Spinning SUVs
I am sitting in a Denny’s just off of Interstate 40 in Grants, New Mexico. The storm outside is not the kind that lowers visibility to an uncomfortable level, nor one that will bury the cars in the hotel parking lot during the night. Instead, the relatively warm day (mid 40s F) heated the road just enough to melt the snow from the previous flurry before the surface froze again, creating a perfect sheet of ice just beneath the thin layer of white. The transition from dry pavement to ice was rapid, in less than a half mile. It was catching everyone off-guard.

My ’03 AWD Subaru burdened with camping, climbing, and biking gear, gifts for my family, and ample food for a few days was relatively stable, tracking forward without issue. But when I passed an SUV in the ditch facing the wrong direction, and another spun-out just in front of me moments later, facing backward in the median, I decided the next exit was the safest bet. I passed two more recently stranded vehicles and a state trooper before I left the interstate in the last mile.

I contemplated stopping to help, but determined that my vehicle on the side of what was quickly becoming a single lane could complicate the rapidly building danger zone. Unfortunately, many of those vehicles would need assistance from a team of horses or a decently sized tow truck with studs or chains to be removed from their unfortunate position.

Dooenok?
The man now seated across from me also came down I-25 and over on I-40, in an SUV. He too felt the call of Denny’s late night menu. My salad and omelet consumed, I am enjoying watching the variety of travelers stagger in, take a seat, and order. Some are regulars, it seems, the menu not required. Others may be experiencing Denny’s for the first time. It’s an interesting dance, the wait staff asking the same questions, the answer slightly different from each patron.

Walk in. Sit down. Talk about the weather. Sit back. Relax. The waitress comes to the table every few minutes, asking again “You still do’n ok?” which sounds like “Dooenok?” If English were not my first language, I would not understand and just nod to be polite. Stand up. Walk out. Over and over, hundreds of times per day.

If this behavior were tracked, each person tagged with a marker that is traced on three axis, the flow of human particles over any given time in Denny’s may resemble the movement of a gas into and out of a vented chamber. Not unlike the combustion in the cylinders that power the vehicles which brought each of us to this place, come in cold and under a little pressure, consume, expand, and then leave warm and satisfied.

It’s times like this that you can do nothing but make the best of it. I have no guarantee that I will make Phoenix by tomorrow night for Christmas eve. A discussion between travelers in two other booths makes it obvious that I stopped in the first mile of what is now over twenty or thirty miles of mess. I may awake to five or six feet of snow in the morning or crawl along at a sub-optimal velocity as I attempt to cut south from Holbrook, along the beautiful Mogollon Rim, through Payson, past the foothills of the Superstitions, and into the East valley.

But whatever happens, it’s part of the adventure of travel. Whether in the U.S., Japan, India, Kenya, or Spain, even with the best of modern technology, I simply do not have control over all the variables nor do I desire this. It is the unknowns that sometimes give us the gift of surprise and therein a new appreciation for those basic things which we otherwise take for granted.

Early climber gets a spot
I sit in the passenger seat of my Subaru Outback Sport, the sun rising to my right over the East Spur of Hueco Tanks State Park, twenty miles outside of El Paso, Texas. My car’s thermometer reads 25F degrees. The wind has fallen silent for the first time in a week, giving the desert a welcomed calm which enables the sun’s warmth to be fully received. I will likely remove two of the four layers I now wear before I am allowed into the park.

I rose at 6 am and drove from the Hueco Rock Ranch to the park entrance, again the third in line. I may jump on a volunteer tour by 10, or wait till noon to gain access to North Mountain. My cell phone dangles by its USB tether from the driver’s side visor, facing due West to a gap in the mountains which apparently enables a very narrow band to the desired Edge connection. With this digital lifeline I am able to work until allowed into the park, and again at night following dinner and time spent in the Barn or around the fire.

It’s a strange juxtaposition, to let go of the comforts of modern accommodations, to camp in the middle of a high, wind scorched desert outside an historic border town, to watch the sky catch fire by the hand of our own sun before it gives way to the countless suns of the night sky, and then to slip into the world of electrons whose messages carry reminders of the deadlines and demands of those who awake each morning for a very different reason.

The Rock Ranch
The Ranch was established in the mid ’90s by the late Todd Skinner and friends, and is now owned and operated by Rob Rice. It consists of a 2-story house and hotel, the “Barn”, two fire pits, slack lines, a dog kennel, and a few dozen camping spots set among ten acres of creosote bush, prickly pear, and ocotillo. The house/hotel offers a higher quality standard of living with nightly socializing away from the intense Foosball games in the Barn. The Barn houses a never-really-worked tuner and speakers, Foosball table, hot shower, card tables and cross-selection of donated couches which have long since reached the end of their intended life.

This is the year the Park Service permanently closed the Mushroom boulder, as presented at the Rock Ranch. Too much top soil lost, artifacts destroyed by the pressures of overuse. The majority of the climbers responded by asking why the Park Service didn’t take precautionary measures sooner, to protect and preserve instead of waiting until it was for the most part, too late. The Park admitted to having not managed the area well, inspecting hot spots too seldom. Sad, for the artifacts and for the climbers too.

A climbing mecca
People come from around the world to climb at Hueco Tanks, three or four languages spoken each night around the fire. And yet it feels like a family reunion for the faces are familiar from previous years at Hueco and commonplace meetings at Joshua Tree, Bishop, or Rocky Mountain National Park. Despite the countless tens of thousands of committed climbers world-wide, the bouldering community feels small when I consider the number of familiar faces over so many miles, a perpetually unfolding journey to mecca, year after year.

Sedan roof racks sport crash pads, cargo vans with built-in kitchens, mini-RVs and pull along trailers, all adorned with an ornamental myriad of stickers promoting peace, climbing, and intentional homelessness by high school and college graduates who prefer the challenge of climbing a rock than a corporate ladder.

It’s a simple life, focused almost entirely on improving the mind and body for just one purpose –to climb harder. Some people climb one day on, one day off; some two days on, and then rest. Some come for just a few days or one week and push themselves to the limit, climbing four or five days straight which inevitably results in a donation of blood to the granitic god who turns crimson to brown; fingers taped, muscle tissue torn, wrapped, and bandaged.

Silhouetted against the midnight flames are animated bodies whose legs, arms, and fingers retell the epic battle of the day, each move accompanied with the sounds of explosive release, cries of pain, and ultimate victory. The dances by fire light are the retelling of battles lost or won not with an enemy, but with an ancient companion whose uplifted magma chamber eroded into the perfect training ground for the climber’s soul.

… and into the Canyon
One week ago I returned from an eight days backpacking trip with the Grand Canyon Field Institute for which Christa is a founding instructor some fifteen years ago.

I cannot fully describe the intense learning experience coupled with the phenomenal beauty of the north rim of the Grand Canyon where we carried heavy packs through more than 12,000 feet elevation loss and gain. It is the sharp contrasts from rim to river, the rich, exposed geologic and dynamic human histories that create such a compelling, raw story.

An Open Book
Nowhere else on this planet can one witness such an open book to so many years of history, from the ruins of mining expeditions just decades past to the bedrock formations 1.7 billion years old. In this place Christa wove a story eight days and at the same time 4.6 billions years long as we hiked from the rim down through limestone, sandstone, shale, and confusing mixtures of all three that tell an incomplete story of mountains rising and falling, rivers flowing east and then west only to be temporarily blocked by volcanic eruptions. Ultimately, the Grand Canyon was formed, yet even today the full story remains elusive.

I grasp what I saw through the magnifying lens, the shapes of ancient trilobite tracks, crinoids, worms, and brachiopods, but even after three years of exploring the Southwest with Christa, whose profession it is to teach geology, archeology, and paleontology, my brain struggles to fathom the one variable that makes all things possible—time. I am overwhelmed by consideration for the quantity of creatures that must have lived and died in the ancient oceans to build a thousand feet or more of the standing limestone cliffs, now painted red in flood by the overlying, frozen sand dunes and river floodplains.

To Thunder River, Tapeats, and Deer Creek
Out of the limestone comes rivers. Not just seeps, trickles or flows, but rivers that pour from slits and mouths and gaping caves of limestone walls, rain water filtered through overlying layers reaches an impasse and moves instead horizontally. These rivers gain volume, momentum and pressure, and—with time—emerge from underground caverns and caves to refract the rays of the high noon desert sun. At the base of the falls are cottonwoods, juniper, maidenhair ferns, grasses, and pools of water that have not for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years run dry.

We found refuge there, as did the Native Americans in decades and centuries past, for our needs have not changed so much in the intervening generations that we cannot appreciate something so incredible, authentic, and rare. It is good that our inventions have not replaced in us the basic appreciation of pure water and cool air.

We hiked beneath Thunder Falls and up Tapeats Creek where we found a living cave rich with stalagmites, stalactites, and an underground river thirty feet wide and a few deep; to the muddy brown Colorado River and to Deer Creek where the Piute dead pass back into the underworld through the narrow, winding water way. We came back up more than six thousand feet by way of Surprise Valley and a sandstone plateau where driving rains drove those of us without a tent to the shelter of the sandstone ledges.

Each evening Christa read to us—stories from the river, the Hopi, the Mormon settlers, and those not of books but of the rocks and stones themselves for they have recorded the coming and going of entire continents afloat on a semi-molten goo. If only I could learn the Latin names of plants, the age of the rocks, and the lineage of the peoples who have made this place their home as easily as I memorize the speed of a new processor or interconnect fabric, I could tell you a more complete story. For now, my photos will have to do.

Sadly, only for a few days each year do I go without cell phone or internet connection. But these days I cherish most, for my mind is no longer concerned with the timing of things, the overlapping conference calls, nor the financial health of my company. It seems then, during these brief, true vacations, that if every microwave oven, cell phone and TV, if every embedded CPU and laptop on the planet would spontaneously disappear, the world would be a slightly better place.

Thank you Hank, Midge, Steve, David, and Christa for a most educational, light hearted, and enjoyable time.

Last night, after writing the post Spirit of the Wind I drove to Tempe to see “Once”, the Irish musical. A movie well done. Simple, elegant story telling. An art all but lost in American film. I then drove to Arizona on the Rocks at 90th and Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd to climb. When I left the gym an hour later at six in the evening I looked to the North and was thrilled to witness the entrance of the powerful companion to the wind, the feared and cherished desert rain.

Its face was two, maybe three thousand feet tall, cloaked by an omnious hood reaching out and over a mile of its intended path. The leading edge was a translucent mixture of white, blue, falling to gray. The solid mass that fell from the back of the hood to the desert floor was an impenetrable black, momentarily illuminated by strokes of lightning within. The mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree were completely masked and invisible.

I jumped on the freeway and then off again at Pima just a few exits later. One mile from Carefree highway, the water touched my windshield as counted drops. By the time I turned East on Carefree, the rain drove sideways and the road was overtaken at all but the most subtle crossings, native topsoil mixed with gravel moved as liquid, white and yellow painted boundaries all but obscured.

The rain did not just fall, It came down with bold intent. The aroma of wet creosote entered my car through the vents. There is no smell that touches me like that of the desert in rain. The outside temperature dropped from 103 to 85 in less than ten minutes, and then into the seventies.

At the “Y”, I went to the left and north toward Seven Springs. The temperature continued to drop. Seventy five. Seventy one. Sixty eight. Sixty five. The sun was setting. And the spirit of the wind had handed its torch to the spirit of the rain.

While I continued along the mixed paved and gravel road to Seven Springs, the wall of water moved south. But it never made it past Camelback Mountain nor the McDowells nor even much beyond Pinnacle Peak, from what I could discern the next morning through my exploration by vehicle and by foot. My brother confirmed that not a drop fell in the heart of Phoenix less than thirty miles south of where I Carefree was overwhelmed, the concrete and blacktop and pool decks once again the victor in the battle for supremacy in this drying, dying place.

At the Seven Springs camp ground I moved to the passenger side of my car, dropping the seat back and the windows open to allow a few drops to fall on my arms and face. I fell to sleep quickly and slept well, the sound of the rain upon the metal roof of my mobile shelter slowing to a mist well after midnight.

This morning I awoke as the sun rose to the green that only a recently wetted desert can paint. Not forest green nor apple green, but a florescent green that appears to glow from inside of the creosote, prickly pear, sage, and grasses.

I entered the gravel road on the far side of the park and headed north and east for a little over twenty miles, reminded of how much incredible beauty exists just outside the reach of the Phoenix wasteland. High desert plateaus and deep, heavily wooded canyons bounded by distant, purple peaks that rise and fall. Four Peaks to the immediate south. Weaver’s Needle beyond that.

With the choice of east to I-17 or west to the Verde river, I returned to Seven Springs, Cave Creek, and then Bartlett Reservoir to swim before driving into the only remaining portion of the desert north of the McDowells not converted to a “desert lifestyle” by Troon or Del Webb.

I recalled Pinnacle Peak as it was when I was in college, where I often slept for a few hours atop spires of decomposing granite between long, intense days in the studio of my Industrial Design program at ASU. I recall one night clearly where I lay on my stomach and peered over the edge of one such rock to observe a half dozen coyotes feasting on the night’s kill. Their barking was intoxicating, the excitement of the feast echoing across the then, mostly unaltered desert floor.

I reached the saddle of the McDowells by foot just as the sun broke through the final remnants of the previous night’s storm and the temperature rose from the low nineties to the low hundreds. Back down the rolling double track to Jomax and Dynamite roads, across the reservation, to the 202, and Tempe where I now sip an iced tea, wishing I was again being tested by the spirit of the rain.

When I lived in Phoenix my final two years of high school and subsequent five years of college, I recall once or twice a storm of such incredible proportions that it invoked a sense of superstition, anthropomorphism giving voice to the wall of red sand that came in from the West.

photos by Dan Heim

This one thousand foot high curtain covered the Valley with intent, an ominous creature who year after year attempted to remove the pollution of this man-made anomaly. First the blasting sand to scour the buildings, cars, streets and manicured lawns. And then a torrential downpour to wash away the exfoliated skin of human creation, flooding streets, gullies, canals, and what remained of the natural washes and otherwise dry basins.

The evening news made victims of the people rescued by helicopter from the roof tops of their cars, having attempted to drive across a flooded roadway; and heroes of those who conducted the rescues. No one gave credit to this desert of ten thousand years whose implicit right it is to replenish herself not in subtlety, but in bold, dynamic flood.

It is a natural part of the ecosystem, an anticipated and joyous event that all but the modern city dwellers celebrate. Instead, they attempt to control it, ignoring that replacement of the original, fragmented and porous skin with concrete focuses and amplifies the run-off into unnatural channels ill equipped to deal with the volume. Two college degrees rendered useless in a single night as both civil engineers and weatherman Valley wide lowered their heads in shame, realizing they knew very little and could control even less.

In the subsequent years, however, the average, ambient night time temperature has increased by nearly ten degrees and the perpetual column of rising, hot air literally obliterates the moisture bearing clouds.

Two nights ago the desert unexpectedly came to life. I could smell the dust rising and an excited electrical charge. In the distance, beyond South Mountain, a few lightning strikes confirmed my body’s response to a childhood recollection. The spirit of the wind had returned.

In a matter of minutes, the visibility dropped to less than one hundred feet. I could not discern the color of the house across the street and traffic at the end of the block was visible only by the halo of head lamps emitted from cautious cars. My brother was nearly lost coming home from just one mile away, the corner street signs invisible.

I ran out to close the windows of my car and enjoyed the rocking motion for a few minutes as the wind erupted in seemingly random gusts. Back inside my parent’s home, the single pane, steel framed windows were no match for the fine particles which coated floor, furniture, and lungs.

Queen Creek, to the south of the Superstition Mountains was hammered with rain, the temperature dropping from 108F to seventy-something in just twenty minutes. Beyond South Mountain, just fifteen miles from downtown, it rained for an hour. But in downtown Phoenix the rain never came, void of the smell of moisture which usually accompanies this monsoon wind. The column of amplified heat was an impenetrable barrier that even ten thousand years of wisdom could not defeat.

Every year it gets hotter. Every summer, the average night time low and the number of nights which remain above 90F increase. Every year the rain moves further away from the heart of this place, depriving the residents of the very reason they moved here, a place of stark contrast and harsh, surprising beauty.

Only the ghosts of generations prior recall the cooler nights in the desert and smile for they know that some day, by subtlety or by bold flood, this place will be reclaimed and the rains restored.

Friends, Family, & Foe Ho, ho, ho,

Twas the day before the night before Christmas,
and across the Navajo rez I sped.
My beloved Subaru injured,
my fuel economy dead.

On 3 cylinders I drove,
the number 2 spark plug lame;
sputtering from Moab to Phoenix
into the Staats family lane.

Grandpa, Grandma,
brother, mother, and dad;
the great dane so large
remaining asleep on her pad.

We talked, we laughed,
we cried a bit too,
for times were a chang’n
this family askew.

Grandpa’s got cancer,
my father a cold,
the dog’s farts smell someth’n aweful,
and I’m start’n to feel old.

After church services one, two, seems like four,
we prayed to God, “Please, no more!”
Stand up! Sit-down! Wake up! Sing that!
‘How do church-goers ever get so fat?’

I awoke this morning
to sleigh bells in the yard,
my father like his father
playing Santa too hard.

Dreams of robots and movie scripts,
sci-fi gravity tossed;
my shut-eye wonder land
disrupted and lost.

I walked from my brother’s house
to my parents’ next door.
My mother laughed at my hair;
then we gathered on the floor.

Magnets, tea,
books, licorice, and dice;
we exchanged boxes, opened stockings
everything so nice.

The dog now sports a bandana,
my grandfather new slippers and chair.
My mother a zippered sweater
and I an Oakley cap to wear.

The dog ran off
with a ribbon and nearly consumed a shoe,
my brother quickly scolded
for something he didn’t do.

Some things will never change
some things will be new.
Just glad to be with family
for this Christmas too.

w/Love,
kai

Yesterday I drove from Rifle, Colorado to Moab where it has been raining off/on for 3 days. In the low ’80s the temperature was fantastic and the rock surprisingly sticky. I climbed with 3 guys from Carolinas and the locals who came in droves from 6 till what I assume was 9 pm. Big Bend their local, outdoor gym.

I headed South at 8:30 that same night and was overwhelmed by the most magnificent electrical storm I have ever experienced. It extended from Monticello to Blanding, and nearly to Bluff. Heavy, thick, black clouds that threw bolts to the ground every 10-15 seconds, never more than 30 seconds without a series of flashes for a contiguous two hours. There were dozens of horizontal whips of electricity that shot from one prominent underpinning of a cloud to the next, the fire produced similar to that between two or three CDs placed in the microwave oven.

I celebrated my front row seat to this masterpiece with Vivaldi’s flute concertos. I pulled onto a gravel road and faced my car East into the panoramic heart of this living, breathing creature. I literally clapped at the finale of a burst of strikes on three sides of me and above at the same time. Secretly, I hoped it would strike me car just to see what it was like. But when one such bolt came far too close, that desire was satisfied.

At Bluff, I was on the edge of its unfolded wings, the moon breaking through the sharp border where the storm stopped and the clear night sky began. I slept in my car just between Bluff and Mexican Hat, on the pull-out to the road that winds up and up and up the cliff. I wanted to return to where we had camped before our float trip, high on the cliffs West and North of Bluff, but was concerned that if the storm made it this far South, I could find trouble on those dusty roads.

The storm lost its power in pursuit of me, but the memory of it will remain for a very long time.

I was watching the 10 o’clock news at my Grandparents farm in Iowa last night (my one dose of TV for the year). The TOP STORY was an interview with a “homeland security expert” who claimed something really bad was going to happen soon and could happen in Iowa.

When asked what and why, he said (and I quote), “Well, we’re getting pretty close to the election now and you see, the Al Qaeda may attack Iowa because, well you know, we produce all the corn and beans. We’re the source of the food for the U.S. and they would want to disrupt that.” Following a question about what to do to help prevent attacks, he concluded, “Be very wary of strange things your home town and do not be afraid to report suspicious activity to the police.”

You have got to be kidding. No name. No title. No job. Just “homeland security expert”. What? Are 10,000 militant extremists wearing John Deere baseball caps, blue jeens, and basketball shoes with loose laces to drive through rural Iowa in Dodge Caravans saying things like, “Ya think she’s gonna rain?” in order to burn 10,000,000 square miles of fields and blow up grain elevators?

Racing along Wyoming grasslands and South Dakota forest boundary with sun setting to my left, the full moon rising to my right, breaking over multiple, distant grass covered, raised earthen shelves and sand cliffs; fence posts, and glistening barbed wire. Stopped abruptly to capture the moon on digital film, another car on the other side stopped to watch the sun set, clouds on fire on the horizon, burning yellow, orange, and eventually deep red.

Winding up and round into the Black Hills, North bound on HW85. Peaked at more than 6,000 feet, the temperature quickly dropped from the high fifties to 43F. The scent of pine entering my car through the fresh air laden vents. A camp fire at canyon bottom, river side camp ground invoked a smile as I assumed someone was also melting chocolate and marsh mellows between graham crackers.

Twisting round and round, down the canyon, the trees rising higher, split only for moments by white sand cliffs and small open fields whose condensation touched blades of grass reflected the full moon light. I raced by in my Subaru pulling hard around corners, remembering to accelerate, not brake. A good challenge, to program a physiological response to the opposite of that which is autonomous and seemingly logical.

At the intersection of HW85 and Alt14 which splits left to Spearfish, my birth place, and right to Lead, I noticed a hand painted, carved wooden sign showcasing cabins and tent sites. Were it not for anti-lock breaks, I would have enjoyed a brief spin as I turned hard to the left and applied ample pressure to the brake pedal, returning to the cabin property and entry. I dimmed my headlights and drove nearly silently deeper into the compound, in search of the camp host.

At the very back, where a single mercury vapor yard lamp illuminated a small portion of the property, I noted an open interior door through which the screen door cast warmer yellow light to the walkway. Inside, I tripped over a pair of sandals, entry rug, and nearly fell on to the dog who was too tired (or old) to take notice. The woman at the counter seemed pleased to rent a cabin at that late hour and I was thrilled to find something so perfectly situated at the bottom of the canyon where I was born, on the creek whose unique babble I believe I can recognize from any other in the world. Shallow, even, crisp, and over large, moss covered and smooth fist to head-sized boulders which dislodge once in a while and tumble just once or twice, emitting the deep reverberation of a small underwater collision.

The single room cabin greeted me with the flicker of a flame in the corner gas stove and the wonderful smell of untreated pine. Not one square inch was left without raw wood. The ceiling too covered in tongue-n-groove. I pressed my thumbnail into a piece to demonstrate that it was neither preserved with lacquer, stain, nor even water seal. Just pine. I could not help but smile, for the aroma of that wonderful wood has that effect on me.

I walked to the other side of the drive, plastic fork and kung-pow tofu delight from Wild Oats in hand, purchased in Fort Collins five hours earlier. I erected an overturned lawn chair just inches from the edge of Spearfish Creek, tightened my fleece jacket, and ate.

And then I listened and watched. Even at 10 pm, by the light of the single yard lamp mixed with the rising moon (which just broke the tree tops of the canyon walls, given me the opportunity to watch it rise twice in one night), I could easily enjoy both the surface and submerged features of the creek. Sticks, leaves, and other natural debris swiftly moved by.

I was briefly reminded of Siddhartha’s exploration of his world and the man who lived by the river, surviving, even thriving on what it randomly delivered. I wondered how long I would sit there before the river would bring something to me.

And then I felt more than I did hear something move behind me. When I turned, two white tail deer had crossed half of the yard, now perfectly and fully illuminated by the yard lamp. The lead deer stared at me, attempting to determine who or what I was, its ears moving as radar dishes concerned for enemy approach.

I retracted my eye contact and slowly turned away again, hoping it would not panic. To my surprise, the deer sneezed, it’s head bobbed vertically. It stopped, moved its front hoof forward and then back again, and sneezed even louder. At this, the both turned and bounded back to the roadside.

It appears they are not interested in my zesty tofu.