FEATURED POST

Photo credit: Andrew Burr http://andrewburr.blogspot.com/

And already, the week off is becoming evident.  I even forgot to use my savings card at the supermarket this morning – the dirtbag in me can’t stop freaking out about the two dollars I would have saved had I not botched the sequence.  Joshua Tree was a revelation, as always. The place is super-special to me on many levels, but this time, it was the desert flora that shall remain indelibly etched in my mind.  When Coby and I visited in February, a week or two after I was in Seattle, we were met by some rather unexpected weather – it had rained and snowed for the first two days of our trip and the campground developed deep runnels from all of the drainage.  By the end of our week, we had managed to cram in some great climbing in perfect, SoCal-desert winter conditions, but the unseasonably high levels of precip sparked an interest in the back of my mind…

And so a bit over a week ago–when it was becoming evident that Yosemite would be a bust – I suggested to my partner, Sam, that we head further south instead, as the forecasts for Josh read like a misprint:  low seventies with sun.  And this in the end of May!  I remembered just how much moisture had fallen in the south this winter, not only from our last visit, but from the rather lack-luster powder season we enjoyed here in SLC. It seemed the trend that all of the moisture had been diverted south by La Nina.  Record water in the desert, however, meant one thing:  in an ecosystem adapted to thrive in some of the driest environments on our planet, those in the center of continents, the plant life – which forms the basis of nearly all other inhabitants – responds to these anomalous climate events with what might very well be the greatest bloom of many human generations. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of nature.  And it was.  It was beyond words.

On our rest day, I failed – initially – to coerce Sam into going for a day hike in the park.  He seemed like he could use the rest, so I acquiesced.  I left the campground and went exploring.  It’s a funny thing about these really big landscapes: at home in Little Cottonwood, for instance, I notice the peculiar way time and space are compressed when I drive down-canyon toward town after a day of climbing.  In less than a minute, I cover the same ground it takes twenty minutes to hike, and therein lies the deception.  The topography of J-Tree creates a similar illusion:  instead of time, the horizon hides the depth of the place, and, if on foot, one quickly discovers that the weathered domes often conceal sheltered valleys, some as large as a football pitch, others, about the area of my apartment.  In one of these smallish rooms, I found an oasis of plant life. I saw both conifers and their cousins, the flowering plants, representing both major branches of the their side of the tree of life.  Imagine a large yucca or a barrel cactus:  they’ve been waiting – perhaps, for years – saving up enough resources through to maturity to trigger the next step in their life-cycle.  All of a sudden, it happens – enough water to create a surplus, and enough surplus to bloom, some then relying on our branch of the tree, the animals, to fulfill their ultimate goal: pollination.  A super-cool thing to see – I was there alone in a room that might not have seen a human being in quite some time, a privileged witness to a scene that has played out since long before our species.  It was like stepping back in time to an earlier earth.

This trip to J-Tree was a catharsis of sorts.  It’s hard not to feel melancholy in light of the current state affairs on our planet. Just weeks ago, I spied a line that will, undoubtedly, be the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to free-climb.  It’s probably a day or two of work-for some of the world’s strongest – some of them, my good friends – but for me, it’ll demand all of my physical and emotional focus.  After aiding it, I started calling it “Desperate Reality,” both in homage to the famed Yosemite roof crack, “Separate Reality” – a climb made possible only by the invention of the world’s first SLCD – and to this pervasive and deeply embedded feeling that I’ve had for some time now.  This morning, I thought about my last trip to Japan, a few summers ago.  It took me twelve hours to fly to Tokyo.  What a small world!  What if, then, we’re unable to stop the flow of oil into the gulf?  How long will it take before its effects, in turn, affect the food chains on a global scale?

A “Desperate Reality”, a name inspired by the present.  But as I opened the file “my pictures” on our laptop, I looked upon a pic of the line for the first time since I left town.  It’s steep.  It’s thin.  It’s too hard.  But in my absence, I’ve been dreaming.  I’ve been rehearsing the moves in my mind, and with every imaginary burn, it’s starting to seem possible.  And that’s when I realize there’s hope…