There are moments in climbing that come to fully embody and realize all of the work that led to that instant.  These are the times outside of our thinking monkey minds, when the realm of what is possible is investigated and expanded.  They are the moments of hard-earned bliss that justify all of our effort.

In October of this year, I traveled to Red Rocks, NV for the first time.  I had just lived at Indian Creek, UT for eight days, learning the self-contained art of crack climbing.  I had pushed myself there, and was satisfied to have chosen appropriate challenges, and to have engaged with the unknown several times, with surprisingly good outcomes.  I felt prepared for new experiences in the Nevada desert.

My climbing partner from the Creek accompanied me, but had tweaked his knee and didn’t feel like he could climb.  Thankfully, my long-time climbing mentor cum partner Rodney Sofich flew in from Portland to join us.  His experience with the intricacies and unique challenges of Red Rocks was welcome.

Though they are within view of the glowing city of Las Vegas, the climbs of Red Rocks have an alpine feel.  They’re long, committing, and often the descent offers its own cruxes.  Approaches can be long, the sun hot, and the vegetation quite unwelcoming.  We set to the job of climbing and in just a few days had climbed almost thirty pitches in the park.  We mulled over our choices for the following day while cramming down blue cheese burgers at the campsite, and we settled on a remote but interesting climb called Jubilant Song on Windy Peak.

Windy Peak lies down a long and bumpy BLM road in Black Velvet Canyon.  The following morning, parking on a gravel strip, we took off along a winding trail through strange conglomerate boulders and spiny cacti.  The trail rose and steepened, gaining several hundred feet in the heat of the desert morning, but it was surprisingly clear and easy to follow– a blessing on an approach here.  The face was impressive, rising in broken crack systems and imposing roofs out of view and into the sky.  The first ascent was established by Joe Herbst, a prolific Red Rocks climber, and one who’s routes I’ve come to really enjoy.  They follow lines of natural weakness and require a creative, open mind to solve their various problems.  They hold in them a true sense of adventure, the unknown, and even a sense of humor.

Rodney took the first lead (5.5) so that I could, as he said, have the “money pitches”.  I followed and was soon looking at the long second pitch, an undulating 5.7 crack stretching a full 160′ into blocks above.

My time at Red Rocks thus far had been filled with actively engaging the fear that I experience climbing this alpine-like terrain.  The remoteness, the length, and the many unknowns had weighed on me, even in easy terrain that I knew I could climb.  But for once, leading off onto this pitch, I was focused solely on climbing.

The pitch flowed by, despite getting fully stuck inside of the body-width crack mid-pitch, and as the air grew beneath our feet I became absorbed by the climb.  At the top of the pitch, I found relief from the sun in a deep chimney, and brought Rodney up.

As Rod led into the third pitch, over me and out of sight, I had time to consider what was approaching.  My next lead would require traversing under the imposing roof and had been growing over our heads, and for the sake of avoiding hanging belays, I planned to link it into the following 5.8 crack pitch around the corner.  Dread settled in.  Self-doubt.  Fear.

Nevertheless, as a good partner there is no choice but to be game and take what falls on your shoulders.

I stood at the tiny ledge on the left side of the roof, next to Rod at the belay.

“May I take you off the anchor?” he asked.

“Climbing”, I said, and looked right across the roof.  One problem at a time, I thought, as I took a large step to a smearing foot and worked away from the corner.

One good piece of gear in.  Good, not going to swing back into the dihedral below the belay.

I probed around the next turn of the roof, staying high up under it’s reach, placing gear at what I thought a prudent interval.  I needed to conserve gear to link the two pitches, and the gear under the roof needed to be extended with runners to minimize the rope drag after I turned the corner of the roof.  If I fell I was looking at big swings.  Clean, but big.

Moving further, the weight of the lead rung in a silent chaos inside of my head.  The will to maintain control was greater than the noise, and progress continued.  I stretched away from the belay.  “Maintain a sense of possibility”, I told myself.

Realizing that I would need to depart from the safety of where the wall met the roof, I could see no possibilities for protection ahead, so I placed and equalized two pieces.  An all-else-fails sort of thing.

I smeared away from the security of the roof and out onto small foot nubbins.  They were reachy, but stretched improbably to another rest.  From the rest, I needed to climb down slightly, and under a large block, where there was obvious, good protection available.  But still I was 15′ from my last gear, and the next moves looked to be the crux.

“I may build the hanging belay under there, Rod”, I said, “to give my mind a rest”.

He encouraged me to stick to the plan.  At that moment he was better aware of what I was capable of than I, and he knew how rewarding the success would be.

I spent a long time at that rest.  Rising onto a foothold and returning to the rest again and again, I looked for protection, acutely aware of the energy that I was using.  Several nuts popped after a test-pull, but one finally slotted horizontally into a little pinch between some nubbins.  The roar in my head was getting louder, but oddly, my center remained quiet and focused.

I told Rodney not to tell me if the nut came out as I moved past it.  I stepped down, and around, clinging to sloping hands until I could stem and rest under the large block.  The block took a great cam, and after another moment of pondering the improbable, a heel hook and mantle let me pull the lip.  Some more interesting slab moves took me to a good placement, and the crack above revealed itself to be quite short.

A few finger locks, a tenuous stem, and a nut placed with my face practically in a cactus led me to easier terrain above.  Two cams in a slot, equalized, extended, and then tied off, and it was over.  I had no idea how long the pitch had taken, but I silently thanked Rodney for pushing me through.

With the call of belay-on, Rod followed, and was soon at the belay, beaming.  It was one thing to be proud of what I’ve done, but it was another to see the rewarded look in his eyes.  From all that he has given me over the years, it was as much his success as mine.  I was still decompressing, showing only a stressed sort of wistful smile, but he was full-on grinning.

Rod led on up an easy squeeze chimney and then into a water groove with truly tricky stemming and we were soon below the summit block.  I led out and around a large chockstone on steep but easy terrain and then ambled up a huge, black edge-of-the-world ramp.  At the top, I tossed the rope over a rock horn and gave Rodney a hand belay as he came up.  We walked from there to cairn on the peak’s flat summit.

We sat elated in the sun, eating smoked clams and watching mountain goats move comfortably across exposed slabs.  I felt that it could get no better.  Rodney had wanted to climb this route with his longtime partner and climbing mentor, but the man’s age had started to catch up with him.  The tides were turning, and for better or for worse, Rod was becoming the old guy.  Instead, his vision had been realized with a new partner.

It is in times like these that we become acutely aware of how far we’ve come, and of how the loose ends of our efforts can inexplicably come together to allow us to cross, if briefly, to the other side of our expectations; When we can, briefly and blissfully, overcome ourselves and explore the world’s possibilities.  Rod had a glint in his eyes, a small flame burning out from behind the blue.  I shared that energy.  Even as some part of the unknown is triumphantly incorporated into the known, through our sweat and work and fear, so does the unknown enticingly expand and beckon us further.

Following the final pitch of Zebra Zion, one of my first climbs with Rod, circa 2007.

I’m standing in the Northernmost stand of Joshua trees, or so the plaque says.

This plaque I discovered while wandering up a deserted wash, just north of some numbered state route just north of the Arizona border.  Arizona’s so close I could almost toss a rock across the invisible line, if I hadn’t driven a few miles up a rough road across some recently flooded washes.  The kind of driving that doesn’t really worry me, unless the rain comes back.

Some poor BLM bloke, he had to have driven as I did across these washes, parked, as I did, at the turnout by the water catchment hole, and then he had to have walked, as I did (though likely with more purpose) up the rocky wash to affix what must have been a pretty heavy plaque.  It’s about two and a half square feet of brass, bolted to the limestone walls of the wash.  Must have been a charm to carry over there.  And what a place to put it.  If I hadn’t been working hard to finish our 3.2 beer before leaving the state, I never would have thought to walk up here.  What with the Mojave rattlesnakes, approaching storm and all.  But I did, and I found this.

Two other men may have seen this strange apparition.  They were hunting for ‘chuckers’ they said, walking past our camp in what felt like the early morning, but turned out to be almost noon.  They’re ground birds they said, like a blue-grey softball.   But they hadn’t seen any, scattered across the desert by the storms of the last few days they thought.

This is the second time that I’ve been up this road this year, the last in the late spring.  When I was last here I thought silently to myself, ‘I’ll likely never return here’.

The desert the connects southern Utah to Arizona and Nevada is the kind of place that’s only beautiful while it’s easy to leave.  It seems to stretch ad infinitum to and beyond the hulking hills that define the horizon in all directions.  It feels endless, and that endlesness frames a space in which light and atmosphere play and intermingle.  It’s the kind of place where God can try out his scenic moves before throwing them before an audience.  It’s safe to assume that there’s practically no one here.

The only company here, besides the tiny rodents and birds that break the spell of lifelessness are the Joshua trees.  Northernmost, the plaque says, and certainly stressed by the fact.  At least a third of them stand dead, blackened.  The dead trees hulk at odd angles like African dancers wearing fronded masks, dancing in the heat of some iboga vision.  The live ones remind me of small palms.  Vegas. Reno. Anywhere, AZ.  Damn the fouling associations.

In the morning, we go climbing, the purpose of our stop here.  The rock’s sharp and oddly fluted limestone, beautiful and energizing to climb.  Booms echo through the desert.  Under a cloudless sky, the resonating thunder is presumably another god, the USAF, trying out scenic moves of its own.  As the heat grows, we leave past others coming to climb in this nowhere.

As much as loneliness in an endless desert is a crushing dream, I still wish they weren’t here.

A summer has passed through the Wind River mountains once more, and the wind’s gone cold. Out of the field again, I’ve gained nothing more material than a good solid stink, but this trip in particular got the wheels turning once more. How to live the good life? Where’s the satisfaction to be found? Am I living by fear or am I injecting the necessary energy to keep the real ball rolling?

Invented on this last course, in collaboration with J. Spaulding, is the concept of the Anablog:

An·a·blog /ˈanablôg/ Noun: Blogging by use of analog technologies. Verb: To record on paper opinions, information, etc. on a regular basis. Journal.

The following is Anablog #2, as numbered on paper.

As I walk through the pre-dawn darkness by headlamp, my light begins to catch on the reflective tabs on student tents which, though they plan to leave before us, are for some reason still standing.  I’m carrying all of my possessions in the bag on by back, and I greet them with a “Good morning, gentlemen” as I pass.  As an afterthought I add:  “If my memory serves me, today is the first day of Fall.”

“Feels like it”, one of them responds through the frosty dark, though I can’t quite tell who.

As I walk on towards the kitchen, where Gabo is preparing water for coffee and for the morning maté ritual, I think about the absurdity of what I’ve just said.  Fall doesn’t come at once, but as a slow and rolling tide punctuated by occasional rapid advances.  Though the nights are now longer than the days, it was last week that the crowberry turned yellow, earlier still that the blueberry bushes purpled, and the lupine have been standing at seed for weeks.  The calendar says that Fall has just begun, while the golden quaking aspens disagree– more like halfway to Winter here.

Over breakfast, we watch the sun rise like the pagans we must be here.  Like Anasazi ruins, our kitchen was placed to catch the morning solstice sun, which came at 7:09 over the Eastern hills, first painting the spruce behind us a rosy pink before warming our faces and then our cores.  We discuss the invention of the calendar; how ancient cultures must have had men who watched the sun, how the solar standstills when the sun reversed its track from south to north and back again could form a quartered calendar, how being able to mark and know one day each year would let you count stone-after-stone the days of the year.  This was a task reserved for the few wise diviners of the stars, whose power and influence must have come from the ability to predict with certainty some events in an otherwise unpredictable world.

But the men and women working the fields grew their own calendar, and knew the natural signs and stages that were the harbingers of their growing seasons.  How well did the wise sun-watchers know the calendar of leaves and roots and blossoms?

Time passes.  Now we’re walking the Old Glacier Trail.  As we walk, an elk is bugling in the woods below.  We’re high above, surrounded only by scree and bunchgrass, and the elk’s call filters up through the wind first as a faint whistle, and then through the calm as an echoing, mournful cry.  Jared say that it’s practically tradition for him to be ushered off by such a call, and it seems right– a kind of lonely seeking that is the voice of a world moving likewise onwards.

Here, above the pines, the path is braided like a glacial river, splitting and rejoining where the path was once flooded, or where a stream claimed dominion over a straightaway.  Each split and each reunion is a track, a story left on the ground.  On the hill we’ve just climbed, the trail splits five-wide, the mark of one cowboy’s Wind River story in this June’s high snowpack.  Clayton Voss is his name and his camp lies at the convergence of Dinwoody Creek with the Downs Fork.  He’s a horsepacker who makes his way, and has for many years, by ferrying folks around the east side of the Northern Wind Rivers.

As we walked through hip-deep snow in early July, he and his hired help were digging out the glacier trail at Double Lake, trying to push the horses in further to finally make camp.  He and his family rely on the summer season to support themselves– he’s never been later to make his camp than in this year’s high snows.  Riding in time after time, he and his led their mules around the nearest snow-free ground on this pass, and each week as the snow melted the cut another braid.  Five weeks of digging and hauling, written there on the ground like a single bar of sheet music, noteless.

The cold Fall wind dies off as we round the hill, heading East.  Here the path is a single braid, sometimes wider or less so.  It traces across glades, past scraggly white pines and through woods dense with deadfall.  A switchback cuts an open hill above sandstone cliffs, and twenty more lead down to the river.  Wading accross, the cool water makes my boots heavy, but it’s a welcome feeling.  Leaving wet footprints up the far bank, we’ve crossed an invisible line back from the margins to the center.

The next morning, the tent is covered in a sparkling frost.  Orion is still high in sky.

It will be winter soon.

(This post has been relocated to another date, though it was really published in December of 2011.  There are good reasons for this that will not be explained.)

Other people always tell me that they envy my lifestyle.  At least, my peers do (anyone from 18-40 years old I’ll count among that group).  There’s no denying that I lead a blessed life.  I spend practically every day doing what I love to do, and the small evils are easily recognized as necessary to support maximum time in the mountains and among friends.  I have the time, energy, and the little bit of disposable income to be able to pay attention to myself, to my body, and how to make it stronger and keep it healthy.  I have few obligations.  I owe no debts but to my parents.  I’m mobile, and that mobility allows me to meet many fantastic people living extraordinary lives whom I otherwise never would have met.

Extra-ordinary is a good way to explain this way.  Outside ordinary– outside the script, the easily described path, the known trajectory.  To be outside of this highway that so many take from conception to the nursing home is to draw usually-subtle but pernicious criticism.  I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that this is because those traveling that beaten road understand those outside of it to be a subtle threat to their comfort.  We, if they would let us, make them question themselves.  But they put up a strong fight, doing nearly anything to avoid introspection.  This is my own speculation.  They call it immature, or selfish.  They lecture.  They weave stories about lives off the path to protect their own stories.  This, not speculation, is awfully clear.

Tonight, I simply wanted to speak about this as one of the big challenges to my lifestyle, because it’s digging into me and needs voicing if it’s to be removed.  This passive guerrilla-war of judgement is hard to be rid of.  In truth, part of me subscribes to the idea that I am being selfish, immature, imprudent.  This has been ingrained.  But to me, inner-conflict has come to be the mark of this life; it is a sign that each step is being considered and lived, not passed by on autopilot.  I refuse the path, but will continue to battle with it until perhaps my way leads to full self-realization.  I can have no other way.

To relieve any sense of pretension, let me bare my cards.  My lifestyle could not be as it is without outside support.  I could possibly live as I do without that support, but it would require a much greater frugality, and my mobility would certainly be less.  My parents and grandparents both contributed to a trust in my name, from which I receive $500 per month.  Because, at this point, I only work at jobs that I enjoy, which don’t pay well, this assistance makes up almost 40% of my annual income.  Additionally, I owe my parents $5000 that they loaned me to pay for my NOLS instructor course.  I can’t pay this back in part because I make very little money, and in part because I’m selfish and can’t bring myself to sacrifice when I expect that in the future I’ll make more money and be able to pay it back without personal sacrifices.

These debts do make me call my life into question, but it’s others who reinforce this questioning sufficiently to make it a nagging source of doubt.  Even my parents, who offer me the distribution from the trust as support for a lifestyle for which they at times voice their jealousy, can’t help but make frequent small, jabbing remarks that betray the other, worried side of their support.  This is a dishonest imposition of their own values, but it comes from an underlying protective love that is easy to forgive.  Nevertheless, their support is not wholehearted.

I will not change but as I will to change.  This is the conviction underlying the route that takes me to the mountains and home again, and through each year towards what I do not know.  If you follow this same conviction, I know it by your speech and how you walk your life.  If you do not follow it, I forgive you, but our time together will be limited, as our paths will diverge. The challenge of a life off of the well-trodden path is the will to use the razor to cut away what is grasping at your coattails, trying to hold you back.

I falter.  Often.  But I stand again having learned something.  My life will not be as it now is forever, as my ambitions grow and my goals diversify.  I will eventually sacrifice some of my freedoms is favor of other values, such as family, charity, or self-sufficiency, but this will come as I see fit to make the changes.  Medical school? Maybe.  The thought grows every day and the willingness to sacrifice for a career in medicine becomes stronger.  But I won’t go because I feel the need to get back on the road.  My path may cross it, but it will weave its own way.  If this resonates wth you, then count yourself a friend.  If you are defending yourself word by word, I may see you again, but it will be by chance.

The consequences are part of the appeal, and character comes of consequence.

There’s a line in Fight Club that says, “We are a generation of men raised by women.”  That’s not quite the problem.

One of the big perks of living in the world of dedicated climbers and skiers is the opportunity to meet men and women of good character.  Sure, there are a lot of jokers at high levels of both sports whose main and honest reason for participation is that they get to claim themselves as participants, that they get to tell others that they’re a climber, or a skier, who is, by the way, awesome.  But, for the most part, the people who are drawn to sports of commitment seem to be those of solid values who push themselves against risk to further their self-knowledge and feed their sense of adventure.

I call this a perk because it’s uncommon to find such people at large in the rest of the world.  This is especially true of men.  At a concert that I attended last night, I was frankly a bit shocked to see that the wall flowers glued defensively to the sides of the venue were all men.  That doesn’t jive with the traditional image of the shy girl off to the side, waiting to be drawn onto the floor by a confident man.  That doesn’t jive because the gender in question seems to be losing its collective confidence.

The evidence against us isn’t limited to the walls of concert venues.  In my conversations with women, a common theme arises when we talk about their troubles finding partners.  Sure, there are plenty of men out there, but they all act like boys.  For women dating men in their early twenties, this isn’t all that surprising, and is maybe even excusable, but the theme extends to gents in their thirties and even their forties.  In short, they’re either egoistic to a fault, or more commonly, they’re needy, lack confidence, and can’t keep up a mature relationship.

Here in Salt Lake City, this effect is particularly pronounced, and I suspect that it’s because of the predominant Mormon culture.  Mormons, like most religions, have prescriptive rules of behavior phrased mostly in the negative: no sex before marriage, no drinking, no drugs, hell, even no coffee.  But more so than many religions (in my experience) the Mormons have a dominating social and family structure that effectively enforces these rules.  As a result, their kids don’t have the opportunity to make many mistakes– the culture preempts the opportunity.

Though the intentions behind this Mormon culture are pure, they do their children a disservice because mistakes are a crucial source of self knowledge.  The small modicum of maturity and self-awareness that I have was in part passed on to me by my relations, but in much larger and more effective part was earned through more stupid and painful mistakes than I can count.  The crucial difference between a lesson ‘learned’ through the telling and one learned through personal error is that the truth of the latter is proved by personal experience and so carries more personal weight.

This phenomenon of the protective culture isn’t limited to Mormons, but extends also to the rest of the country, and likely to the whole first world.  I use the Mormons as an example above simply because the effect is most pronounced in a limit case like theirs.  I mean, hell, the very idea of suburbia is to protect families and their children from the pitfalls of urban life, and the modern city has come to look a lot like an oversized suburb.

This is a long way of saying that modern men aren’t quite “a generation of men raised by women”, but they are a generation raised by those who don’t see the value of danger and the opportunity to make mistakes.  As a result, maturity is a long time in coming.  Moreover, I think that this sheltering is also a side-effect of the shelving of certain values by our parents’ generation as perhaps less important than others.  The values I’m talking about are courage, self- awareness, integrity, and self-sufficiency, as these are the character traits that seem to be most lacking in younger men.  If these four traits are valued highly by a parent, then the usefulness of danger, the necessity of mistakes, and most importantly, the value of allowing a young adult self-determination will all three be a given, because all three are needed to develop the valued traits.

The consequence of this collective, and likely subconscious, failure is that men are looking a lot like boys.  On the flip side, women have come into their own over the past few generations as an equal and soon to be superior sex.  This is fantastic, and I fully support women’s rights… despite how news articles and statistics frequently make it seem, the two genders needn’t vie for power, but can each improve in their own right.  Right now, women seem to be strongly self-developing, though there are certainly many fronts that still need to be advanced.  I simply think that it’s time to turn our collective male attention towards raising men, instead of large children.

I can’t do much until I raise children of my own, so I implore you, men, to learn now what may not have been taught to you:  Learn to see your own fear, learn to act in spite of it, learn the true meaning of strength; learn to be vulnerable, and most of all, learn to please a woman.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

-from Wendell Berry’s
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto

Split Decision – Self Portrait, V2. This was taken during a solo bouldering trip to the Big Bend Boulders outside of Moab, UT this past Tuesday.

(The blustery summit of Mt. Superior, LCC, UT)

Some lines steal your imagination the first time that you see them.

That’s what happened to me the first time that I saw Mt. Superior in Little Cottonwood Canyon, UT, three or four years ago.  At the time, the South Face of Mt. Superior had yet to be listed at one of the 50 Classic Ski Descents of North America.  It was simply the largest skiable face that I’d ever seen, and it flowed all the way to the busy Little Cottonwood Road.  If you ski at Snowbird, or at Alta, then as you turn to ski downhill, you turn to ski towards its steep white face.

When I first saw Mt. Superior, I was impressed to learn that people skied it, and as the bumblie that I was, I told myself that one day I’d ski the line.  I’m now sitting in Salt Lake with the first of the summer’s thunderstorms shaking my windows, looking back on the season, and my descent of Mt. Superior marks a distinct high-point of personal satisfaction.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not special, gifted, or even really that talented a ski mountaineer.  On any given day of the week, almost regardless of snow conditions, someone will lay turns down Superior’s South Face.  So often, in fact, that it’s a fairly common question to hear batted around at the bar; have you skied it?

However, I like to think that Ian Donovan and I not only skied the line, but we got on the line in near perfect conditions.  Because of its popularity, as I mentioned above, the face is skied in almost all conditions.  In many cases, the skiers who lay tracks down the face do so in such unstable conditions that I don’t hesitate to call them morons, fools, avalanche poodles, or all the above.  They’re likely unaware of the hazard to which they’re exposing themselves, or they just don’t care, both of which are unsustainable options.

(Sunrise on the ridge to Mt. Superior's summit.)

For much of December and January, I looked up daily at the face, batting around in my head the condition of the face and instabilities in the snowpack.  Because Superior faces South, it’s subject to a lot of sun beginning early in the day, which tends to peel the new snow off its flanks in pretty regular fashion.  Any face over about 40 degrees will sluff snow in little loose-snow avalanches as you ski it, and these can be readily avoided.  On the other hand, if there is a lingering instability in the snowpack, your weight or the sluffing or both can initiate a larger slab avalanche, which on Mt. Superior would be likely unsurvivable.

The long and the short of it is this:  it’s challenging to ski the face when it both is covered in powder snow, and when it’s safe.  Thankfully, in April, a thorough warming and refreeze was followed by a good 16 inch storm.  This consolidated the underlying snow and provided a stable surface for all of the fresh pow.  It was time to rally the cavalry.

Our party left the road at around 3:30 am, at first a party of four and then a party of two.  Let me just say now that I’ve never toured with someone using Alpine Trekkers who didn’t break them or have a problem with them.  Ian Donovan and I were the remaining members who crested the ridge to Superior around 5:00, and who began to ascend the at times quite narrow ridge leading to Superior’s summit.

Sometime around 7:00, with little of the ridge remaining to climb, the sun rose over the mountains to our East.  Few feelings compare to seeing the light shine out across the range under a cloudless sky, knowing that a goal of several years will be realized before most people begin their work day.  It was a moment that wholly confirmed not just the sacrifice of rising at 2am, but all the questionable sacrifices that have accompanied my life since college.  These are the moments that I search for.

(The day's first light strikes Superior's South face and illuminates the tallest peaks of the Wasatch.)

I was nervous when I finally clicked into my skis.  I talked to Richie on the phone, who was in the parking lot at the base because his bindings had failed.  “Dude”, he said, “You’re about to have the best run of your life”.  Both he and our friend Ben (and his video camera) would be watching from below.

There remained a doubt in my mind about how much the snow would sluff on top of the icy surface below it, and I wondered if this hazard could make the skiing difficult or frightening.  All of these doubts disappeared as I traversed onto the face right below its summit and carved my first big turn into untouched powder that flew up over my head.  It was perfect.

True, some of the terrain chokes had sluffed clean, leaving a stiff bed surface to ski on, but while it didn’t ski nicely, it did reassure me against the avalanche hazard.  Most of the descent was nevertheless in fresh, soft, perfect snow.  When I finally stopped, my legs burned from 3200 feet of dreamy skiing, and I felt a satisfaction uncommon before 9 am.

The season is now drawing to a close, and rock climbing has fully supplanted skiing as my seasonal obsession.  Nevertheless, the memory of Superior closes an early chapter in my aim to become a true expert in the mountains.  Though I skied many steeper and much more dangerous lines this season, few brought the satisfaction of this descent.

If you’d like to see video of the descent, it’s available here: http://ow.ly/4UEZx

Often, when I write here, I feel like I’m writing for no one in particular.  Sometimes the analytics confirms this.  But that’s besides the point.

When I built this blog and paid the whopping fifteen dollars to have my own domain name, I did so knowing full well that it wasn’t going to serve my ego very well.  The simple design, the undeclared authorship, it’s all designed to cut away the trappings and reveal unobscured what I write here, so that I have little place to hide.  It was designed as such because, as MontBell puts it, function is beauty.  The irreducible is the most full.

This photograph is one that I took on one of my first extended trips through the mountains.  I was 14 at the time.  I still remember the exact place in which I took it, on a point in the Olympic mountains of Washington.  To this day, I still think that it’s one of the best images I’ve ever made of life in the mountains, and it was made without that intention.  The story that I have for it I wove around it years after I took it with my dad’s 35mm all-manual Vivitar, but that simply means that I can’t claim authorship to how it speaks.

There’s a lot in this photo for me about our relationship to the mountains, how we enjoy them with others, about teaching a life of travel, about yearning and direction.  But I prefer not to break it down.  Looking at this photo just pulls at my heartstrings in just the right way.

Summer’s coming.  I can feel it, smell it even, during warmer evening moments.  This transition always stirs up the crazies in me and forces me to ask too many questions.  This year I hope to avoid thinking about those questions too much, not because they’re not important, but because it makes a lot more sense to me now to understand things as a whole rather than to ask how the elements all fit together.  Where am I going?  Is this right job?  Do I live in a good place?  Should I run?  Follow?  Those sorts of questions I’ll relegate to my weaker moments if I can.

The me that took the photograph above couldn’t possibly have planned or envisioned the pathway that has brought me from there to here, because too much of what has made me who I am was a tangle of unforeseeable mistakes and happenstance.  But it has been a path of increasing depth and satisfaction.  For now, I know that on the whole I am headed where I need to go, and hopefully after another ten years I can understand my path with the same satisfaction and depth with which I see this photograph.

You might thing that jumping off tall rocks on skis is not only dangerous, but stupid as well, given that there’s often other ways to the bottom of the rocks that don’t endanger one’s femurs.  I’d have to agree with you.  Nevertheless, I still jump off rocks, and I find the activity not only thrilling, but inherently pretty interesting, as the contemplation of the act beforehand is a quick route into the machinations of fear.

Standing at the top of a cliff yesterday, I got pretty scared.  Scared enough, at least, that my heart began to beat loudly and I could hear myself breathing faster in anticipation.  It’s not a natural thing to throw yourself off a precipitous edge, especially when the outcome is uncertain and when even the distance to the ground is difficult to gauge.  Thought the landing may be (and hopefully is) covered in soft snow, the rocks in between takeoff and landing look painful to meet.

When arriving at and contemplating air travel on skis, I find that there is a window of about 10 seconds during which the decision to take off can be easily made, as there’s not enough time for the brain to substantially object to your proposition. After that ten seconds, the rational mind has to jump in and wrinkle the process.

The rational mind is exquisitely good at blurring the line between fearful rationalizations and reasonable safety objections, so once these ten seconds have passed, the matter of throwing one’s body off of a rock seems to become much more complicated than it was mere seconds before.

It is challenging to decide to what degree the mind’s objections are worth heeding, and to what degree they are merely self-limiting.  One doesn’t want to break one’s femurs, as that confuses one’s summer schedule considerably, and it’s a costly event as well.  On the other hand, if one relies upon one’s mind and its fears to direct one, then to remain on the safest sofa possible will be one’s path.  That leads, I think, to little satisfaction, and overall few interesting stories to tell at parties.

Is there a legitimate chance that jumping off this rock will lead to injury?  Certainly, but it’s the probability and the severity that have been skewed by my mind.  Further, and more annoyingly, the very interruption of the overprotective rational mind has disrupted my calm and has likely increased my chance of poor execution in a measurable way.  That, folks, is irony.

Most interesting to those of you who concern themselves with overcoming their fears, there is a small portion of the brain which seems to remain separate from the fire going on inside of your helmet in the contemplation of risky flight.  This small portion possesses a tiny override button.  I imagine this button as an amusingly undersized red disk with the words “fuck it” printed thereupon in small point font.   When you recognize that there is part of you that remains detached and unafraid, execution becomes a simple matter of getting yourself to push the button.

There are any number of foolish techniques available to achieve this, but my favorite is the absurd attachment of my self-respect to my desired outcome.  You can’t back out now, you pussy.  Hike up your skirt and point em’.  Other available techniques include mild chemical intoxication, or the use of self-destructive attitudes, though these each have their respective drawbacks.

It takes very little time to shift one’s body weight and rotate a pair of skis, with regards to the fall-line, from the perpendicular to the parallel position.  When it comes to throwing oneself from heights, this constitutes pressing that amusingly undersized red disk emblazoned with profanity and thus forging a kind of Ulysees pact in which your future self is bound to the commitments of your mad present self, for it takes but a short moment to accelerate to such a pace that to attempt to bail would be disastrous.

The ensuing moment is viscerally hilarious, as the whole mind and body object to having been gravitationally committed, but their protest is like that of an unwilling toddler being dragged across a busy avenue; if they had their way, they’d likely be flattened regardless.

More amusing still is the behavior of the fearful mind when skis successfully reunite with ground, as it immediately reorients and pretends to have been hip to the thing all along.  The danger now removed, it’s as cool as ice.  What, me?  Scared?  Nah, I was just waiting for those other skiers to go past so that I wouldn’t scare them with my mighty feats.  Go on about your day, I’ll see you when I’m finished being superior.

I have an illness called Wild Lust.

When it comes on, I’m debilitated and unable to work effectively. That’s why I call it an illness. To call it such is more a what-other-people-think-about-it thing.  Really, it’s more like a vibration in my heart, or a line drawn up my center towards somewhere else that I’m not.

I said somewhere else, but its not a certain somewhere that the Wild Lust draws me.  It grabs me when I need to be taken away, and it takes me to where I can find what I need.  It doesn’t give it to me, but it makes the finding possible.  It does this no matter how unreasonable I think it.

The Wild Lust often causes problems.

I can’t always follow the Wild Lust when it comes on, just like sometimes I get sick but can’t admit it because I’ve too much to get done that week.  When that happens, the symptoms of the Lust creep out through my shell like a runny nose.  I drink too much to lose my balance.  I jump on my bike when I should be going to bed to get lost down dark streets I don’t know.  I write to find an outlet when I’m caged up by my bedroom walls.

The Wild Lust is the gravity of a life in movement.   The lightness of traveling somewhere new, of moving beyond what I know and am comfortable with, is the feeling that I call vitality.  To stay in one place is fine so long as other unmapped territories are on the menu: adventures of mind or spirit or body can take place anywhere.  But there’s really no substitute for a new place, where I no know one and have no way to define myself but by how I act and how I explore.  To be uncertain of the outcome and then to succeed is the ultimate satisfaction.

Part of me wishes that I could be happy to seek a still contentment, but as it is, I’m a stir-crazy young Siddhartha looking for all that the world can offer.  Just like the 8-fold path, there’s only one way that the Wild Lust affliction progresses;

At first it tickles, and then it prods.  It grows more difficult to ignore until it gnaws.  Prudence and savings fall by the wayside, as do projects, classes, diet, and hygiene.  In a sudden moment, the Lust becomes unbearable, and movement instantly becomes the first priority.

Then I’m off, to elsewhere.

Alive again.