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.

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.

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. 

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.

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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. 

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.