with melting determination from the boulders.
But there's something special about climbing in the snow too. While I lived in Prescott I regularly layered up  and took the broom from the kitchen and swept the fresh snow from the final holds of whatever problem I was trying. When you spend so many hours in a place focusing on little else but climbing it's easy to loose sight of where you are. The snow is the remedy, it changes things just enough to make me look around and see things I normally look past.
Snow always directs my attention to the boulder problems I want to climb most. I have to take the extra time to drive out, hike out, and clean off the ice to let the rock dry for a couple days. Going to places where the routine is as reliable as a morning cup of coffee, and changing it by simply wandering around, noticing the squirrel tracks linking trees like someone drawing lines between the stars makes that place feel new again.
 So come the end of this storm, or series of storms, I'll be skiing up Priest Draw with a quiver of brushes to clean the ice from the final holds of the Mars Roof. It will be the first time I've been there in any amount of snow, and the idea of spending time there with different intentions, those of being outside to see a place I care about with a different mask unique to this time of year, is as exciting as the first visit.

Mechanics of The Heart

Martin Scorsese's new film, "Hugo", is a beautiful adaptation of Brian Selznick's children's book, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," and a well-oiled homage to early film and story-telling. After Mr. Scorsese's long list of serious, heartbreaking films like "Raging Bull," "Goodfellas" or Taxi Driver," it seems he has taken to exploring different genres, as in last years "Shutter Island," or this years "Hugo," which leaves the frowning adult world and enters a child's.
Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living in a 1930's Parisian train station where he oils, repairs and sets all the stations clocks. In his old forgotten room deep in the interior of the station where steam rises from gratings and gears eternally rotate, Hugo has an old Atomaton, a sort of mechanical man, poised to begin writing, Hugo believes something from his dead father, a watchmaker (Jude Law).
After his father's death, Hugo is taken to the train station by his slurring uncle (Ray Winstone) to eventually replace him as timekeeper. This uncle leaves and Hugo is left to fend for himself in the cavernous train station against a Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) hell-bent on sending him to an orphanage. There are many scenes of Hugo running from the Station Inspector and his orphan-sniffing doberman through a maze of legs and passageways taken straight from the imagination of a child beneath the dinner table and Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." Hugo, all the while is repairing the Atomaton with parts he steals from an enigmatic toy vendor, Georges Méliès, (Ben Kingsley) and his Goddaughter, Isabelle, (Chloe Grace Moretz.)
This is the Méliès of early silent cinema whose film "A Trip To The Moon" contains a certain image of the Man on the Moon with a projectile in his eye that has become ubiquitous in modern culture. Mr. Scorsese uses this image to great effect in "Hugo," as he does with countless other images. This film is as much a lesson in early film as anything else. 
"Hugo" is a great adventure into a sad child's world and the depression of a man who thinks his once celebrated art, his calling in life, are now forgotten and destroyed. While this film may not be entertaining in the same way something like "Puss in Boots" or "Cars 2," it maintains that not only Disney/Pixar can make children's movies that hold cinematic weight. Characters are complex, The Station Inspector's war wound effects his confidence, Méliès transforms from a grumpy old man to a magician and the magic between could lift even the coldest heart. 

Red Rocks and Guidebooks

Red Rocks looms out of the desert, facing all the lights and endlessly turning gears of the strip. Every year the sprawl of tract homes reaches closer, and Charleston gets more congested but Red Rock Canyon stays more or less the same.
Red Rocks has, in my opinion, some of the best rock climbing in all the hugeness of the West. From 2000 foot 5.9's to boulder problems as sexy as the classics at the Buttermilks, it's all there, like 30 miles from the Strip; there truly is something for everyone. It can be surreal, looking back off a route or boulder to see a city growing from the sand, gridded like a computer chip. Vegas is perfectly out of place; a city like that couldn't exist anywhere else, except maybe some oil-rich country in the Middle-East. I love the anonymity of a Casino, the faux glamor of their hollow decor, and all the blinking lights and chirping, ringing, talking machines stretching off in great empty rows.
It takes about three minutes for me to want to leave.
Even looking over at Vegas from Red Rocks it's hard to imagine all the people inside, staring blankly at a screen, pushing a button that makes their money go somewhere else.
It seems as if more and more climbers are adding Las Vegas and Red Rocks onto their winter circuit. A new route guidebook and a new bouldering guidebook have been released in the last few years.
The route guide, Red Rocks: A Climber's Guide, by Jerry Handren is excellent in its descriptions, directions and photography. It's written well, as if Handren actually studied writing and spent more than  45 minutes editing. The bouldering guide, By Tom Moulin, is perhaps the best guidebook I've ever read. Not only does it do all the things a guidebook should, like get you to the area and boulder problem you want, it provides a much more detailed history (way back to pre-history) and a great natural history chapter. I love to know where I am, as in what bioregion, and what plants and animals I'm seeing, so perhaps this part excited me more than it would the average boulderer. But I think it's important for some Southern California bred gym climber to have pretty much undeniable (unless they ripped that chapter out) access to information about why, for example, Creosote is such a badass plant. This guidebook really does set a new bar, as it claims on its website.

The Vortex

Sedona is one of those unexplainable western towns famous for, among other things, its red rocks. People come from all over the world to ride around the not-so-wild-anymore wilderness on Pink Jeep tours or hired helicopters. They take photos and videos and rush from one scenic overlook to the next, but with the next days plans and Route 66 already in mind.

I love to go places like Sedona, where you can't walk into a gas-station without seeing some kind of display of sandstone coasters with Kokopelli etched deep into the grain, or tee-shirts with lonely howling wolves. But my stomach can't handle it for too long before I feel like there's something wrong, as if something is missing. They say Sedona is one giant feel-good vortex, making it the center of the new age world but I always leave feeling a bit hollow.
I've only been to Sedona a few times and always to climb on its famous red rocks. It's a strange experience to be atop some 500 foot spire big enough for only a few people to stand and see a helicopter rise nearby and hover while its occupants take your picture. Meanwhile, the canyon floor crawls with Pink Jeeps and you feel, for the fleeting moments you're in Sedona's least trodden wilderness, that you're somehow famous.
A couple days ago I, along with my friend Spencer, made the short drive down Oak Creek Canyon from Flagstaff to the Anvil Boulders just outside Sedona. This stretch of 89 is always clogged with traffic and the pullouts are filled with rental cars, windows down, cameras out.
I had been to The Anvils once before and was impressed by the quality of the problems and the features on the stone. These boulders, however, are just across the creek from town and suffer, to a certain degree, the same fate as Stoney Point in Los Angeles, which by night becomes a favorite place to enjoy a forty of O.E. in one hand and practice tagging with the other.
The Anvils aren't as bad as Stoney, but the area was significantly more trashed now, just a year after I first visited. There were empty water bottles near every boulder and yards of old, discarded athletic tape drying into crusty fossils of the fingers they were once wrapped around. The Anvils already suffer from being so near town and 89. I find it disheartening to top out a problem and see a strip mall at the foot of some of America's most beautiful sandstone formations and to have a crude drawing of a cock a few inches from my face while I climb.

Since I last went to The Anvils someone has graced what I think to be the best and definitely most photogenic boulder with a plethora of drawings and words. We found a worn screw nearby the boulder, it's stripped head just poking out of the sand as if it had been left for the next artist to contribute to the mural. It's heartbreaking to know that, as show by the "Climb Hard" at the top of Crack Factory, the degradation of the area isn't from passers-by who don't know any better, but by climbers.
After we dropped our pads to walk around and decide what to climb, we ran into another group of climbers. I recognized a few of the teenagers from the gym in Flagstaff. As I said hello, I noticed an empty bottle of Ensure at my feet. I asked if it was theirs and if they were going to leave it there. They all seemed very threatened by Spence and I, like we were gun-carrying Arizona rednecks with a serious agenda for litterers. They eased up when they realized we too, were there to climb.  The group left and Spence and I warmed up on Lazor Cut and Free Willy, both of which are on some of the best rock at The Anvils.

The afternoon turned out to be quite a good one but was typical of Sedona. Private jets and helicopters few over at regular intervals and the drone of 89 became a static backdrop. We both climbed well; Spence got close on Alien Baby Left and did Sai Baba while I repeated Alien Baby right and did Big Sexy without too much trouble.
 The Anvils still have something to offer despite the trash and graffiti: really nice bouldering. This isn't the kind of place you go for a break from the city, it's the kind of place you go after work to drink beer and try to climb things. It's appropriate that The Anvils are the most popular place to boulder in Sedona; it is the geologic equivalent of a strip mall, a place you often go for its convenience, but isn't exactly the Taj Mahal.
The truly tragic thing about Sedona and The Anvils, and what always leaves me feeling hollow, is that both of them were once truly pristine, beautiful places. It's not that they're ugly now, but with the gaining popularity of places like Sedona and the bouldering world's feet growing larger while its shoes shrink, it's only a matter of time until your local crag is like Stoney Point or until it suffers a fate like that of the Mushroom Boulder in Hueco Tanks. It's an easy fate to avoid, and though I filled my pockets with trash and plan to take a trash bag when I go to The Anvils next, the scratched in graffiti won't fade for hundreds of years and there is nothing to be done about it.

Onwards Back

After a summer of saying I will, I actually am, actually have, started a blog. I graduated from Prescott College, a microscopic liberal arts school in northern Arizona, with a degree in creative writing and literature and dreams of travel across the country, world, and most importantly, the West. Accompanying me would be my girlfriend, Christina, who also happens to be a writer. We would first spend a month in Sweden and Norway, then the rest of the summer at my family's cabin in Colorado and finally a road trip along the East coast. The winter would be spent (of course) bumming around from bouldering mecca to bouldering mecca. This was my dream, had been my dream since I first went to Hueco in 2006. But that was before I started writing, before I had to divide time between all the various things important to me.

We made it through the summer in Colorado but the rest of our plans were abandoned and soon forgotten. But Colorado... We weren't exactly staying in some four-star hotel. My great-grandfather bought our cabin for 250 dollars in the late thirties. Then it was one room, now it has doubled in size but modern conveniences, with the exception of electricity, never followed.
Leadville also doesn't have the wealth of bouldering you'd expect from central Colorado and instead of spending hours in the car driving to and from Rocky Mountain National Park or Mt. Evans I entertained myself at the nearby Aircraft Carrier, and Kluttergarden. Both places are small but make up for their size in other ways. The Aircraft Carrier, a giant, ship-shaped boulder, is surrounded by raspberry bushes. There are even a few situated atop the boulder so you can mantle and then pluck berries from the bush while you catch your breath.  The Kluttergarden is notably beautiful in the fall while the aspens are changing and the fall temperature makes bouldering a pleasurable experience. Someone has also furnished the place with several benches made, presumably with beetle-killed pines.

Further up Homestake road, the same road used to access The Aircraft Carrier, is a talus slope and large cliff band where there are supposedly quite a few sport routes established. I couldn't find much information on this place, though the most obvious lines were chalked up and there were a few stashed pads. Every time I tried to go here to climb, it rained. Actually, it seemed to rain much more than I remembered in Colorado.

I'm used to the afternoon thunderstorms, but especially in the bouldering areas, it seemed to rain constantly. I wanted to use the summer to get back into bouldering shape after my final semester of school, during which I spent so much time writing I wore a dirty spot in the carpet with my feet. I was sure that somewhere in the high country there was a field of boulders still unbrushed and crowded only with marmots and pikas. I spent weeks wandering and found everything but what I wanted, including the twisted wreckage of an old plane crash rusting away in a scree field. I did spend some time up at some boulders near Hagerman tunnel, where I established a couple of problems.

10,000 feet is way up there and so is the cabin. Altitude is a funny thing, locking away the simplest words into some deep chasm of grey matter so it can take five minutes to think of the word "book" or something like that. Writing was impossible for me up there, partly from the thin air and partly from the distractions outside. When you live in a cabin with no running water, you and your bucket become the faucet. There is always wood to be chopped and a fire that needs another log. The cabin is a place of amateur carpentry, of anachronistic kitchen appliances, and of little time to do anything else.

We were ready to move on after the first snow in late August. It was impossible for me to climb as much as I wanted and impossible for either of us to write. We began to think of places to go next, and we both decided that they needed running water and central heat. Boulder and Los Angeles were at the top of our list until Christina mentioned Flagstaff. I've never spent too much time in Flag even though I spent six years living an hour and a half away. When we left Arizona just a few months before we joked that we might not be able to get our things out of storage because Jan Brewer would build a wall around the state and secede from the union. We did not want to go back. But we both thought about it and decided  to give the city a trial run.
It's been about three weeks since we got back to Arizona. We have an apartment close to downtown and the movie theater.  Since we got here  I feel like I've climbed more than I did all summer, and even with snow in the forecast, there can only be more.