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.