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.