Thursday, December 13, 2012

Bang On


Well now, it’s the holiday season and snow is in the forecast. Beta Bouldering’s grand opening was about two weeks ago and I’ve been in there quite a bit since. People seem pretty psyched to have a new climbing venue in town and the after-work sessions are growing. This upcoming storm, which seem to carry with it the long anticipated beginning of Flagstaff’s winter, will almost certainly close the forest roads and make desert pilgrimages a necessity. Though I’ve gotten closer on my project in Cherry Canyon, I’m excited to have an excuse to go to the desert. I have an ambitious tick-list this year and I’m psyched to get to work.
            I crossed another problem off my lifetime tick-list just before Thanksgiving. Christina and I had plans to spend the holiday in Del Mar, Ca. I could not resist a stop at Black Mountain to try Bang On.
I’ve been able to do all the moves on Bang On for over a year, and have been able to do the stand for four. Because I live in Arizona, and Black Mountain season overlaps with the season here, I don’t get out there as often as I’d like. So I included a couple pads and convinced Christina I’d be able to do it in just a few tries. I wasn’t sure if the lower gate was closed, so the two-hour detour was a gamble.
But the gate was open, and though we had to walk from the campground gate, the detour was worth it. Bang On, though it is only four moves long, has some of the most bizarre beta of anything I’ve climbed. Sure, there is the iconic cross, and that strange toothy crimp. I find the most important piece however, is how I grab the start hold. Crystals need to be between the right fingers, hands must be at the right angle. The flappers on my palm and little finger are a map to the first move. 
After about a dozen tries and a little bloodshed, I sent Bang On. I’m still psyched about it. I’d tried the problem the fist time I went to Black Mountain. It looked climbable, but felt impossible. Now that I’ve been focusing on climbing for just a few months I’ve cruised past my old performance plateau and into new territory. I don’t even really know how to behave. I flash people’s projects accidently as they watch between burns. I don’t mean to, it just happens. As a rule, I don’t let go. So for that, I apologize. But hey, I’m just as stunned as anyone.
Anyway, here is a video of Bang On

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Broken Symmetry, The Spider Pocket, and Uptown Vandal


Beta Bouldering will be opening December first and the mad rush to finish the place has been underway for quite some time. I’ve been over there disobeying the warnings on Bud cans and drilling, pounding, patching, painting almost every day. In the few short days I’ve not gone in to help out, or worked on the innumerable unfinished projects in my own house, I’ve been getting out to Cherry Canyon, Choss Roof, and Middle Elden.
I’ve been having a good fall, to say the least. I feel the strongest I ever have. My ambitious winter tick list doesn’t seem so out of reach now. Maybe it was the six months of trail work, or the six months of more limited climbing, or the better diet. Who knows, it’s probably a combination of it all.
In any case, I finished off Uptown Vandal first go of my second day on the problem. I figured out some good beta for the stand start that makes the problem flow much better. I also did John Val John, a problem whose name always seems to be mumbled, (I think no one is totally sure how to say it) on my second try. I also rapped off a tall wall just up canyon from Panama Red that looks like it could go after a good cleaning. The gate to Cherry Canyon will be closed soon, so any projects need to be finished before access is limited.
Choss Roof and Renegade have been in the news lately and while gates are not closed, it might be better to wait until spring to revisit. I managed, with some beta from Matt Gentile, to snag the first ascent of The Spider Pocket, a problem that has stood up to many strong Flagstaff climbers for several years. The problem climbs right out the center of the roof through a large move to a two-finger pocket and gaston. I’m really happy to have contributed this problem to a roof already filled with excellent problems. I also managed the third ascent of Choss Origins, which is arguably the best line on the roof. Matt put together this video of both problems.
Yesterday morning, I went up Middle Elden with Christina to work on Broken Symmetry. I’ve written about this problem before, and tried it many, many times. It was a lump in my mind, clouding thought, keeping me awake. I started working Broken Symmetry this season about a week ago and came so close on that first session that it’s all I’ve climbed on since.  On Wednesday I went back up the canyon with Matt Gentile and Cory Hathaway, who was on his way through town. Matt figured out how to reach the bad right hand crimp, the one that has crumbled several times, (I even broke a little off on the first day of work) but was still trying to figure out the match. I struggled at the same place, but managed to match that crimp once with a cool cross-under move. I’m not really sure why, but I fell after I matched that hold. Maybe my core just gave out, or I surprised myself, in any case, I couldn’t get back up there again. After two days off to let my skin callous up, Christina and I walked from our house to Broken Symmetry. The wounds on my left forearm opened up after one try so I taped my shirt snuggly to my arm. Then, second try of the day; I floated the thing using the same cross-under I’d used on Wednesday. After probably five or six sessions over a year, Broken Symmetry is a boulder problem once again. Like with The Spider Pocket, I’m really proud to open this thing up again. It’s a great problem, and unlike anything I’ve ever climbed before.
I’ll leave you with a video of the send. Sorry the top out is cut off, you can see it in the shadow.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Renegade and Choss


It’s the time of year that I start to plan trip out of state. Trips to Texas and California, desert places intolerably hot most of the year. For the next couple months though, I think I’m staying home.
I just bought a house, and though the first round of painting, flooring and other domestic-type activities have come near an end, I want to enjoy the fruits of our labor. And of course spend time with Christina.
I’ve never lived someplace like Flagstaff before. There is so much I haven’t climbed here, so many areas I’ve yet to visit, that I want to get out on the forest roads, see the roofs find the bulges, and of course climb them. Gates and locks—so often the enemies of climbers, will close off Cherry Canyon and Woody Mountain in about two months.
For these next two months I will be climbing at only these areas and on Elden. Projects are everywhere, there are numerous new things to be climbed and my old reasoning to leave doesn’t work anymore. The desert can wait.
Matt on a project on Renegade Roof
Yesterday I went out to Renegade Roof and Choss Roof with Matt Gentile. In the last year or so, a resurgence of development has swept across Northern Arizona, much of it spearheaded by Matt. He’s visited the areas already found and written off and climbed many new problems. Choss Roof alone will probably host around 40 problems from V5 to V14 in link-ups and variations, many of which will be among the best in the state.
Renegade Roof
Renegade Roof, which was abandoned after one line was climbed because of a hugely bad landing, is much like the famous Mars Roof, only bigger and with a far more impressive backdrop. There are only three or four finished problems on the roof, but it’s covered with two-finger pockets, pinches and jugs. There will be another half-dozen problems by the time the roof is climbed out.
At Renegade I worked on the original line, which shares its name with the roof. The problem climbs through a series of pinches and pockets with good toe-cams for feet. Matt worked on a project that climbs out the center of the roof to a tricky and treacherous lip encounter.

Getting closer to the lip


Choss Roof
We walked over to Choss Roof and I tried the center line, Choss Origins, The Spider Pocket project and one of the newer problems in the area called Garden Heist.  It was my third time to the roof, and I’ve sill never topped anything out besides the warm-ups. Soon though, with work and endurance I will start ticking them off the list.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Cherry Canyon


Obviously fall has arrived and for a while at least, I have joined the ranks of the unemployed.  This is good though, at least for now. I have time to work on this house, to write, to climb. Working at CREC was a great experience, but the schedule of eight days on-six days off, didn’t work for me. I couldn’t even come close to balancing all those top-heavy aspects of life. Who ever does?
            Fall--apples, carved pumpkins, changing leaves. It’s time to get out last years leftover candy corn and put it in a bowl in the kitchen, time to start drinking tea instead of ice water, and time to boulder as much as possible while the conditions are good and the forest roads are open.
            Two Sundays in a row I’ve gone to Cherry canyon with Matt, Brian, and Spence. No one outside of Flagstaff seems to know the brilliance of this place. Even though Cherry Canyon houses what is arguably some of the best limestone bouldering in the country, I’ve never seen another group of people there. Right now it seems most are drawn to the various super-sized roofs to the west and Cherry has fallen to the wayside. Even though I have lived in Flagstaff for a year now, I still haven’t figured out how to climb those roofs. I’m getting better, but I feel at home at places like The Glorias, Middle Elden, West Elden, and of course on the towering bulges of Cherry.
            Since the first time I went to Cherry last spring and set eyes on The Bulge Wall, I have wanted to try Uptown Vandal. This is a boulder problem that could only happen here. A couple easy roof moves lead to a sloping pocket, heelhook, and a strenuous move to a flat, half-pad undercling. A bump off a bad crimp leads to a better one and the beginning of a highball V7.
            I’ve tried Uptown Vandal maybe a dozen times now. Yesterday was the first time I’d tried it early in the day and on my first solid effort from the bottom I got into the crux of the stand start. I surprised myself. I gave one more try, but the first try had drained most of my strength and I got to the same place. Still, I will climb Uptown Vandal the next time I try it. Until then it’s clouding my thoughts, as boulders often do.

Monday, May 7, 2012

The Mandala


It’s been a while and since I last wrote, and much has happened. Three weeks ago I packed up my Subaru and sped northwest through the infinite and wonderful desert to Bishop, CA. My trip to The Buttermilks would be a short one—only three climbing days—but what it lacked in time was made up with incredible intention. Never do I go someplace to climb with one problem in mind. Never, until recently have I driven eight hours to essentially climb one thing. All these big destinations are too overwhelming, daunting in the sheer number of brilliant problems to try. It’s easy to forget the project, leave it neglected in the dust of a bunch of fun V7’s.
This trip had been seeded the last time I was in Bishop, over the winter and finally bloomed in spring. The Mandala, whose crux section I had figured out that last trip, was looming larger and larger, its rounded prow like a ships bow in the fog.
            The Mandala, I think, is one of the most famous boulders in the world and most definitely the U.S. Dreamtime, Midnight Lightning, Esperenza, The Mandala, problems that everyone knows, that over the years from their desperate inceptions have, in some way defined what it is to climb a good, hard boulder problem, are a true accomplishment to finish. I remember watching young Chris Sharma climbing The Mandala in Dosage 1 and famously joking about its grade. Soon after I went to The Buttermilks for the first time and saw that same boulder shining in the light of a full moon. I thought it looked impossible, or at least like something I’d never be able to climb. I’ve tried The Mandala half-heartedly almost every time I’ve been near it, but never been able to make anything work. It’s sharp, sharp enough that after five or six tries my fingers would be too bruised to climb anymore, and it’s massively dependant on weather conditions. I never got very far and usually spent the rest of my time climbing easier things and dreaming of the day that everything would align for those few seconds to let me stand atop that one boulder. God, bouldering is silly.
            Considering the fame of The Mandala, the rock is really not the best in Bishop. Something like A Maze of Death or Evilution have far more brilliant patina. This year alone The Mandala has broken twice. Once right before my winter trip and once right before my spring trip. The second break was more significant; a fingerjug large enough to match and rest on evolved to nothing more than another crimp. I heard of this break two days before I left and was sure that I’d leave defeated once again. All winter I’d been saying, “The Mandala is not going anywhere,” but its permanence seemed suddenly less than geologic.
            My first day in Bishop I only looked at The Mandala.  The broken hold didn’t look as bad as I’d heard—I was expecting it to be almost entirely gone. I wanted to give the problem a try, but instead wandered the Buttermilks, climbed easier things in hopes of some callous growth for those sharp holds. After a day off I went straight to The Mandala after my warm up, where I met a guy named Jon who asked to film me. On my first burn I climbed through my old highpoint to a new one three moves below the final jug and mantle. It felt like I could climb the entirety of the boulder on any go. However, as it happens, I had to figure out how to do the top section with the smaller, broken hold and after six or seven tries I was tired, the wind picked up to a gale and I couldn’t do the first move any more.
            Jon, living alone in his truck, invited me over to drink wine. By nine my cheeks were warm, we’d each had a whole bottle and a hilariously philosophic conversation about how living a nomadic lifestyle encourages the same deep-rooted comfort as staring at a campfire.
            The next night Jon made me a delicious dinner of pork tenderloin and assorted vegetables. “ You need sending fuel,” he kept saying. We were just two lonely climbers living in dirt and passing time with each other’s fine company.
            That night, just as I was settling into my sleeping bag, it began to snow. I imagined The Mandala, not far away, slowly vanishing beneath a thin layer of ice. I wondered if I’d be able to climb the next day, the last day of the trip, or if I’d have to leave Bishop again with only the satisfaction of progress and worries of erosion.
            It only dusted that night and maybe half an inch of snow clung to the sage and pea gravel in the morning. By ten the snow was gone and the stone dry. I warmed up and went over to The Mandala, which I cleaned tediously and took care to chalk every hold.
            The Mandala is of the breed of problems that draw spectators. People walking by stop and watch for a few minutes. It’s disconcerting though, having a crowd of unknown onlookers, pure judgment in their eyes, see you struggle on the first move. On this day though, it was only Jon and I, a clear sky, and ice-cold rock.
            I sent The Mandala first try that morning and though standing atop that boulder was as fantastic as Beethoven’s 9th, and the drive home filled with desert mountains capped with snow like I’d never seen before, my return seems imminent.  There are too many blocks of stone to climb and too many to find.
            As I drove home to Flagstaff that afternoon I thought about what to project next, what odd wall would consume me and leave my fingers sore after every session. Uptown Vandal, a powerful bulge in Cherry Canyon came to mind, so did Black Mountain’s classic oddity, Bang-On. None came close to The Mandala, though. Their draw is strong but not magnetic. When I do find it, that coveted next project that is always just over the next hill, on the other side of the boulder, or hiding deep in the blocks of a jumbled talus field, I’ll have something new to work towards whose achievement will feel just like watching another sunrise. 

Here is Jon's Video:
http://www.dpmclimbing.com/climbing-videos/watch/luminance-ground-updowngrade-post-breakage-ascent-mandala

Monday, April 2, 2012

Ice-9


Well, I had been planning on driving to Bishop yesterday to get my hard boulder on, but instead Christina and I made an offer on a house here in Flagstaff. All that planning, all that dreaming of the sharp crimps I love, oh well. It’s not like the rocks are going anywhere. I left all my things packed just in case the opportunity arises to race across the sand and dust. My fingers are crossed.
            Buying a house, like a long-planned trip to a fantastic climbing area, is enormously exciting. Christina and I stay up late deciding what to do with each room and what color to paint the trim. The house has four bedrooms, so there’s plenty of space for the traveling whatever, and it’s about as far away from Middle Elden as the usual parking area.
            Elden, as in the entire mountain, might not be the finest rock in Flagstaff, but I like it. It is still a fucking mountain strewn with boulders, even though 99 percent is vicious choss. There’s always something else to clean and climb and because I am from Southern California, land of even worse rock, I’m thrilled to hike all over that mountain.
            Instead of driving to Bishop yesterday, I went bouldering here. I started out at Buffalo Park, a nice little cluster of basalt blocks like three minutes from downtown. I warmed up and then quickly climbed The Madsen Problem, which is the area’s classic testpiece. As I was trying The Madsen Problem, Danny Mauz called. He wanted to climb a project at Middle Elden. I told him I’d meet him in a while.
            I had actually looked at the problem Danny had cleaned up the first time I went to Elden and put it on my list of things to clean up. It climbs a tall, slightly overhanging line of thin edges from a sit start. Danny did it from a stand start and I was able to do the sit. While it’s not quite on par with some of the other classics up the canyon, I thought it was close.
            We wondered what to climb next. I suggested Broken Symmetry, since it’s forming a shadow in my mind. Danny told me about an undone problem on the way out called Ice-9. I had heard of it before and after Danny described it, we both decided to go try it.
            Ice-9 climbs a sloping rail to a hard deadpoint to a sloping but good crimp, which is followed by another heartbreakingly accurate deadpoint. This line, and I’m sure of this, would be sought after in any climbing area.
We worked out all the moves, which find themselves in a comfortable medium between power and technique. After a couple more tries I was able to climb Ice-9.
            So, instead of driving really far to climb good boulders, I crossed town and checked of one Flag classic, put up another, and got excited about that house on Bern Street.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Four Hours From Flag


Before it’s too hot, before I start working, before the summer, I’m making one more trip to Bishop. I leave on Sunday but my mind runs electric before I fall asleep, rehearsing beta, searching the vast database of other problems to try. It’s convenient that the guidebook is so thick.
Yesterday I went out to Priest Draw with Matt and today we go to The Glorias to try an undone sit start to a treacherous highball put up by Danny Mauz a few years ago. Soon the forest road will be opened and a whole new galaxy of bouldering I’ve never seen will be available to try.
The longer I live here in Flag, the more local areas I visit, the happier I am that I moved here and didn’t go with one of the other, pricier alternatives. When I lived in California the nearest climbing areas were a thirty-minute drive and over the summer I regularly day-tripped the four hours to Black Mountain or The Tramway. In the thirty-minute radius around Flagstaff there are dozens of areas on limestone, sandstone, basalt and dacite. I can climb on thirty-foot roofs one day and 100-foot hand-cracks the next. Las Vegas and Moe’s Valley are both right at the four-hour mark.
There isn’t any true kind of guide here. There are no glossy pages to sweat over, and while the Internet is a good resource, it isn’t all-inclusive. I used to be annoyed by this. It’s a long drive up here from Prescott and without someone to show you around, Flagstaff is a daunting place. Now that I live here, now that I’ve been introduced to just a fraction of the climbing I don’t feel the same.
Flag is famous for its secretive locals and I can’t blame them. The climbing is good; maybe not as good as Hueco or Bishop or the various crags and boulder fields of Yosemite or Colorado, but occasionally it gets quite close. There are no crowds here in the Fall, and Spring when conditions are best. Climbing here is an experience now rare in the West. It’s possible to walk up on breathtaking lines without ever having seen a picture in a magazine or a video on YouTube. This, I think, is what should be preserved.
Last week at The Glorias I decided to try a problem called Rotator Cuff. It’s notoriously strange and while it’s not all that hard it took me longer to figure out than any other problem I’ve climbed there. I had a tremendous amount of fun, though. Sometimes I think we forget that a big part of the fun in climbing is figuring out how to do something. Video beta is surely helping climbers flash harder and harder climbs while the onsight is starting to feel neglected. Flagstaff does its part with its obscure boulders and walls to keep the tradition alive. I like that.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

What's Underneath


The San Francisco Peaks smile down on all of Northern Arizona, a reminder of the bubbling, molten stone underneath. I could see these mountains from the picture window in my old house just seventy miles away in Prescott. After big snow storms The Peaks seemed florescent, like something out of a dream. It’s no wonder they’re so sacred among the various cultures that came long before the railroad. 
            I spent quite a bit of time in the last two years sitting at the kitchen table with my back to that picture window, my fingers sweating onto the keys of my computer as I wrote countless stories and essays now strewn across my hard drive like laundry on a teenagers bedroom floor. I always wrote stories about people in far-away places. Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Bishop, El Paso, Colorado, Utah—all the states surrounding the one in which I lived. I wanted real mountains, and I thought I wanted a real city, one with traffic and freeways, anonymity in numbers. I wrote so much I wore a small dirty patch into the beige carpet under the table with my toes. I was proud of it, still am. My mind was my world and looking out the window at the distant mountains or at the Ponderosa in our yard was the closest thing I got to going outside.
            I was too busy to go climbing with any kind of frequency and sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d wonder if I would ever get to start again. I always marveled at the people who breathed climbing and day-tripped to Joshua Tree and then somehow, almost overnight, lost interest and tossed their rock shoes into the back of the closet. I worried this was happening to me, and I lost sleep over it. Climbing is something I need. It’s not just the movement of body over stone, it’s not the long drives through the desert with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ry Cooder, and Bill Frisell blowing and plucking their way though the speakers and into my ears. It’s all of it. The climbing movies, the constant trouble of raw or peeling skin on my fingertips, the strange shape my toes have taken, the fractured vertebra and all the other injuries, I love it all, and it has shaped who I’ve become as much as anything else.
            Last May, Christina and I packed away all our possessions into a storage unit. We had plans to travel for a few months. All that was left of us in our home of two years were the various stains and traffic patterns worn into the carpet and a man was coming to erase those as well. I studied the dark spot on the carpet under the picture window one last time. It was all that was left in the house of months of effort on one project. I had obsessed, so much that I wasn’t myself anymore. I hardly climbed, and I had been a bad partner, a bad friend. When I went to the bar people were surprised to see me still in Prescott. “I thought you graduated,” I sometimes heard. All I did was write, read, and watch bad movies to calm my mind. I felt like something had started to trim the fat of my personality, but I liked all that fat, it was still part of me and I never agreed to give it up.
            I watched the carpet cleaner as he shampooed under that picture window framing the San Francisco Peaks. He dragged his heavy machine over the spot once, twice, slowly the third time and it was gone. All those months of over-caffeinated work, the labyrinth in which I’d become so lost was wiped clean with mechanical indifference. 
            I don’t have a direct view of the Peaks anymore but whenever I leave my apartment I see them bright with snow and bigger than I remember.  They’re much closer to me now and those old mountains always surprise me as if I forget they’re there, smiling back, reminding.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Test Driving


Going to test-drive a car, I realized over the weekend, is a lot like going to an animal shelter with only a vague desire to leave with a new pet. Christina and I left home at 11 AM to look at new Subarus and go to the grocery store but didn’t leave the dealership until five. We left behind my old Tacoma, my first car and mobile bedroom of seven years.
            I traded in the OG Tacoma for the other car most reliably found at the crag trailhead. And damn, all of you still driving trucks really ought to thing about the change. There were things about my truck that I loved, but when I really think about it, I just liked having a bed in the back. The bed though, it wasn’t very comfortable and I couldn’t sit up without my head being cocked drastically to the side. Sounds trivial, but as the weeks back there piled on all I wanted to do was sit up straight. Packing two people in the back of the truck made things even worse.
            I was just slightly too tall to sleep parallel in the truck. My feet pushed against the back window and even on warm nights turned to blocks of ice by morning. And added condensation of another’s breath, even with windows open, turned the bed to a swamp.
            These are tiny problems. There is a reason why some absurd percentage of rock climbers own Toyotas, but with gas at nearly four dollars nationally, I’m glad to trade 19 mpg for nearly 30.  And here’s my plan as far as cragside luxury:
An example of a teardrop trailer
            I’ve been scouring Craigslist for months to find a good trailer and I’m pretty sure I’ve found the most ideal. Since the Big Bang of travel trailers, insect-sized teardrops have been towed behind small cars and crouched in the forests and deserts of America without attracting great attention. These trailers, at a weight of around 800 pounds, don’t affect gas mileage by all that much and can be as posh or minimal as you want. Kitchen, cabinetry, heat, some of these things even come with flip-down TVs. And generally running at prices from 2000 to 4000 dollars, these trailers are pretty cheap as far as the market goes.
            Now, If you were actually living in one of these trailers, you might hate your life by month two. The kitchen is located outside where those unbelievable desert winds can steal so much heat it takes an hour to boil water. And these trailers lack many of the things you come to depend on in daily life, like tables and chairs or a place unexposed to the elements to stand up. These trailers though, and I’m convinced of this even though I’ve never even been in one, are perfect for someone who goes on several shorter climbing trips every year.
            So that’s my plan. Find a good, inexpensive teardrop trailer and keep it ready to go at a moments notice so when the impulse strikes, all I have to do is hook it up and drive off into the desert or mountains and recline in comfort. 

Monday, March 19, 2012

Tree Lobster In Middle Elden


Last week, before this sudden winter storm rolled through Flagstaff and left almost two feet of snow behind, I went up to Middle Elden with Spencer Church to see how my finger was doing and possibly try Broken Symmetry. The canyon was warm, the sun strong and as I warmed up my desire to give the old Proj a try was quickly dashed. My finger was still not totally better, it was too hot, blah, blah, blah. Boulderers are perhaps the best of all athletes at making excuses.
            Spence’s wrist has been in a cast since the first day of 2012 when he peeled off a wet hold on a problem in Priest Draw. Rocks: don’t even try to climb them if there’s water seeping down the face, bad things tend to happen. So, with that days dream as no more, I decided we would trudge up-canyon to a problem I’d found in my wanderings about three weeks ago. Spence, happy to be away from the couch and cable, agreed to walk up there and take pictures.
Gaston
            This problem is about 15 minutes past Entering Betsy way up on the west side of the canyon. It climbs a tall, orange face on some of the best rock I’ve seen anywhere on Elden. Days ago I walked up there with a few tools and cleared the landing. I’ve been thinking of climbing it since.
The First Move
High Step
            After pushing our way through the Gambel Oak and Mountain Mahogany Spence set up on a boulder over-looking the problem, the canyon, and all of Flagstaff. He opened a beer and got out his camera and I opened up my crashpad and put on my shoes.  The first move, a long throw to a good pinch, is the hardest move on the problem, so after I’d tried it a couple of times I started working the problem from the good pinch. After trying a few different variations, I found a double gaston and balanced high-step to work the best. After maybe ten or twelve more tries on the hard first move I sent the problem in it’s entirety on what I’d just told Spence would be my last try.
            The only other people we saw in the canyon that day were almost certainly looking for Bigfoot. We heard one of them say, “this is great Squatch country,” and they were howling like animals, which is not really peculiar behavior for Middle Elden at all. But it’s a small world, I guess, and everyone wants to find Bigfoot.
 With Cryptozoology in mind, I named the problem I climbed that day Tree Lobster, after this crazy hand-sized insect thought to be extinct for something like 80 years that was recently found on a remote island off the coast of Australia that looks like an illustration from a Hardy Boys book. After going to The Glorias and climbing Cross-Eyed Nurse, Flyswatter, and Tombstone, I think Tree Lobster is somewhere in the V8 range, but who knows. Once all this snow melts I’m going to take Matt and Danny up there to see what they think.
            The snow is falling again, and now with that quiet urgency of a true storm. I think I might go blow up the tube, or at least make something hot to drink.
Add caption

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Bigfoot?

Last Sunday, while pulling onto the start hold on Mars Roof at Priest Draw, I felt something go wrong in one of my fingers. When I woke up the next morning and the dull ache was worse, I made a doctors appointment and expected bad news. But the appointment went better than expected, I’d only sprained a joint, and a week later I was already halfway through the recovery time.
I’ve had some time to devote to more serious, intellectually demanding activity, namely Bigfoot sightings in Arizona. Zeke Smith is the kind of guy who will always have a moustache, wears wacky polyester shirts, regularly smokes a pipe and goes to cryptozoology museums at every opportunity. It was Zeke who told me about a town hall meeting to be held in Payson, AZ by some Animal Planet TV show I’ve only watched about ten minutes of.  The people whom, without an ounce of skepticism, believe in Bigfoot, the Mogollon Monster, Sasquatch, or any other variation on that theme, tend to be exceptionally bizarre. And throwing in the possibility of appearing on a popular television show really does something to people. Couples bring infants and ask for pictures; the true fanatics wear Bigfoot jewelry or roll their sleeves up to show off their tats. Bigfoot believers are as interesting as the creature itself.
To make things clear, I am not one of these people and neither is Zeke. I am a Bigfoot agnostic, and until I have some kind of experience that makes me lean either way, I’m firmly planted in the middle. But the thing about Bigfoot, and all such creatures for that matter, is that I find them incredibly interesting. In a world almost completely explored, Bigfoot is the last hoorah of the unknown. In some ways finding Bigfoot is the same as falling into fame and fortune; the American Dream. So who to expect in a dimly lit bar whose every wooden surface is etched with bland biblical names, whose stage, for once in its long life of county music and bad covers of Hotel California, will hold some real live b-list television celebrities, and a free opportunity to finally find out if being on TV makes you look fat.
These people name their sons Remington and take them hunting before they can walk, they wear non-ironic moustaches and real tree camo and blaze orange hats and underwear. Corona, in this demographic, is exotic and savored, and Bud Light flows steady like the meandering Amazon. This is the America that likes Rick Santorum’s family values and is stubbornly still returning to the non-issue of Obama’s birth certificate. And, when everyone who has had a Class A Encounter—seen Bigfoot—raise their hands, it’s clear that a lot of Arizonians not only believe, but have also rubbed shoulders with that famously elusive biped.
Zeke and I, we order beers and find a place to stand where we can see the stage. The place is packed. People are huddled up outside the windows to watch, to get a glimpse of someone vaguely famous. We talk about Bigfoot, the great, sparsely populated swathes of land in the West, and these giant herds of forest buffalo in Canada thought to be extinct until recently. If an entire herd of enormous animals could evade the hand of science, then surely an intelligent ape can as well. But why, we began asking ourselves, are the people who see Bigfoot and come forward generally the uneducated or intoxicated? In that room of Carhart clothing and slimy polyester sports team jackets this became a real question. Why is it that with all the field scientists out there in the most remote parts of the wilderness surveying wildflowers or grasses, no one sees the same mystery animal as the people in that room? Perhaps it takes ignorance to have the courage to come forward; there’s no way a true scientist, whether they’d seen something or not, would tell anyone without undisputable evidence. The scientific method and peer review is clearly gumming up the process here.
The stars come out, take center stage, and the testimonials start. This was everything I’d dreamed it would be. The same people whose entries on BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization) I’d read that morning were there, and they spoke more eloquently than they wrote. There really was a little boy named Remington who saw Bigfoot with his Dad and whose story was perhaps the cutest thing I heard all night and will most definitely make for some great television. Some of these people didn’t follow the same archetype of Bigfoot Believers. There was a chiropractor that fondly admired Bigfoot’s posture as he crossed his headlights. This small handful of sightings that came from people whose professions demanded college degrees made me wonder. Maybe its true, and many made the same point that night, maybe many of us have seen Bigfoot as just another bushy sapling on the side of the road or a trick of the eye on a moonlit night. Maybe we all need to be as open as Fox Mulder of The X-Files and let the unproven into our minds.
There was one testimonial that really rung loudly though, and really just because of its absurdity. A woman stood, and I could tell immediately that this would be a good one. She was the kind of Sedona, new age type that smiles at everything and wears too much dangly silver jewelry. She was from the Verde Valley, and was “a fairy,” this was her profession and I’m pretty sure it didn’t require more than an online degree. She claimed to go down to the river and see fairies every night, all flying and buzzing around the cattails and reeds. This was where she saw what she figured everyone else thought was Bigfoot. In a part in the reeds she saw two great, glowing eyes, and in the moonlight realized the answer to all of life’s persistent Bigfoot related questions. The creature, she claimed, was a Hobgoblin, and because of this no one would ever capture a photo or video or find a bone. You can’t capture evidence of a spirit.
The crowd of Bigfoot Believers scoffed at the fairy woman in a great collective judgment. “Fairies, yeah right,” some grumbled. Her smile unwavering, she went to her seat, got her coat and sort of glided out of the room. Zeke and I loved this. Never had I seen a group of people so unqualified to judge someone’s paranormal beliefs do so in such incredible time.
The night dragged on and many more got on stage and mumbled about their mostly bogus encounters. It was easy to pick the fabricated ones out; incongruent details gave the poor storytellers away and a few seemed almost rehearsed. But there were a special few whose details were consistent and sources seemed credible. So on the way home, driving though the windy dark, Zeke and I gazed out the windows and looked between the trees for whatever we wanted to see. Unfortunately it wasn’t there. 

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Google Nowhere


I dream of a place where the border between earth and sky is sharp and always overexposed, where cottonwoods exhale soft white fluff and their leaves flutter in the persistent sandy winds like hands clapping. This place, whether it be a canyon whose rock walls have toppled in like the forgotten stacks in some goliath library of geologic time, or just the end of a dusty road to an infinite nowhere but always limited nothing, is what I imagine when I start to feel claustrophobic.
            The mountains, with their savagely formed peaks all torn and pushed from below, the galaxy of trees and summer flowers whose names I’ll never know, are still home. Here at the base of the San Francisco Peaks all those cottonwoods and that library of stone are just over the horizon. I can drive east to the moon and north to that often visited but seldom entered canyon of the Colorado River. All those places I’ve imagined, all the sandstone labyrinths and water polished granite blocks shining white as light, they’re out there somewhere and Philip Glass wrote the score.
            It takes a certain kind of person to devote so many lonely hours to the dull buzz of washboard. They’re out there though, crawling across the wintery desert in search of the best weather and hard rock. But as gas approaches the pinnacle of five dollars a gallon driving aimlessly, flipping coins at intersections, (heads left, tails right) makes less and less sense. So I’ve taken to that thing considerably vast and headache inducing, the Internet.
            Like I am to the desert Southwest, I’m addicted to the Internet. It's a portal of glass and light, keys and chips, electricity and people, to those places where the road ends and the trail starts. Someone’s always been wherever the curser lands and taken photos to prove it. Those blurry satellite images are like heroin and like a drug, always seem to disappoint. After hours in the car whatever neglected scattering of boulders I finally pull up to is head high, the worst rock in the West, or balanced precariously in the angle of repose. But I don’t stop, I can’t stop, the desire to discover must be fed and kept alive because sometimes there are those rare moments where bags can be packed and a trip can be taken with no expectations. 
 I need wilderness and I need, at least sometimes to feel like a part of it. That’s one reason why I like to climb, and because it’s there, crouching in a cave or at the bottom of a murky pool, the wild that has shaped us all. I can’t find it, don’t know what it looks like or feels like, but looking seems like the right thing to do. After every trip, every new place, and every new climb, that wild feels closer but I know I’ll never find it, which is good. So I pack extra water and snacks and head to the moon.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Entering Betsy

A few weeks ago, just before going down to Hueco Tanks, I went back up Middle Elden with Danny Mauz and Matt Laessig to climb on some sharp crimps, to try Entering Betsy, its stand start The Hole Show, and the canyon’s project, Broken Symmetry.
            It’d been just long enough since I’d been in climbing at The Buttermilks that all the callous’ on my fingertips was peeling off in great sheets thick as a couple pieces of paper. We warmed up at the mouth of the canyon and with my fingers oozing sweat, walked up to The Hole Show.
The Hole Show, and its dynamic low start, Entering Betsy are easily the finest established problems in the canyon, and among the best of their style in Flagstaff.  Middle Elden is, despite constant bouldering traffic over the years, a relatively obscure, seldom visited area. The rock is not as consistent as it is over at the more popular Glorias, but when it’s good, as in The Hole Show’s case, it can make for some very good climbing.
The problem starts is an anomaly of a hold for Elden, a large, perfectly smooth Hueco, (most holds are jagged and sharp) and moves left to a small crimp. Both Danny and Matt weren’t sure what happened next, but it was definitely hard.  Danny, a few weeks before, had scoped out the holds on the top of the boulder and found a small, sloping crimp on the lip he’d missed before. I fooled around with a bad sloper on the face and some variations in footwork, and then realized that I could just swing up to the crimp on the lip with a high heel hook in the starting hueco. I climbed The Hole Show a couple tries later and while my fingers were starting to throb, decided to try Entering Betsy next.
This problem starts on small sidepulls below and to the right of The Hole Show. While it only adds one strange all-points-off move to the stand start, I think it improves and adds some difficulty. It isn’t so much of a pull and jump, as most dynos are, but just a jump. It’s all in the ankles and man, that move feels cool to do. It seems impossible and bizarre until your hand is in the hueco and your feet are swinging out.
Daylight was starting to ebb and the already rust-colored rock was turning orange. I put my climbing shoes back on, tried the dyno, fell, tried again and surprised myself by doing the move. I wasn’t really prepared, at least mentally, to climb the rest of the problem and left my heel too low in the hueco and fell back to the pads. I rested a couple minutes, put my heel in the right place and did Entering Betsy in its entirety. I’d been thinking of this problem since Matt first showed it to me about a month before. Standing on top, looking out over east Flagstaff swallowed by dusk I felt like I was starting to get stronger.
Since then, Matt has been able to do The Hole Show and both Danny and a guy I know as Noah-who-broke-Broken-Symmetry have climbed Entering Betsy.
 Now I’m working on Broken Symmetry, which never saw a second accent before the break and none since.  It reminds me in many ways of a problem California called Bang On. They share a very similar crux move, but I think Broken Symmetry is harder, especially after Noah broke it. I’m sure that after a few weeks of work muscle memory will start to pick up and with a bit of luck, I’ll cross that one off my list as well.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Going West

             When I think of westerns a few things come to mind. Vast landscapes dotted with dwarfed trees or surreal cactuses, dusty streets lonely of people but not tumbleweeds, Buffalo, a sky so blue and wide there seems to be almost nothing else, Indians, and of course, the hero, whose energy conserving laziness, whose smooth slouch, has permeated almost every pore of globalized society.  But there is also a dream to the version of West we’ve all learned about while watching Clint Eastwood’s cigar roam from one corner of his mouth to the other. A dream of possibility, of unlimited potential for success, and of untouched wilderness whose fruits could be anything.
Hueco Tanks’ West Mountain can be kind of a hike, depending on what boulder problems you want to climb on. After climbing Diaphanous Sea my fingers were raw and bruised; I needed to rest them for at least a couple of days. So when Matt, Cory and Ryan all decided to pack light and climb The Round Room, 1969, Best of the West, Crash Dummy, and Star Power in a day, I left my extra shoes and pad behind and followed. All I really wanted to do was climb The Round Room, whose easy traverse circles a room with hueco’d walls and a damp dirt floor that always smells of water. The Round Room is a quintessential Hueco Tanks feature, and even though I’ve been climbing there for six years, it took until now to make it all the way out to the remote end of West Mountain.
We dropped our pads under a big oak at the beginning of a stone ramp  and scrambled up with chalk and water. Going to The Round Room can feel like time travel, if you want it to. That little compartment in the earth with nothing but a small patch of sky for ceiling seems unchanged. It could be 1880, and the great mythic westerner could be lazily riding by. The only time in a place like The Round Room is in the hands of your watch and in the number of times you’ve traversed its entirety.
The Round Room
After a few laps and a posed picture of all of us clinging to the wall and smiling awkwardly, we slid back down the ramp to our pads in the shade and ate candy bars and trail mix. The sun shined with the precision of a flashlight through the bare branches and I could feel its warmth on my skin.
“Here are some pottery shards,” Cory said as he picked up a small, broken piece of clay. He turned it over and over in his chalky fingers. I could see its jagged broken edges, the gentle curve of its former shape back when it was something more than an ancient piece of discarded waste slowly chipping away from all our footsteps and becoming nothing but dirt. “These things are everywhere,” he said and put it back down where it came from.
In Matt Wilder’s guidebook to Hueco Tanks there’s a picture of himself hanging open-handed on some cool looking slopers. 1969 gets just two stars but it’s one of those problems that people always talk about. “We’re going there tomorrow, they say at the fire,” as if the approach is like walking to the corner for a cup of coffee. Anyone who knows any better rolls their eyes and asks who their guide is.
It’s impossible to actually walk to 1969. The approach is one that involves technical face climbing, even some chimneying. Going to 1969 isn’t like walking downtown, it’s like discovering an entirely different world hidden in a dangerous maze, it’s like that scene in The Last Crusade, where Indiana has to figure out a bunch of booby traps to get to the Holy Grail as an army of cold eyed Nazis hold his friends at gunpoint.
1969 is not the Holy Grail, It’s a lowball on good rock way the fuck back in the heart of West. Unless you’re spending a great deal of time in Hueco and have run out of other things to climb, don’t haul your crash pads back there.  
We decided to leave our pads with Ryan, whose climbing skills weren’t high enough for the you-fall-you-die approach, and scrambled up the gully leading, eventually to that problem so romantically pictured in the guide. Past a vertical face and through a narrow gap between walls the gully opened up. Walls of bulging stone overhung a few tall, jagged boulders like suddenly frozen waves. Two or three small oaks, their branches just starting to bud green, clung to life, thrived. The path led us under giant roofs and boulders, their bellies stained that flaming white, to red to deep, rotten wood brown by the often present but rarely seen flow of water. Its swirling fingerprint is everywhere in the cosmic shapes the rock in Hueco has taken after so many centuries of persistent effort. Water has drawn so much to Hueco, it’s even responsible for all those climbers living in tents and examining their fingertips too closely on their rest days.
After half an hour of crawling under rocks big as train cars, we find 1969. My fingers are still sore from climbing the day before, and the sloping pockets of the boulder problem feel threatening.  We talk about coming back on our last day, but West Mountain isn’t the kind of place you go to get a lot of climbing in, it’s a place you go to walk around, peek into dark holes and narrow gullies because West continues to give. Every corner has probably been explored. Someone has stuck their head in every dark hole and let their eyes adjust, but finding lines, cleaning and climbing them takes a kind of creativity and motivation many don’t have. Still, problems like the 130 foot long NRA, only climbed last year, are still lurking deep in the mountain.
Cory on Best of the West
Once we’d retrieved our pads and Ryan, we staggered and sweated our way up to The Best of West, a problem that ironically doesn’t ever really top out. Still, this was the highest up West Mountain I’d ever been. We went over to look at The Feather, a problem I’d wanted to try since I first saw a picture of it. Every other mountain seemed like it was just a few hundred yards away. We could see people carrying pads and we could hear the grunts and yells of unnecessarily loud climbers over on North Mountain. I’ve always felt that West, from those more popular places, seemed like it was miles away, foreign and unknown. And from its top everything else seemed tame and boring, picked over like a market after the 6 PM rush. But the top of West, or the near top, felt like a place I could just sit and watch the clouds rush by without some enormous group coming by with thirty pads and screams to wake the dead.
The Feather
After climbing Best of the West and trying The Feather, (I was able to do it from a stand start) we hike back down the side of West and over to Star Power, A long roof of giant huecos and jugs. Star Power is one of my favorite climbs in Hueco, it’s like the famous Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive on North Mountain, but three times as long and a bit harder. We all run a quick lap, then move over to Crash Dummy, another favorite.
Matt on Crash Test Dummy
             Coyotes start to yip and howl across the field at the base of North Mountain. They scream and cry and as we all look, trying to pick them out against the brown rock, suddenly stop. We never saw them.
            As we walked back to the car I thought about the day. I thought of The Round Room, time, the smell of damp soil, and pottery shards I thought of the gully to 1969 and the feeling of possibility around every next corner. I thought of the near top of West, The Feather, and the distance I felt between the rest of the world and myself. As the coyotes found something else to get excited about and as I unlocked my truck, I thought of the great mythic West and that there was no other name better for where we’d just been than West Mountain. 

Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Cast of Hueco



After a three-year hiatus, I’ve finally gotten to spend some time down in the miserable city of El Paso where my trash was eaten by feral dogs, where I woke after a windy night to a glossy patina of ice on everything, and where a great metropolis of winding chasms and toppled brown boulders rises from the flat desert floor to be populated by an unlikely crowd living in trailers, tents, even a teepee.
I returned home to Flagstaff from Hueco Tanks after a week-long trip with bruised fingertips a few problems checked off my tick-list and many more added. I’ve been on trips to Hueco as long as a month, but this short week was more productive than any other pilgrimage. I managed to climb Diaphenous Sea in about ten tries, flashed Taxing The Pipe, Javalina, and Something Different. But climbing was only part of the fun of Hueco, as is usually the case, and it’s giving me plenty to write about.
Flashing Javalina
The cast of Hueco is as variable as the curving, curling features of the rock itself. Every year, there’s a different set of guides, a different crew of tent dwelling dirt bags asking for cigarettes or other things smoke-able. This trip I managed, through one of the truly seasoned Huecoers, GP, to camp for a dollar a night on some obscure land where with each step I sank an inch into the un-trodden dust. I camped, climbed and rested with my friend Matt and his brother Ryan. Both are from Wisconsin, tattooed and hilarious. Ryan is an Alt photographer and set up a photo shoot in a windstorm with a liberally pierced woman from El Paso who got a ride to the Rock Ranch from her parents. He told me once that I was “flashing shit like a chick on Mardi Gras.”
The Round Room
Other friends were down there too. Our guide the first day climbing was my old friend Kate, who was one of my climbing coaches when I was 16 and first started climbing. Kate lives at the Wagon Wheel Co-opt in a Teepee and is spending the season guiding. On that same day we ran into another old friend of mine, A stocky Israeli from Los Angeles named Yair. Yair was the person who, in the climbing gym, showed me the possibilities of bouldering and got me hooked on the sport. We climbed only once on this trip, but he gave me the beta I needed to climb Diaphanous Sea. Of course, there’s GP too. I met GP a few years ago in Groom Creek and climbed with him quite a bit just before we both migrated away from Prescott. Of course, there were new people as well. Corey is a friend of Matt’s and climbed with us every day but one. He helped us navigate through all the various mazes of regulation and we rewarded him with food. Corey led us on one of the more entertaining tours I’ve ever been on. We penetrated deep into West Mountain where the extra-terrestrials of Hueco live, at least according to folklore.
On West Mountain
                                                                                  Our Campsite from West Mountain
On our last day, we woke to freezing rain and tremendous winds. Matt and I had to take Ryan to the Greyhound station so he could catch a bus to San Antonio. As we drove west, the weather worsened and it looked like climbing wasn’t going to be possible. We got a big breakfast and relaxed a while before we went back to pack up camp and leave.  As it happens in the desert, the clouds parted, the sun melted the ice and dried the rock. We would be able to climb after all. After picking up Corey, we went to North Mountain and warmed up. I tried Dark Age a few times. This is one of the problems that has been on my mind for years now. The rock is perfect, the top out scary, and the movement some of the best in the world. Matt and Corey both did See Spot Run, the classic V6 that Dark Age feeds into. As is always the case with the last day in Hueco, I couldn’t climb what I really wanted to, I fell off Dark Age twice in a row on the same easy move just before the top hold of See Spot Run. But leaving Hueco with an almost send like mine on Dark Age, or a few years ago on Barefoot on Sacred Ground, makes the return even better. It gives me something to train for and something to dream about.

Black clouds came from the east just as we turned right onto Montana. Big raindrops fell and splattered on the windshield and the smell of rain came off the pavement. We had a long drive ahead of us, nine hours of sitting, eating fast food, drinking coffee. Always though, with a presence like that of the storm to the east, the return to Hueco, it’s boulders, and all who call it home, will gently build in my mind.












Hueco Moonrise

Sunday, February 5, 2012

100,000 Miles: Part Two


Until last week, it had been years since I’d climbed with, or even seen Jarod. After leaving the porn industry behind a couple years ago, Jarod moved to Mammoth, California and quickly joined the fearless ranks of people who hurtle down the mountain and huck themselves off jumps with drops like four-story buildings. I drove out from Flagstaff, spent a day at The Buttermilks, and then went up to Mammoth for the weekend. There was hardly any snow and Jarod had to work most nights. We got a couple beers and sooner then I’d expected it was time to go back down to Bishop where I planned to climb for another couple days. I told Jarod I’d see him later in the spring when the snow was better.
            Normally at any major bouldering area I run into some group of climbers I know and end up climbing and camping with them. This time however, those groups seemed to be elsewhere and I was left to enjoy quiet solitude in the back of my truck with a couple novels for company. I wandered The Buttermilks all day, climbed some old projects, found some new ones and felt like I was home. Sagebrush grew with twisted branches from the sandy soil and I wondered where all the rattlesnakes were this time of year.
            I woke as the sun turned the sky amber and reflected off the glassy boulders across the way. It had been cold; my water was all frozen and it had been hard to read the night before without gloves. I decided to get a hotel room for my rest day.
In the afternoon, Jarod called. He was getting a ride down to Bishop for the day; did I want to get some food or something? By eight we were both back in my hotel room, talking about our first trips to Bishop, The time we found a baggie of meth in New Mexico, all that Red Bull, my broken ankle, and my truck. We agreed, Good Times that should absolutely keep on going. I told Jarod that after all these years and miles I wanted to sell my truck. “How much do you want for it?” he asked. We started talking numbers.
Driving up Buttermilk road Jarod patted the dash, “I love this truck man, I can’t wait!” Jarod only speaks with extreme punctuation and when he writes he tends towards the use of multiple exclamation points.
We parked at The Birthday Boulders, where we used to camp when we didn’t know any better. The sun was strong and warm and the shade cold. The rock was chilled to the core so we decided to go to that quintessential Buttermilks problem, Ironman, to warm up. After a couple laps we wandered the web of trails talking about the time we got really drunk shot-gunning beers in the campsite I’d camped in two nights before. The night had ended when a bunch of other climbers all wearing nothing but kilts stumbled out of the darkness and crashed the party with a well-placed head-butt and a bloody nose.
I made progress on my project, I felt stronger with Jarod spotting and his encouragement always gets me higher. The next hold always seemed closer. Soon though, the sun rounded the corner and the crux holds were too warm. We wandered on, talking little, but feeling good. Even after so many years, climbing with Jarod had barely changed. We didn’t feel like we needed to catch up, the blank spaces filled themselves in. We just bouldered, fell, and laughed. Nothing else mattered.
 I’d been planning on leaving early; Flagstaff is a long nine hours away, but early snuck past us both and the shadows off the mountains grew longer and longer. We were bumping back down the road to Bishop by 3:30, two hours after I had planned on leaving.
Jarod had some paperwork to do at the DMV, he was in the process of purchasing a rifle, and so I dropped him there.
“I’m gonna come out to AZ this spring, man,” Jarod said, “I have a friend with some Harleys, were gonna ride to the Grand Canyon!” I pictured Jarod on some monstrous bike riding through that same stretch of desert.
“Awesome,” I said, “just let me know when.” I hope he does. He’s always welcome on my floor.
Jarod got his bag out of the back of my truck and closed it back up. The latches are finicky and I noticed that he worked them skillfully. A car horn honked from 395 and the branches of the cottonwoods were all naked.
“So good to climb with you again man, I really miss it,” I said.
“Yeah dude! Come back out soon! I love this, just like Old Times,” he said, and I knew I would make the long drive back there from Flagstaff soon. We hugged, fist bumped, and then did that awkward handshake-hug combination thing.
“See you later dude,” I said. I got back in my truck and rolled down the window.
“Later Bro!” Jarod said, smiled and went inside.
I rolled my window back up and drove east into that primordial space where places aren’t advertised, but still wait to be discovered by people like me or Jarod, people who find the solitude of bumping along some cracked highway more soothing than a warm bath. I drove through a forest whose trees are old as stone and back into a desert where time moves differently, where all the lizards, tortoises and kangaroo rats go about their crepuscular business without anyone noticing and every roadside stand sells the world best beef jerky.