12.09.19
We’d flown over the English Channel and landed at Heathrow and taken a bus to another part of the airport and then back when we realized we only needed to walk down the terminal to the connection flight and then over the Atlantic ocean with the stale ambiance and white noise of airplane fans and the occasional outburst from an unhappy child and then we were walking through customs in Los Angeles after negligible amounts of sleep, standing in lines with scores of exhausted souls who just wanted a bed; inching through the checkpoints to stand in another bus that crawled through a sort of Blade Runner maze in the recent wild-fire haze of the valley that stopped at a rental car company with chipped formica and sweat-stains where we threw everything into a minivan and headed to a small hotel on the northeast outskirts. We took showers; almost too tired to care. Everything was mechanical and pragmatic and slow-motion and then we were sprawled on a simple box-spring and Hanne told me how expensive a full box-spring is in Switzerland and I smiled and slept and woke and drove.
And then we were in Wrightwood. Over a year later. After what had been a separate sort of time altogether, when we made our first tepid steps together on the Pacific Crest Trail and we’d camped just above the sleepy town on a cold night in the woods on a sloping bed of pine needles and called “Goodnight” from separate tents for the last time and ambled down the Acorn Trail in the morning toward the promise of real coffee and sat on the deck of the cafe and talked with a couple visitors and resupplied down the street and played Connect Four over beers and burgers. It was a different trail altogether after Wrightwood and we wanted to see it. Smell it. Feel it.
And then we were back at the same cafe and the same two girls were working there and we sat stunned. The same man was working at the supply shop too and we perused all the 2019 registries that’d come through. After what had been a year of such immense challenge and magic and love and loss…another group came through right on cue filled with their own dreams and experiences. The trail provides; sometimes long after the trail is ‘finished’. In reality, the PCT is never finished. You’re never officially "return" and there’s always an invisible trail stretched out in front of you.
We parked in a little motel cabin that was nearly glorious in its cozy dimensions compared to the previous night and by all other accounts and walked back toward the old Acorn Trail where we’d crossed paths with our Czech friend Petre who was on the trail with his girlfriend Pavlina who we’re still in semi-regular contact with and made it up to the PCT junction where it headed north toward Mt Baden-Powell and rested there with a few snacks by a campground and came back down in the smell of the pines and ate at the same Mexican restaurant where we’d sat next to Cougar and Hurricane. My God. Right across from where we’d sat and done little more than exchange a few remarks on trail conditions and laughed and wished each other luck and now I was sitting there with the same glass of merlot and street tacos, weighing about ten more pounds more than 2018 and shaking my head. “I can’t believe it.”
In the morning we made a short walk up and around some houses across the main road and dropped the key and headed out for Bishop. We were still jet-lagged and groggy and rolled into town and found the motel and dropped our things again and went back out to explore the town that had marked another major crux on the journey. We’d come over Kearsarge Pass with Freebird after nine days in the snow, summiting Whitney around 6 a.m. and losing our wits in the post-holes after Forrester Pass. It had been a real trudge but we made it out and hitched in from Independence and stayed at the The Hostel California and gotten the news from home. From that point on, it was different trail. A different life. Again.
We tried to push through to Sonora pass but kept backtracking and losing our bearings and by Smedberg lake we called it quits and hurried back to catch another series of hitches to Reno where we bought a rental car and sped down to Sedona where I said goodbye, where she told me to ‘finish the trail no matter what’, and after that, it wasn’t this thing where I expected to finish and casually make my way back to Arizona and help with the ongoing recovery or move on with our lives. It was a turning point, where everything fell out from under my feet and the best I could do was dictate in a sort of romanticized sterility in a series of journal entries what I thought I was experiencing for the next few months. This documentation would eventually become a book which I wonder about in terms of the outright exposure it allowed. It was meant for friends and family but it became another thing…as it happens, but it is above all things in the end, an homage.
We ate at the same brewery where we’d shared dinner with Freebird and looked around at all the climbers in the midst of the late-fall season, all colors and gesticulations and climber-talk and alive. I'd been bouldering for a few months myself and top-roping with Hanne and couple friends in Zurich at the gym and reacquainted myself with the whole thing and found myself wanting to climb somehow, but we didn’t have time. We brought our shoes, but Bishop climbers are a different breed and the town, for its reputation, had only one small climbing room that we could find and we had no crash-pads so we went instead toward Death Valley and took an unexpected right back toward the Whitney Portal and curled up toward the trailhead and briefly pondered the logistics of making an ascent the next day from the east side but that too, was another beast and a two-day adventure that we weren’t exactly geared for…so we bowed our heads and convinced ourselves it was 'ok' and that Death Valley and Telescope Peak would be great either way and we curled back down and across the desert into the great pastel and canyon space that goes on and on and eventually (after much to-do about appropriate roads for rental cars) we found a campsite that wasn’t too busy and made a small fire and pitched the old Hilleberg and popped the stoves and wine and sat their in the ever-increasing cold and talked about everything.
In the morning we woke early in the frigid shadows and left the minivan in the campsite and started walking up toward Telescope Peak which was a pretty good-sized thing to summit from just above sea level and took us a few hours and was particularly tough on the lungs just below the top. We passed a few other hikers…we still call them ‘day hikers’ even though that’s what we essentially are a year later, traipsing up a line of dirt and a few switchbacks and taking lots of photos and eating lunch with pepper-jack and crackers and fruit and salami before turning around toward the afternoon sun where you could still see Whitney in the far distance under a line of smoke and it was glorious. I had official blisters after one good hike over a year later when I hadn’t gotten more than two the entire PCT. The sage was lighting up and the old dry flowers on their tops glowed alongside the tall dry stalks of grass above endless pastel configurations of raised sandstone and other sedimentary layers that arched and dipped like raw paint dripping on canvass. This is where I’m from essentially: The high desert. When I can look straight ahead for a good fifty miles I feel ok. I think we both do. It’s the long gaze that engenders some kind of perspective; looking through time, seeing the centuries on top of each other saying “Either way, It’s going to be ok.”
And we drove down through the canyon after that, deep down into the valley itself where the tourists and busloads where darting about until we wound up on a patch of dirt at the far end of a lot where we could see the stars and set the stoves right down in front of us while we sat cross-legged in the warm night wind and talked about Space. The one above and the one around us, relative to the hustle and bustle and general automated mindlessness of cities.
We had to drive the next day. Lots of miles; all the way up to Utah and the Great Basin until we snuck into Zion just in time for a smooth sunset hike along Taylor Creek and up some switchbacks that ran through Kolob Canyon and ended at a great sandstone overlook offering views deep into the timeless contours and blazing lines of yellow Cottonwoods below. Little magical things make you slow down. The shoulders relax. A deep sigh. You’ve been here before. It’s in your DNA. This land. These sunsets. The smell of the creosote. The smell after a monsoon. Something you can’t own yet always find yourself silently moving toward.
In the morning we took the tram (the only access up the canyon) with its broken loudspeakers blaring something unintelligible about safety or history or squirrels and climbed up toward Angel's Landing. Now, I’d read all about Angel’s Landing and had no real fear of heights. Or I should say, it wasn’t acute. It was more unpredictable than a pathology. Vertigo had more to do with my stomach at the end of the day. Hanging from walls all roped-in-cozy was fun. Even falling from the top of a route in the bouldering room was usually no big deal, but when we got the Angel’s Landing and I saw the scale of what it actually was, something said “No” that morning. We’d crawled up a few hundred meters to test it out of course, giving my rational side some time to acclimate, but as I was pulling myself up with the old chain link rail I made the mistake of looking down to my left, and seeing the 1,000 foot glass drop down off the sandstone a foot from my shoes into the canyon below did something to my brain in a way that left me feeling exposed long after we retreated to the safety of the canyon floor. Something wasn’t right. Later that week we read a girl had fallen to her death on the route a day after we left. While about 300,000 people make the half mile out and back on the razorback line each year, it wasn’t to be and I beat myself up about it all day, trying to rationalize my decision while retaining some pride and understand why I’d suddenly felt that way. “Was it ego? It’s something to do with ego isn’t it. Fear of death. But it’s the amygdala. It’s not rational. It’s an irrational trigger… isn’t it? Come on man, just do it. No. Don’t do it.” Either way, after we retreated we took up another trail with more 500+ foot vertical drops carved into the side of the cliff walls and it felt fine.
We had lunch at a good lookout point about the whole plateau where there weren’t any tourists. Generally, if you want to avoid tourists, just keep walking. Most of them give up after about a mile. So I sat there with my pepper jack sandwich trying to rationalize something that wouldn’t be rationalized just then. All I could say was “Another day.” And we sauntered back down into the throngs and down the cliffs and into the canyon and after some more philosophy on the drawbacks and merits of fear, we got back into the minivan and headed toward Bryce; stopping halfway for a night in Richfield. The drive was good. I honestly enjoy a long-scenic drive with the right music. Something about my younger days, heading solo into Colorado just to take a look at things. Driving up the California Coast or anywhere in the Southwest really. It’s a an American tradition. A rite of passage, that old Road-Trip. There’d been lots of them and here we were in the middle of another. We drove through fields and canyons and passes and lakes and would up in this place, which had a solid Mormon vibe to it and had dinner and reflected on the day. “Something American here. I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this.” Hanne raised her eyebrows. “I know…I know.” Sometimes it’s just a feeling you get somewhere. It wasn't Mormon land or any land per se. Every town has its own vibe and I’d always been drawn to this sort of mid-century, small-town easy-going thing. I was never impressed by the size, scale, or sounds of big cities. I’d tried it out a few times and really had a hard time figuring out what the point was. What was the need? The motive? The over-arching statement? It’s just people crammed together who want a certain level of convenience after all. We all do, but metro cities, these monsters of twisting roads and never-ending construction projects…they’re like entities, not places to live…and they smell bad…or they have no smell at all, which is even worse.
It was a quick morning with a resupply at the local supermarket and a lady in front of us at the drive-thru kiosk bought our coffees for us. This was nice. A simple gesture that typically never happened in Switzerland and how I loved Die Schweiz, but it had been nine months of almost non-stop Swissness that’d driven me far into the Alps and back into Zurich, over the trails, through the tunnels, on the trains, in the huts, learning the ins and outs and basically thinking “It’s perfect. It’s too perfect. It’s like I’m trapped in Disneyland.” And I wanted the regular old biscuits-n-gravy and scuffed shoes and I didn’t want it to matter what year my jacket was manufactured. I don’t come from this set of values and I found myself listening to lots of “one person and a guitar music” and working with clay and doing stuff that let me feel just a little more human at the end of the day. Then there were things that I missed, but at the cowboy diner outside Bryce Canyon that morning I couldn’t remember what it was. I just wanted to breathe in the smell of the pines and the dirt and the bad coffee and speak English.
There’s a few ways to experience Bryce: There’s different trails that go down and and return to the rim or cross the whole thing or stay up top by the roads overlooking from various angles. We decided to cross the floor of the canyon and climb back up and walk the rim trail back to the car. Again, after about a mile, we were the only ones around. The canyon itself isn’t that massive, but it takes a few hours to navigate and I think going down into it is the best way to appreciate the full scale of things. The spires themselves leave the mind in a ponderance. Like much of the geology of southern Utah, it’s easy to say words like ‘carved’ when you want to say ‘crafted’. Everyone’s first thought is “What did this?” even though the sign in front of you describes as much, and there they stand: a forgotten legion in the amphitheater like a museum exhibition while we hold our rectangle machines up and lower them and cover the screens with an open palm and look knowingly into the tiny copy of the real thing in front of us. Is there a reason to do this? To write about it? It’s tough to say. The Yosemite was slated for more development until Ansel Adams took his famous photos to Washington. Other people didn’t believe the words of John Muir and John Powell when they told them of the absolute grandeur of the West. I’ve heard stories of Europeans getting wacky out there with nothing to hold onto and no one around for hundreds of miles to break the silence.
We stop in a little store and buy a few more food items and blaze off down the road to Moab. Old Moab. Slickrock Moab right between Arches and Canyonlands. I can’t quite remember the Moab of my childhood although it'd been on the list of 'future places to be'. All the big names in mountain biking were there and my heroes back then were names like Ned Overend and Missy Giove. Now Moab was another full-scale enterprise with jeep tours and every other amenity for people to cruise in and kick up dust. This was all sacred ground before the internet. You only knew about Moab if you’d been through Moab or heard stories from someone who knew someone. You had to read books to know about certain places. The downside of the informational age is that all the ‘secret spots’ are no longer secret, but again: keep walking. Wake early, stay late. We hit Arches first and saw Delicate Arch before it got too crazy and headed further in to walk among the shadowed, hidden spots and crawl around where we weren’t supposed to and tried our hand at some bouldering above the soft sand and looked through great stone windows into other stone windows into the horizon and felt the cool evening air blowing through. Sometimes areas have a specific reason for being blocked, like reforestation endangered species, etc. Other times it's because more than one person was taking a selfie and fell over the backside of an arch and that was that.
We spent the whole day out there just wandering around with no particular strategy; just putting miles under our feet until the November sun went down and the cold crept in and we went back to the little motel and set up our stoves on the tile by the door and just ate whatever was in the box. Having the clothes strewn everywhere among the general chaos of pocket-knives, titanium cups, headlights, etc was pretty endearing. On the Trail we’d roll into town covered in dirt, exhausted to the bone, savoring those moments under the warm trickle of a half-working shower and watch the muddy water swirl into the drain. It meant running here and there, learning bus routes or hitching to laundromats or markets or outdoor supply stores and trying to update things for family and finds along the way. If we were lucky enough to have a motel, it looked like a bomb went off in REI, keeping with the whole vibe of near-constant re-organization and movement. Tents hung at the nearest hangable situation, drying off after taking a shower with you and food was discernible from the rest of the mess only once it was separated into smaller containers and put into another bag that would get smashed somewhere in the middle of the pack so you didn’t have to dig so deep during lunch and it didn’t strain the neck and shoulders for the few first days after resupply.
All these memories came flooding back as we made our way across the Great Basin and I surmised, as I have many time before, that I’m only really myself when I’m moving. Life makes sense when it’s moving around me, when I’ve got a different view than the day before. I’ve come to know what many thru-hikers find on the trail: That idea (of things being visually, permeably, viscerally different at least on a routine basis) forms the core of the traditional human experience. There are people that will tell you they never felt so ‘at home’ as when they were in the middle a long stretch without a single sign of human artifice for hundreds of miles. Neurosis (if I may counter Freud) doesn't come exclusively from repression, etc. Repression itself appears within the context of the modern milieu. It appers, at least to me, from a lack of engagement. And how better to engage than to move. Movement forms the basis of the whole idea.
And so we moved over to Canyonlands the next day, just across the highway (more or less) and crept quietly to the edge of the rim and down in on a fantastic loop that turned about at the end of another rim for a good ten or miles. Canyon country is difficult to describe owing to a scale that the human eye can't fully appreciate. Distance becomes a relative thing and perception shifts with the changing shadows and light that might coax the land to betray its true dimensions if you sit in the right spot and have an apple and watch. Again we found ourselves in the midst of that fragrant sage with its tangled roots anchored against the desert winds. It’s a strong plant, like most desert plants and animals…it delights upon the plateaus and slopes where it finds favor in all the available elements and we pick little tufts of it and hold it to our noses and smile at each other and climb back out of the canyon and walk back to the van and return to the inn for one more night.
Now we’ve seen what we came to see in Utah and we keep heading east because I have promised that the High Rockies are something every European needs to see at least once. Colorado is a home away from home and my heart has nothing but fond memories those adventures, namely in Silverton…that tiny row of buildings amidst the winter detritus and mud where you’ve got a few permanent residents. You can tell the lifers from the seasonal help without much difficulty. It’s one of the few places I imagined myself settling down eventually, even in those High Rockies. But first: Ouray - and Hanne laughs as we pass a banner saying “Welcome to the Switzerland of the U.S.” The only thing Swiss about Ouray is that it’s surrounded by snowy mountains which we aim to explore, but we come across the Ouray Loop Trail instead and it seems like a good way to experience things so off we go and climb up into the trees and start walking around the town into the forest over a fine catwalk that perches over a great gorge until the town disappears and we’re trudging through the dark shadowed woods along an old metal flume that snakes ominously through the canyon, and across the creek and back into the hills where the sun is just hanging over the western Rockies lighting up the grass in waves of gold beset by nestled mounds of melting snow. It winds up along the south side of town next to a waterfall that sprays down over a cliff-side turning the stone a dark grey and we take a short rest to its side, listening to the sound of the water cascade and find its way to another stream. Then it carves into the canyon wall and winds down into town and we decide it was a good hike and make our way toward burgers and a couple IPAS that have us reeling on account of the elevation and we nearly dance our way back to the motel and fall deep asleep.
And now, we head south over the icy passes, stopping for a good hike up a frozen trail toward a frozen creek below a frozen waterfall, across rock fields and snow fields, hanging onto the trunks of saplings and accidentally stumbling across a mountain lion den of sorts before staggering back down to explore the side creeks and returning in time to find Silverton, as she was when I left her…in the blue shadows of some frosty afternoon. We stop in at the coffee shop and ask if the Hostel is still there. “Oh yeah, same name, same place.” So we head down the street where I look inquisitive and a grizzly old fellow says: “Are you looking for the hostel.” “Yep.” “Well, it was here yesterday and it ain’t here today!” I’m not sure what this means and he’s forced to explain its recent acquisition by a new owner which happened about 24 hours before. “So you head on over to the inn right there and tell ‘em I sent you and they’ll give you the same rate.” “Ok. Thanks.” And we walk ten feet over to the inn where we are clearly the only ones staying for the night and are met by two good men and their old yellow dog who leans against me, or into me and I pivot against him while we go over the paperwork. The entire place was remodeled from its former glory as the premier whorehouse (one of twenty-six or so that lined the main road, leaving me wondering where the residents actually stayed) and was meticulously preserved in this period i.e. not a television in sight. My kind of spot. The walls were lined with books. Real books that real people could read. The stairs creaked and the other available shelves and counters were brimming with period antiques like typewriters and what-not. Hanne was enchanted and we both thought it was the perfect way to spend the night. The hostel had always been my go-to because I like the hostel vibe (unless its over-run by errant city kids) but this was much better and we cracked the window a hair and took showers and fell deep asleep.
Now, we rounded out the whole trip as we turned southwest and headed back down toward Monument Valley and the reservations. Long stretches with little houses dotting the sides of the road and distant hills.
We continued through until the great silhouettes came into focus. Such an iconic sight there along the highway; these sentinels in towering silence spread out amidst the sand and pale blue horizon. We stopped the car just to stare, while the hinged doors of an abandoned fry bread stand flapped in the breeze and barbed wire creaked along fence poles. You are truly ‘out there’ but not in the same sense as the PCT. Just way out there in the middle of the desert with the tumbleweeds and occasional car flying by with a cinematic pitch-bend. We inched closer until we found a campsite in a nearby canyon overlooking the hallowed shadows in the distance and I walked around a sandy trail behind some slick rock and crawled up on top a dome next to a small natural arch for a better view and looked at the man-made carvings etched in its surface denoting various years and relationships. “If these two married after they carved this…they’d both have kids in their thirties now. Huh…” And then we drove back out onto the desolate dirt roads where I tried some night photography without much success…
And the next day we arrived in the Verde Valley and walked along the old river and stayed a night on the farm with my step-dad and Denise and Hope and talked about our adventures and how I felt about bailing on Angel’s Landing and bobsledding and trying to come to terms with life after the PCT and what it all meant and all their stories and travels and what they did with that bear that kept killing the chickens.
We made a small fire in our underground lair that night and and woke and talked some more and bade farewell and headed north to Flagstaff where my sister lived with her family and watched the snow come down outside the great living room windows. It was full circle somehow.
Nothing had stopped since the PCT. As soon as I returned to Albuquerque I consciously started plotting my escape and that took up all my energy until I was in Zurich, wandering around Alps, taking German courses with refugees down the street and learning the right way to prepare fondue. In the morning I’d wake up and sit in the kitchen facing the little square below and try to transcribe all the journals from the trail one page at a time while listening to Gordon Lightfoot, America, Bread, Denver, Dylan…whatever we had around as kids. The point is that I didn’t really get to have a real conversation after that. I think everyone was still in a daze; still processing and coming to terms with a new reality.
We cooked and sat and shared and went out a few times. Hanne and I tried the local bouldering gym and decided American climbers were pretty tough. We could barely finish half the routes and it’s hard to do a new route on the fly without troubleshooting anyway so we messed around for a little bit and then drove down I-17 through buckets of rain and flash floods to Cave Creek to see my ex-stepfather Tom for a bit.
This was something that needed to be done after so many years. He’d been there during The Trail too, throwing in a few hundred bucks here and there. We sat in their well-lit adobe amidst the saguaros and creosote and rabbits and rain and talked over pasole and basically just tried to catch up as best as possible. Life takes so many detours…it’s hard to keep up. Hard to remember all the people that made up the fabric of your experience. I owed much of the support for cycling, my first century rides, planning my training regiments, acquiring my first Bianchi, joining teams etc to him in those few years when he was part of the family.
In the morning we left with a book about Jin Shin Jyitsu, an Asian healing method that had been brought over a few decades ago and extrapolated by his friend Peter Bigfoot who ran the Reevis Mountain School of Self Reliance north of Phoenix. It was a good and all-too-brief encounter before we headed back up to Flagstaff for Thanksgiving.
Hanne said "nothing Swiss, just a traditional American Thanksgiving", so that’s what we had. I was just thankful that I still had a family…after everything.
And then we were back on another plane for another 12 hours and another layover in Heathrow and what seemed like a week of jet-lag and more holiday dinners and rearranging and printing and publishing and…you know what?
I still just want to be on the trail again...
And then we were in Wrightwood. Over a year later. After what had been a separate sort of time altogether, when we made our first tepid steps together on the Pacific Crest Trail and we’d camped just above the sleepy town on a cold night in the woods on a sloping bed of pine needles and called “Goodnight” from separate tents for the last time and ambled down the Acorn Trail in the morning toward the promise of real coffee and sat on the deck of the cafe and talked with a couple visitors and resupplied down the street and played Connect Four over beers and burgers. It was a different trail altogether after Wrightwood and we wanted to see it. Smell it. Feel it.
And then we were back at the same cafe and the same two girls were working there and we sat stunned. The same man was working at the supply shop too and we perused all the 2019 registries that’d come through. After what had been a year of such immense challenge and magic and love and loss…another group came through right on cue filled with their own dreams and experiences. The trail provides; sometimes long after the trail is ‘finished’. In reality, the PCT is never finished. You’re never officially "return" and there’s always an invisible trail stretched out in front of you.
We parked in a little motel cabin that was nearly glorious in its cozy dimensions compared to the previous night and by all other accounts and walked back toward the old Acorn Trail where we’d crossed paths with our Czech friend Petre who was on the trail with his girlfriend Pavlina who we’re still in semi-regular contact with and made it up to the PCT junction where it headed north toward Mt Baden-Powell and rested there with a few snacks by a campground and came back down in the smell of the pines and ate at the same Mexican restaurant where we’d sat next to Cougar and Hurricane. My God. Right across from where we’d sat and done little more than exchange a few remarks on trail conditions and laughed and wished each other luck and now I was sitting there with the same glass of merlot and street tacos, weighing about ten more pounds more than 2018 and shaking my head. “I can’t believe it.”
In the morning we made a short walk up and around some houses across the main road and dropped the key and headed out for Bishop. We were still jet-lagged and groggy and rolled into town and found the motel and dropped our things again and went back out to explore the town that had marked another major crux on the journey. We’d come over Kearsarge Pass with Freebird after nine days in the snow, summiting Whitney around 6 a.m. and losing our wits in the post-holes after Forrester Pass. It had been a real trudge but we made it out and hitched in from Independence and stayed at the The Hostel California and gotten the news from home. From that point on, it was different trail. A different life. Again.
We tried to push through to Sonora pass but kept backtracking and losing our bearings and by Smedberg lake we called it quits and hurried back to catch another series of hitches to Reno where we bought a rental car and sped down to Sedona where I said goodbye, where she told me to ‘finish the trail no matter what’, and after that, it wasn’t this thing where I expected to finish and casually make my way back to Arizona and help with the ongoing recovery or move on with our lives. It was a turning point, where everything fell out from under my feet and the best I could do was dictate in a sort of romanticized sterility in a series of journal entries what I thought I was experiencing for the next few months. This documentation would eventually become a book which I wonder about in terms of the outright exposure it allowed. It was meant for friends and family but it became another thing…as it happens, but it is above all things in the end, an homage.
We ate at the same brewery where we’d shared dinner with Freebird and looked around at all the climbers in the midst of the late-fall season, all colors and gesticulations and climber-talk and alive. I'd been bouldering for a few months myself and top-roping with Hanne and couple friends in Zurich at the gym and reacquainted myself with the whole thing and found myself wanting to climb somehow, but we didn’t have time. We brought our shoes, but Bishop climbers are a different breed and the town, for its reputation, had only one small climbing room that we could find and we had no crash-pads so we went instead toward Death Valley and took an unexpected right back toward the Whitney Portal and curled up toward the trailhead and briefly pondered the logistics of making an ascent the next day from the east side but that too, was another beast and a two-day adventure that we weren’t exactly geared for…so we bowed our heads and convinced ourselves it was 'ok' and that Death Valley and Telescope Peak would be great either way and we curled back down and across the desert into the great pastel and canyon space that goes on and on and eventually (after much to-do about appropriate roads for rental cars) we found a campsite that wasn’t too busy and made a small fire and pitched the old Hilleberg and popped the stoves and wine and sat their in the ever-increasing cold and talked about everything.
In the morning we woke early in the frigid shadows and left the minivan in the campsite and started walking up toward Telescope Peak which was a pretty good-sized thing to summit from just above sea level and took us a few hours and was particularly tough on the lungs just below the top. We passed a few other hikers…we still call them ‘day hikers’ even though that’s what we essentially are a year later, traipsing up a line of dirt and a few switchbacks and taking lots of photos and eating lunch with pepper-jack and crackers and fruit and salami before turning around toward the afternoon sun where you could still see Whitney in the far distance under a line of smoke and it was glorious. I had official blisters after one good hike over a year later when I hadn’t gotten more than two the entire PCT. The sage was lighting up and the old dry flowers on their tops glowed alongside the tall dry stalks of grass above endless pastel configurations of raised sandstone and other sedimentary layers that arched and dipped like raw paint dripping on canvass. This is where I’m from essentially: The high desert. When I can look straight ahead for a good fifty miles I feel ok. I think we both do. It’s the long gaze that engenders some kind of perspective; looking through time, seeing the centuries on top of each other saying “Either way, It’s going to be ok.”
And we drove down through the canyon after that, deep down into the valley itself where the tourists and busloads where darting about until we wound up on a patch of dirt at the far end of a lot where we could see the stars and set the stoves right down in front of us while we sat cross-legged in the warm night wind and talked about Space. The one above and the one around us, relative to the hustle and bustle and general automated mindlessness of cities.
We had to drive the next day. Lots of miles; all the way up to Utah and the Great Basin until we snuck into Zion just in time for a smooth sunset hike along Taylor Creek and up some switchbacks that ran through Kolob Canyon and ended at a great sandstone overlook offering views deep into the timeless contours and blazing lines of yellow Cottonwoods below. Little magical things make you slow down. The shoulders relax. A deep sigh. You’ve been here before. It’s in your DNA. This land. These sunsets. The smell of the creosote. The smell after a monsoon. Something you can’t own yet always find yourself silently moving toward.
In the morning we took the tram (the only access up the canyon) with its broken loudspeakers blaring something unintelligible about safety or history or squirrels and climbed up toward Angel's Landing. Now, I’d read all about Angel’s Landing and had no real fear of heights. Or I should say, it wasn’t acute. It was more unpredictable than a pathology. Vertigo had more to do with my stomach at the end of the day. Hanging from walls all roped-in-cozy was fun. Even falling from the top of a route in the bouldering room was usually no big deal, but when we got the Angel’s Landing and I saw the scale of what it actually was, something said “No” that morning. We’d crawled up a few hundred meters to test it out of course, giving my rational side some time to acclimate, but as I was pulling myself up with the old chain link rail I made the mistake of looking down to my left, and seeing the 1,000 foot glass drop down off the sandstone a foot from my shoes into the canyon below did something to my brain in a way that left me feeling exposed long after we retreated to the safety of the canyon floor. Something wasn’t right. Later that week we read a girl had fallen to her death on the route a day after we left. While about 300,000 people make the half mile out and back on the razorback line each year, it wasn’t to be and I beat myself up about it all day, trying to rationalize my decision while retaining some pride and understand why I’d suddenly felt that way. “Was it ego? It’s something to do with ego isn’t it. Fear of death. But it’s the amygdala. It’s not rational. It’s an irrational trigger… isn’t it? Come on man, just do it. No. Don’t do it.” Either way, after we retreated we took up another trail with more 500+ foot vertical drops carved into the side of the cliff walls and it felt fine.
We had lunch at a good lookout point about the whole plateau where there weren’t any tourists. Generally, if you want to avoid tourists, just keep walking. Most of them give up after about a mile. So I sat there with my pepper jack sandwich trying to rationalize something that wouldn’t be rationalized just then. All I could say was “Another day.” And we sauntered back down into the throngs and down the cliffs and into the canyon and after some more philosophy on the drawbacks and merits of fear, we got back into the minivan and headed toward Bryce; stopping halfway for a night in Richfield. The drive was good. I honestly enjoy a long-scenic drive with the right music. Something about my younger days, heading solo into Colorado just to take a look at things. Driving up the California Coast or anywhere in the Southwest really. It’s a an American tradition. A rite of passage, that old Road-Trip. There’d been lots of them and here we were in the middle of another. We drove through fields and canyons and passes and lakes and would up in this place, which had a solid Mormon vibe to it and had dinner and reflected on the day. “Something American here. I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this.” Hanne raised her eyebrows. “I know…I know.” Sometimes it’s just a feeling you get somewhere. It wasn't Mormon land or any land per se. Every town has its own vibe and I’d always been drawn to this sort of mid-century, small-town easy-going thing. I was never impressed by the size, scale, or sounds of big cities. I’d tried it out a few times and really had a hard time figuring out what the point was. What was the need? The motive? The over-arching statement? It’s just people crammed together who want a certain level of convenience after all. We all do, but metro cities, these monsters of twisting roads and never-ending construction projects…they’re like entities, not places to live…and they smell bad…or they have no smell at all, which is even worse.
It was a quick morning with a resupply at the local supermarket and a lady in front of us at the drive-thru kiosk bought our coffees for us. This was nice. A simple gesture that typically never happened in Switzerland and how I loved Die Schweiz, but it had been nine months of almost non-stop Swissness that’d driven me far into the Alps and back into Zurich, over the trails, through the tunnels, on the trains, in the huts, learning the ins and outs and basically thinking “It’s perfect. It’s too perfect. It’s like I’m trapped in Disneyland.” And I wanted the regular old biscuits-n-gravy and scuffed shoes and I didn’t want it to matter what year my jacket was manufactured. I don’t come from this set of values and I found myself listening to lots of “one person and a guitar music” and working with clay and doing stuff that let me feel just a little more human at the end of the day. Then there were things that I missed, but at the cowboy diner outside Bryce Canyon that morning I couldn’t remember what it was. I just wanted to breathe in the smell of the pines and the dirt and the bad coffee and speak English.
There’s a few ways to experience Bryce: There’s different trails that go down and and return to the rim or cross the whole thing or stay up top by the roads overlooking from various angles. We decided to cross the floor of the canyon and climb back up and walk the rim trail back to the car. Again, after about a mile, we were the only ones around. The canyon itself isn’t that massive, but it takes a few hours to navigate and I think going down into it is the best way to appreciate the full scale of things. The spires themselves leave the mind in a ponderance. Like much of the geology of southern Utah, it’s easy to say words like ‘carved’ when you want to say ‘crafted’. Everyone’s first thought is “What did this?” even though the sign in front of you describes as much, and there they stand: a forgotten legion in the amphitheater like a museum exhibition while we hold our rectangle machines up and lower them and cover the screens with an open palm and look knowingly into the tiny copy of the real thing in front of us. Is there a reason to do this? To write about it? It’s tough to say. The Yosemite was slated for more development until Ansel Adams took his famous photos to Washington. Other people didn’t believe the words of John Muir and John Powell when they told them of the absolute grandeur of the West. I’ve heard stories of Europeans getting wacky out there with nothing to hold onto and no one around for hundreds of miles to break the silence.
We stop in a little store and buy a few more food items and blaze off down the road to Moab. Old Moab. Slickrock Moab right between Arches and Canyonlands. I can’t quite remember the Moab of my childhood although it'd been on the list of 'future places to be'. All the big names in mountain biking were there and my heroes back then were names like Ned Overend and Missy Giove. Now Moab was another full-scale enterprise with jeep tours and every other amenity for people to cruise in and kick up dust. This was all sacred ground before the internet. You only knew about Moab if you’d been through Moab or heard stories from someone who knew someone. You had to read books to know about certain places. The downside of the informational age is that all the ‘secret spots’ are no longer secret, but again: keep walking. Wake early, stay late. We hit Arches first and saw Delicate Arch before it got too crazy and headed further in to walk among the shadowed, hidden spots and crawl around where we weren’t supposed to and tried our hand at some bouldering above the soft sand and looked through great stone windows into other stone windows into the horizon and felt the cool evening air blowing through. Sometimes areas have a specific reason for being blocked, like reforestation endangered species, etc. Other times it's because more than one person was taking a selfie and fell over the backside of an arch and that was that.
We spent the whole day out there just wandering around with no particular strategy; just putting miles under our feet until the November sun went down and the cold crept in and we went back to the little motel and set up our stoves on the tile by the door and just ate whatever was in the box. Having the clothes strewn everywhere among the general chaos of pocket-knives, titanium cups, headlights, etc was pretty endearing. On the Trail we’d roll into town covered in dirt, exhausted to the bone, savoring those moments under the warm trickle of a half-working shower and watch the muddy water swirl into the drain. It meant running here and there, learning bus routes or hitching to laundromats or markets or outdoor supply stores and trying to update things for family and finds along the way. If we were lucky enough to have a motel, it looked like a bomb went off in REI, keeping with the whole vibe of near-constant re-organization and movement. Tents hung at the nearest hangable situation, drying off after taking a shower with you and food was discernible from the rest of the mess only once it was separated into smaller containers and put into another bag that would get smashed somewhere in the middle of the pack so you didn’t have to dig so deep during lunch and it didn’t strain the neck and shoulders for the few first days after resupply.
All these memories came flooding back as we made our way across the Great Basin and I surmised, as I have many time before, that I’m only really myself when I’m moving. Life makes sense when it’s moving around me, when I’ve got a different view than the day before. I’ve come to know what many thru-hikers find on the trail: That idea (of things being visually, permeably, viscerally different at least on a routine basis) forms the core of the traditional human experience. There are people that will tell you they never felt so ‘at home’ as when they were in the middle a long stretch without a single sign of human artifice for hundreds of miles. Neurosis (if I may counter Freud) doesn't come exclusively from repression, etc. Repression itself appears within the context of the modern milieu. It appers, at least to me, from a lack of engagement. And how better to engage than to move. Movement forms the basis of the whole idea.
And so we moved over to Canyonlands the next day, just across the highway (more or less) and crept quietly to the edge of the rim and down in on a fantastic loop that turned about at the end of another rim for a good ten or miles. Canyon country is difficult to describe owing to a scale that the human eye can't fully appreciate. Distance becomes a relative thing and perception shifts with the changing shadows and light that might coax the land to betray its true dimensions if you sit in the right spot and have an apple and watch. Again we found ourselves in the midst of that fragrant sage with its tangled roots anchored against the desert winds. It’s a strong plant, like most desert plants and animals…it delights upon the plateaus and slopes where it finds favor in all the available elements and we pick little tufts of it and hold it to our noses and smile at each other and climb back out of the canyon and walk back to the van and return to the inn for one more night.
Now we’ve seen what we came to see in Utah and we keep heading east because I have promised that the High Rockies are something every European needs to see at least once. Colorado is a home away from home and my heart has nothing but fond memories those adventures, namely in Silverton…that tiny row of buildings amidst the winter detritus and mud where you’ve got a few permanent residents. You can tell the lifers from the seasonal help without much difficulty. It’s one of the few places I imagined myself settling down eventually, even in those High Rockies. But first: Ouray - and Hanne laughs as we pass a banner saying “Welcome to the Switzerland of the U.S.” The only thing Swiss about Ouray is that it’s surrounded by snowy mountains which we aim to explore, but we come across the Ouray Loop Trail instead and it seems like a good way to experience things so off we go and climb up into the trees and start walking around the town into the forest over a fine catwalk that perches over a great gorge until the town disappears and we’re trudging through the dark shadowed woods along an old metal flume that snakes ominously through the canyon, and across the creek and back into the hills where the sun is just hanging over the western Rockies lighting up the grass in waves of gold beset by nestled mounds of melting snow. It winds up along the south side of town next to a waterfall that sprays down over a cliff-side turning the stone a dark grey and we take a short rest to its side, listening to the sound of the water cascade and find its way to another stream. Then it carves into the canyon wall and winds down into town and we decide it was a good hike and make our way toward burgers and a couple IPAS that have us reeling on account of the elevation and we nearly dance our way back to the motel and fall deep asleep.
And now, we head south over the icy passes, stopping for a good hike up a frozen trail toward a frozen creek below a frozen waterfall, across rock fields and snow fields, hanging onto the trunks of saplings and accidentally stumbling across a mountain lion den of sorts before staggering back down to explore the side creeks and returning in time to find Silverton, as she was when I left her…in the blue shadows of some frosty afternoon. We stop in at the coffee shop and ask if the Hostel is still there. “Oh yeah, same name, same place.” So we head down the street where I look inquisitive and a grizzly old fellow says: “Are you looking for the hostel.” “Yep.” “Well, it was here yesterday and it ain’t here today!” I’m not sure what this means and he’s forced to explain its recent acquisition by a new owner which happened about 24 hours before. “So you head on over to the inn right there and tell ‘em I sent you and they’ll give you the same rate.” “Ok. Thanks.” And we walk ten feet over to the inn where we are clearly the only ones staying for the night and are met by two good men and their old yellow dog who leans against me, or into me and I pivot against him while we go over the paperwork. The entire place was remodeled from its former glory as the premier whorehouse (one of twenty-six or so that lined the main road, leaving me wondering where the residents actually stayed) and was meticulously preserved in this period i.e. not a television in sight. My kind of spot. The walls were lined with books. Real books that real people could read. The stairs creaked and the other available shelves and counters were brimming with period antiques like typewriters and what-not. Hanne was enchanted and we both thought it was the perfect way to spend the night. The hostel had always been my go-to because I like the hostel vibe (unless its over-run by errant city kids) but this was much better and we cracked the window a hair and took showers and fell deep asleep.
Now, we rounded out the whole trip as we turned southwest and headed back down toward Monument Valley and the reservations. Long stretches with little houses dotting the sides of the road and distant hills.
We continued through until the great silhouettes came into focus. Such an iconic sight there along the highway; these sentinels in towering silence spread out amidst the sand and pale blue horizon. We stopped the car just to stare, while the hinged doors of an abandoned fry bread stand flapped in the breeze and barbed wire creaked along fence poles. You are truly ‘out there’ but not in the same sense as the PCT. Just way out there in the middle of the desert with the tumbleweeds and occasional car flying by with a cinematic pitch-bend. We inched closer until we found a campsite in a nearby canyon overlooking the hallowed shadows in the distance and I walked around a sandy trail behind some slick rock and crawled up on top a dome next to a small natural arch for a better view and looked at the man-made carvings etched in its surface denoting various years and relationships. “If these two married after they carved this…they’d both have kids in their thirties now. Huh…” And then we drove back out onto the desolate dirt roads where I tried some night photography without much success…
And the next day we arrived in the Verde Valley and walked along the old river and stayed a night on the farm with my step-dad and Denise and Hope and talked about our adventures and how I felt about bailing on Angel’s Landing and bobsledding and trying to come to terms with life after the PCT and what it all meant and all their stories and travels and what they did with that bear that kept killing the chickens.
We made a small fire in our underground lair that night and and woke and talked some more and bade farewell and headed north to Flagstaff where my sister lived with her family and watched the snow come down outside the great living room windows. It was full circle somehow.
Nothing had stopped since the PCT. As soon as I returned to Albuquerque I consciously started plotting my escape and that took up all my energy until I was in Zurich, wandering around Alps, taking German courses with refugees down the street and learning the right way to prepare fondue. In the morning I’d wake up and sit in the kitchen facing the little square below and try to transcribe all the journals from the trail one page at a time while listening to Gordon Lightfoot, America, Bread, Denver, Dylan…whatever we had around as kids. The point is that I didn’t really get to have a real conversation after that. I think everyone was still in a daze; still processing and coming to terms with a new reality.
We cooked and sat and shared and went out a few times. Hanne and I tried the local bouldering gym and decided American climbers were pretty tough. We could barely finish half the routes and it’s hard to do a new route on the fly without troubleshooting anyway so we messed around for a little bit and then drove down I-17 through buckets of rain and flash floods to Cave Creek to see my ex-stepfather Tom for a bit.
This was something that needed to be done after so many years. He’d been there during The Trail too, throwing in a few hundred bucks here and there. We sat in their well-lit adobe amidst the saguaros and creosote and rabbits and rain and talked over pasole and basically just tried to catch up as best as possible. Life takes so many detours…it’s hard to keep up. Hard to remember all the people that made up the fabric of your experience. I owed much of the support for cycling, my first century rides, planning my training regiments, acquiring my first Bianchi, joining teams etc to him in those few years when he was part of the family.
In the morning we left with a book about Jin Shin Jyitsu, an Asian healing method that had been brought over a few decades ago and extrapolated by his friend Peter Bigfoot who ran the Reevis Mountain School of Self Reliance north of Phoenix. It was a good and all-too-brief encounter before we headed back up to Flagstaff for Thanksgiving.
Hanne said "nothing Swiss, just a traditional American Thanksgiving", so that’s what we had. I was just thankful that I still had a family…after everything.
And then we were back on another plane for another 12 hours and another layover in Heathrow and what seemed like a week of jet-lag and more holiday dinners and rearranging and printing and publishing and…you know what?
I still just want to be on the trail again...
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