Reaping What We Sow : Part I

From Indian Creek, Utah we headed south to meet the Arizona border.  We made Page, AZ by nightfall.  Page is notable for being on the southern coast of Lake Powell and is also home to Glenn Canyon.  We hastily made our way to the banks of Lake Powell just in time to watch the sunset paint the surrounding rockscape in pastel colors which glowed against the dimming backdrop of the sky.  The canyons that have been flooded by the Glen dam to form Lake Powell would certainly be a magnificent destination to scuba dive or snorkel.   A unique environment of contrasts would be found by the underwater exploration of the long-forgotten and once arid floor below.  The previous summits of now submerged cliffs would act as a diving board in which the adventurous could begin a journey into the unknown depths below as an endless gallery of geological artwork is vertically traversed.

The next morning we were eager to keep pushing west to Las Vegas.  Our progress took us through Zion National Park.  We spent a night in Zion and the following day hiking up the infamous "Subway" canyon feature.  Winter temperatures were forecasted in the coming days and so our time in Zion was grossly inadequate to take advantage of all that could be done there.  We swore to go back and do some proper canyoneering when we would rappel, hike, and swim through world class slot canyons that have been carved through the eons by the curious meanderings of creeks and tributaries trying to find their way through the mountainous sandstone desertscape.

The next evening we were in Las Vegas, eager to reorganize our lives using the lessons learned from the first 4000 miles of traveling.  We have since been in Las Vegas for two weeks and have many stories to relay.

However, I'm not going to relay these stories.  After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.  Just kidding.  But I want to take this opportunity to record some thoughts and recollections of how Juliet and I found ourselves in our current state of affairs for those who are interested.

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, a galaxy called Duluth, MN...

Both Juliet and I needed to complete an internship in order to cast off the shackles of college.  A couple years earlier, I had completed my first internship by living and working at the Dorothy Day House which was a community house meant to provide limited housing for the otherwise homeless.  A very long story short, I met some incredible people who were living an alternative lifestyle (I'm talking about the workers specifically, not the homeless).  Each person came from a very different background and there was an equal amount of diversity in the reasons that brought them to the house.  I continued to live at the Dorothy Day house for the better part of two years as I finished college with the perk of living and eating for free. 

Juliet, an outdoor recreation major, had found herself completing her internship through a dog sledding outfit.  She lived on forty acres that shared a boundary with a lake.  Her home was a 12' x 12' cabin powered by a single extension cord and without running water nestled in an old growth cedar forest.  Between completing school assignments for her internship, Juliet was responsible for the well-being of fifty Alaskan huskies.  Moreover, Juliet would lead dog sledding tours on the weekends as well as help train teams of dogs for various races. 

During this time, both Juliet and I were working part time jobs.  Juliet worked at the local rock climbing gym and I did web design as well as mental health work with adolescents at a hospital.  The prospect of dog sledding was too exciting to pass up and so I began helping with chores on occasion.  The winter came and went quickly and before we knew it, summer was on our hands.

We both managed to finish school and thence came the assault of "the question."  Do I really have to spell it out?  "What are you going to do now that you are done with college."  As obnoxious as this question is to be asked, when you are young and broke and have just filled your brain's grey matter with worthless knowledge for the price of a new Mercedes Benz, I think it has always been meant as a joke.  Established adults know very well that we have been in school our entire lives.  Now that we didn't have academic obligations I felt like Morgan Freeman in the Shashank Redemption as he is let out of prison after serving a sizable sentence.  The world appears foreign and you haven't found your place in it.  You don't know what else is out there.

So that question remained unanswered but Juliet and I have always liked everything outdoors- swimming, sailing, biking, climbing, hiking, camping, and kayaking.  But having been so busy with school, internships, and jobs, we didn't feel like we were able to do these things as often as we had hoped and we weren't getting any younger.

We began to dream of going on a trip.  A long trip where we could find out who we were, what was around us, what our true passions in life were, and maybe start to figure out the question of what we wanted to do next.  The details were really rather unimportant as we knew we could just figure it out on the way.  The big challenge, of course, was being able to finance such a trip. 

to be continued...

Juliet jams up the crux of Way Rambo (Indian Creek)!  Hardest climb of the trip so far!
(Photo by Michael Pang)



Zion National Park : The Subway





End of the line for those without a wetsuit

 

Namesake picture, all a-board

 

If I were an aspiring photographer I would call this something dumb like : "Cascading Pools of Reflection"

We get by with a little help from our friends

Juliet foreshadowed that our participation in the Volunteer Work Day would pay off in the long run.  We've been on the road for two months and live'n ain't cheap.  And although the value of the dollar is plummeting faster than Duluth's fall temperatures, businesses have not yet resorted to taking karma as a valid form of currency for gas and food.  Hey, there's an idea.  I propose a "Karma Kards" program where unemployed Americans (myself included) are given a debit card that can be used to buy groceries.  Points are accumulated proportionately to karma earned.  Helping little old ladies cross the street, reading to a classroom of kindergartners, and ladling spoonfuls of watered-down soup to the homeless on Sundays would all bank points.  As long as the country's 10% unemployment rate doesn't seem to be going anywhere, those in need could be rewarded for helping those in needier.  I know I'd make good use of a Karma Kard as food is our single biggest expense and eating is a habit that we can't seem to kick... for now. 

But the Karma Kard doesn't really exist and so accruing Karma doesn't really do any good unless you are okay settling for intangible things like good fortune and health, feeling one with the universe, and meeting new friends.  It is the latter that we seem to keep getting stuck with.  While having friends isn't as satisfying as a warm hot-pocket (the following is a paid advertisement), with it's golden-brown flaky pastry-like crust and melty-gooey cheese-like filling, I guess it'll have to do.

So while I know everyone would rather read muddled rantings cataloging my favorite aspects of the modern marvel called the frozen food section of your local grocer, I am forced to recount tales of two people we met and spent a significant amount of time with (thanks karma).  So go nuke some pizza rolls, crack open a coke, and settle in for the long haul.  If it's any conciliation to your salivary glands, our friends were from Hungry... seriously.

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"Are you going to climbing the Supare Crack?" asked Tom in his broken, but intelligible English.  We hadn't met them yet, but Tom (Tamas) and Ben (Benya) were about to become Karma's playing chips in a game where we were holding the winning hand.  "Oh, the Super Crack, yeah, when Juliet is finished with the climb it will be all yours ," I replied.  Upon Juliet's decent down the 120 foot sandstone face she turned around to see our new friends.  "Do you want to borrow some gear," asked Juliet to the obviously under-equipped Ben.  Ben, who didn't seem to speak English at the time (it was later revealed that he spoke English perfectly well, but chose not to as a defense mechanism for avoiding having to field stupid questions from Americans ("So, do they, like, call it Hungry because there's no food there?")), stared at us blankly.  Tom jumped in replying, "No, no.  Ben is very strong."  We left the issue alone and wished them good luck.

The previous night we had stayed in a group campsite that had been reserved for the Volunteer Day participants.  The campsite consisted of the following amenities: sand.  A large sand parking lot was the space we shared with fifty other individuals that had volunteered that day.   By the time that we woke up in the morning, a layer of fine-sand covered all of our belongings like dust covering the Autobiography of Richard Simmons ("Still Hungry After All These Years") in the public library.  We decided it was time to part with our group and find a campsite that shared fewer characteristics with the environmental descriptions at the beginning of the Grapes of Wrath.

Two miles down the road is a less known campground called the Super Bowl.  It's entrance is marked by a yellow cow grate and nothing more.  Super Bowl became one of our favorite campgrounds because it is much less open than Creek Pasture (the dust bowl), much more accessible than Bridger Jack (the BLM really outdid itself it terms of building a road that can rattle the bolts loose from your engine block), and wasn't prone to flash flooding like the campground at the base of Way Rambo.  We pulled into Super Bowl and were welcomed by the permanent smile that Tom wears on his face contrasted by Ben's reserved stoicism.  We greeted our yet-to-be-friends, asked them how the Super Crack went, then they asked us where they might go the next day where they could climb in the shade.  We told them that Northern Minnesota was probably grey and bleak this time of year but I don't think they got our joke.  We didn't know which wall might be in the shade for a good part of the day and so we did what any sensible person would do when trying to impress strangers- we lied.  We didn't intentionally send them to the sunniest wall in the desert which had a climate similar to that of the Sun-facing side of Mercury.  But we did- and they survived, thankfully, or the rest of our week would have been much less eventful. 

We made camp across the way from our new friends and caught up with them that night.  They were both incredibly humble and offered up little detail as to who they were without us utilizing the social graces of a metaphorical crow bar.  We pried and prodded for the rest of the night and found out the following:

Ben (32) graduated from college with a degree equivalent to that of our P.E. teacher.  He couldn't find a job in that field so he washes windows in high rises in his home-town of Budapest. Ben picked up English while working in England for a year.

Tamas (35) owns an outdoor store in his home town outside of Budapest and has an 18 year old son.  Tamas spent a year in the United States at a language school and was very eager to continue his language development.

They have both traveled the world and, from what we could gather, are semi-professional climbers.  They were just finishing up a two month trip to the United States and had spent most of that time in Yosemite climbing the monstrous granite formations.

My personal climbing productivity plummeted when we took on our new climbing partners.  The spectacle of them climbing was simply amazing- an inspiring combination of acrobatics and athleticism.  I could see it set to music and preformed on broadway.  Juliet was inspired and continued to push her own abilities.  By the end of the week she had climbed several world-famous routes including the epic Way Rambo, a skinny hand crack etched into a hundred foot sandstone pillar by the hand of Zoro (it is literally a huge "Z" running up the wall). 

We climbed hard and they climbed harder, continuing to push the envelope throughout the week.  By the end it seemed that everyone was feeling a bit exhausted.  As we gathered around a campfire cooking our dinners, Ben told us that the next day would be their last in the Creek.  He told us that they would head to Moab to climb the much renowned Castleton Tower.  Juliet and I had discussed doing Castleton Tower a couple week prior but decided against it due to a lack of experience climbing multi-pitch towers and a shortage of rope in which we would need to rappel off the top.  "Come with us," Ben offered. 

We couldn't believe it.  We spent the next hour trying to convince them that toting us along was not a good idea.  "But what if we climb too slow, what if you want to do a harder route, what if..."  Ben smiled and told us that it would be their last day climbing this year and he wanted to do a relaxing climb with his new friends.

Tom and Ben had been climbing world class multi-pitch together for two months.  They became our unofficial guides up Castleton tower and climbed with an efficiency I have never seen before.  We climbed with a total of three ropes which never got twisted or tangled.  The weather was perfect, the climb was perfect, and the company was perfect.  Once we reached the top we spent twenty minutes taking in the spectacular scenery.  The desert floor below runs up a gradual hill to the east which then explodes into the La Sal mountain range.  We had front row seats to the most amazing show on Earth.

We grabbed dinner with Ben and Tom before they had to leave for California and it was hard to say goodbye not knowing when we might get to see them again.  Juliet and I made the 60 mile drive back to Indian Creek in the dark.  When we returned to camp our friends were gone and we were alone.  We spent several more days in Indian Creek but had a hard time getting back into the groove of climbing without the external motivation.  The weather turned cold and it snowed.  Then it rained.  We both developed a sort of short-term seasonal affective disorder that left us lazy and lethargic.  It was time to move on. 

We couldn't wait to get to Las Vegas, take a break from small desert towns and campground communities, and spend some time with Juliet's family in a new and exciting atmosphere.  Up next: Juliet and Jon vivan Las Vegas

Castleton Tower from the parking lot

Tamas and Ben = All business.  Image this picture set to "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys

Beginning the approach

Three amigos at the top

Ben starts up the third pitch

Views to the southeast

Tamas and Ben with views to the north

Awesome

Juliet gets a little southern exposure

Juliet getting in on some rope management

Max'n and Relax'n and Act'n all cool. Ben before the final rappel

Down, down, down with views of our route

I show off my desert camouflage skills.