Man, how I wish I'd kept up with Turquoise Sun during this last year. Just thinking back on some of the epics we had...block break five was borrowing Shelby's Jeep and laying waste to the national parks of Utah, camping waaay out in the Grand Staircase in the frigid February desert air under the bright Milky Way. There was the day Vail reopened, block break seven, after being closed for a week and being continuously dumped on, floating on about three feet of freshies. Hucking cliffs became a leap and a bounce as the powder just caught us so perfectly. There were days spent climbing at Shelf Road, Garden of the Gods, and afternoon outings to Red Rocks Canyon. There was Feed the Rocks, an amazing show put on at Red Rocks Amphitheater featuring Shpongle, RJD2, and The Disco Biscuits. And I remember May 11th, skipping class to go ski A-Basin with a friend and finding ourselves thigh-deep in fresh powder on the East Wall, an area of hike-to terrain that they open just about every other year, and only for a week or so at that!
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| A pensive Hank Weaver |
For all these adventures, spring break takes the cake. My cousin Ari (see my posts from Israel) came to visit as the tail end of his break and the start of mine aligned. Climbing it was. We did some multi-pitch sport climbing in Clear Creek Canyon outside of Golden, and spent a day at Shelf. Weekend rolls through, Ari hits the road, and I meet up with my trusty pal, Hank Weaver (see right).
The plan is as such: we have a group of friends mob-camping at Zion National Park in Utah and have a ride back to CC should we get out there. Then there was the matter of getting out there. The easy way would be to hitch down I-70, probably find a ride clean through if we got lucky, and get there in no time. But like screw that, we wanted to have fun.
We began thumbing it at the same place as last time, and even got a ride from one of the same people, this bartender who lived way out in Florissant, Colorado, a bit west of Divide. The first day we were hoping to make it to Buena Vista area, but we cleared that in no time and made it all the way to Alamosa. A great start! Some of our more interesting rides that day: three goth girls who dropped us off in the middle of a sandstorm in the San Luis Valley, pot farmers from Crestone who sold us a half-zip for $30, a bunch of foreign ski employees who worked at Taos, NM, an avid disc golfer, and a gun-toting, ATV-riding, Christian who gave us our initial lift out of the Springs. We spent the night in some rinky-dink motel in Alamosa, smoking a bit, taking a bath, and just reveling in the freedom that came with the road.
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| Caught in a dust storm a few miles outside Moffat, Colorado. Sangre de Cristos in the background |
Getting a ride out of Alamosa in the morning proved to be a bit more difficult than expected. A true Japhy Ryder, Hank was a great asset to catching rides. The kid would be off dancing, bending over backwards for cars and I'd be doing handstands, and sure enough, a man driving a Subaru picked us up and off we went, up into the San Juans, out of that horrid valley. We got let off in the beautiful South Fork, Colorado, nestled at the eastern slope of the San Juans. Man, what a beautiful moment. A cop passed us a few times and then pulled over to chat with us. We told her we were going to Utah and she wished us luck. After a bit, a man named Wes from Durango gave us a lift clear across Wolf Creek Pass, the snowiest part of the state. Now Wes was one of those truly great characters that gave us a lot of hope, truly a homie. He runs a massive grow-op and was coming back from dropping 20lbs of nuggets off in Aspen. When we arrived to Durango, he bought us some beer and we drank a few by the River Animas, the River of Souls.
It was about noon at this point and we were making incredible time. We caught a few more rides west on US-160, through Cortez, all the way out to the Four Corners Monument, which closed about 15 minutes before we got there...unfortunate. And there we were, looking around at the bleak Southwestern desert, surrounded on all sides by various Indian Reservations (Ute, Southern Ute, and Navajo), with not a car on the road. Figured we might be here a while...
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| Sunshine daydream at the Four Corners Monument |
It's never the tourists who gave us rides. Not once. Usually we rode in the back of pickup trucks, sometimes an SUV, and only once in a sedan. The man who picked us up from Four Corners never said a word to us, we just got in the back of his pickup, and off we went. Enter the Navajo Nation, arguably the last true stronghold of native life. Imaginably so, they don't really take kindly to white folk, so we a bit on edge the whole time. He let us off at a trading post, written on it: Mexican Water, Arizona. I went inside and was met with stares. Riiight. So we walked a bit down the highway, and it was getting dark at this point, so we ducked a barbed-wire fence and made into the desert night. We stealth camped among these incredible rock formations, perfectly hidden from everything. Although I was a little afraid of waking up without a scalp on, we managed through the night.
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| Shiprock formations outside Kayenta, Arizona |
Morning came, day three on the road, and it was more of the same: back of pickup trucks, no words spoken. From Mexican Hat to Red Mesa to Kayenta to the junction with Route 98 and from there to a trading post outside Inscription House, most of the way to Utah. It was truly inspiring watching the Painted Desert pass by our eyes from truck beds, feeling the dry, chilled air wrap around us like a chrysalis. We hung out at the trading post for a bit, some kid gave us free cupcakes even. Then the coolest shit went down. This man, call him Leheigh (that's his name, yeah), picked us up and started driving north towards Kaibito, realized we weren't from around there, and decided to show us his family's land (totally cool with us). After establishing some trust, he took us down a series of dirt roads near Inscription House and soon we were staring at his family's ancestral canyon, about half the size of the Grand Canyon and lined with beautiful sandstone cliffs. The canyon weaved north all the way to Lake Powell. And we could say, with confidence, that very, very few white people have ever seen this canyon. It has always been on Navajo land and was hidden enough that nobody would find it without knowing it was there.
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| Leheigh's ancestral canyon near Inscription House, Arizona |
We smoked a doobie with him and talked about spirituality and what it means to be a Navajo. He told us all sorts of things, mostly forgotten at this point, but one that stuck with me was, as we passed by this truly magnificent desert spire, he began talking about the Skinwalkers. Skinwalkers are, according to Navajo lore, people who possess the ability to transform into animals. He told us there were skinwalkers in that canyon (points) and that we would be best to not bother exploring on foot really anything in the Navajo nation. Seriously, check this out if you have time...pretty crazy (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin-walker). He then told us about the great balance that exists in nature, and that for someone to be truly good, there has to be someone who is truly evil. After a pretty mind-blowing car ride, Leheigh dropped us off in Kaibito, where we caught a ride with this lady and her two kids all the way to Page in her sedan. That was the only "awkward" ride where we felt a bit out of place. But a ride's a ride, and air conditioning was great. She let us off on the far side of the bridge over the Colorado River, and man, what a place! Arizona was in the books, Utah loomed ahead of us. We quickly got a ride from a man going exactly where we were going. His name was Bob and he was an architect in Kanab, Utah—quite the life he's living, eh? He was coming back from the airport in Page after visiting his girlfriend or something. He gave us a lift an extra 15 minutes to Mount Carmel Junction, where we had planned to meet up with our friends. And that was that for hitchhiking across the southwest.
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| There was writing all over this guard rail from previous hitchhikers, some dating back to the sixties |
That evening, our friends came from Zion NP, picked us up, and off we went towards Bryce Canyon and the Grand Staircase National Monument. I knew of the greatest campsite from my previous block break and convinced the crew to base-camp there for a few days. There were nine of us, adventurous young lads in the desert. There was a dog and a shotgun and a lot of booze and even more pot. It was truly one of the greatest moments of my life. We found a grove with a lot of dead trees, towed them using manpower, and lit a fire that must have been visible for miiiles. And the kicker is there was no one else to see it; we were truly out there in the Monument!
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| Shotgun safari out the window, rabbit down, skinned, and grilled |
We spent the next few days frolicking around at Bryce Canyon, climbing and tromping around hoodoos, seeing God, and really, really enjoying ourselves. We spent a day bouldering and slot canyoneering near Escalante, Utah. That was pretty rad.
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| Peek-a-boo slot canyon |
The time finally came to head back to CC, and off we went. Mission accomplished. Truly, I'm in love with the deserts of the Southwest, and I'm overjoyed with the possibilities that having a car this year bring. I'll definitely be back to the Staircase.
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| Myself perched amongst the snowy hoodoos at Bryce |
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