Do you remember when Bobby and Cindy got lost in the Grand Canyon? (Lucky dogs! I thought so even when I was 10.) Well, for those of you who are not familiar with the Brady Bunch, what happens is these two cute kids get lost in the Grand Canyon. They wander around for a while and then they run into this native american boy, who takes pity on them and does the coolest thing ever: he brings them dinner in an empty flashlight! Yeah! So here they are eating beans and franks out of an empty metal flashlight. So cool!!! Man, I was so wanting to eat out of a flashlight after I saw that (keep in mind again, I was 10.)
Today it dawned on me that it would never happen like that now. We’ve got these tiny LED lights that are smaller than most franks. (I guess this is what you think about during your 1,345,654,345th commute via the Bay Bridge.)
In June, Gear Queen and I will be headed out to the border of China and Kyrgyzstan. A little bit of that insanely beautiful area is depicted in this YouTube video. We’ll be walking, jogging and running around, eating nuts and slurping manufactured energy powders, chomping salt pills and obsessing over our feet. Oh, we’ll be giddy - I know we’ll be smiling sheepishly for 7 days while we take in the scenery and the people. We’ll probably take turns battling food poisoning and laughing about it, or at it, or at eachother (whatever fits). It’s one of those things where sitting here in my cubicle, I can’t really grasp that I’ll ever be there.
My mom tells me there are no GPS maps for this region. You can plug in coordinates and get distances, but no directions. Oh man, could it be? One place untouched by technology? No maps? That’s got to be the best.
I’ve been out guiding, teaching and romping in (in my limited opinion) the finest venues in the American West. It has been a blur of rapids, passes, sandstone, granite, streams, screaming sun, sunrises, sunsets, acres of dehydration-induced delerius laughter, a few chills even - and more pressed coffee than I’d care to admit. In so many pure and charged moments: fears, fearful moments, victories, and times of feeling choppy, then fluid again. Trying, sometimes in the clumsiest way, to connect with people and loved ones in between car rides, airplanes, airports and reams of sleep lost.
You know it’s time to come home, and stay home, when you wonder if your beyond-Blistex-chapped lips will ever heal. When cheese loses it’s appeal completely, and salami becomes a chore rather than a salty thrill. When de (or re) hydrated anything radios your body from afar to say “I will not nourish you - neener neener!” When you go to zip up your sleeping bag and it hangs up for the 1 billionth time, and you could care less - sleeping with the bag half open is just fine. When you wake up, no matter where you are, and instinctively (often frantically) look for signs of daylight, signs of boats or food missing, or bears, students or clients milling around in the dark.
When you realize all at once, that the scenery is just a backdrop, a playground for the most important thing of all - the people who are there with you - and also a reminder of those who are not. When there are friends and family you just flat out miss, and there is no longer any way to finesse it. When you glorify your own life - your home, your people, your job, your future plans - as you hike out for the last time, instead of dread them. When you are somehow at the same time pleasantly and annoyingly, maybe achingly, deficient -nutritionally, emotionally, energetically? …but you cannot quite place it. I don’t get to feeling this way very often, so I also cherish this (and, of course, wish this on others.)
It’s good to be home! Time to replenish, and to kick iGearList into high gear!
No matter how many times you might run the same 10 mile stretch of river, there’s always something to learn. In my case, I’ve been down this stretch - who knows, maybe 30, 50 or 70 times? Not sure. And for sure, not as many as hundreds of others - I’m probably a relative newby. Regardless, the lessons from Saturday’s run begin and end with brilliance:
1. A 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera makes a great shuttle car (carries boat, paddles, soft gear, and 4 people with ease).
2. 4 is the perfect number of people for rafting
3. Switching off guiding and paddling is the perfect way to enjoy a river
4. Satan’s Cesspool is a game of inches, and a tale of two waves
5. Rafting beats macrame any day of the week
In other news. I will soon temporarily retire my post at iGearList and hand it over to Gear Queen and LuLu while I go out to Utah for August. You can look forward to more sarcasm and music than I could ever hope to dish out.
I’ll leave you with the most recent email subjects lines in my “in” box. Together they are pleasantly haiku-ish, upbeat and remind me how good life is just now:
Too bad I’m still on a YouTube video kick. You’ll just have to suffer it. Hang in there. (It can’t be THAT bad, can it?)
But first, a brief iGearList announcement - I just put up a new page that will house all of the gear sale announcements from all of our affiliate partners. One example is MountainGear’s insane sale in progress now - talk about deals! Seriously. See all this good stuff HERE. Of course to learn more about the shopping program on iGearList and who our affiliates are, go HERE.
Now on to today’s video. Today, I’m itching to get on the river, to get out and run, and to generally plunge in and devour what’s left of the summer wholeheartedly. I’ve got that late-July restlessness. You know? On that note, tomorrow I’ll be R2-ing (that’s 2 people, 1 raft) down the SFA with EB. Should be rockin’. The pics should be funny. Stay tuned - I promise to post if I can.
I think Matt Nathanson says it best (OK, minus the car crash part, for those of you who have seeen mine…remember, it’s just a song.)
Without further adieu, today’s YouTube Vid. Ha ha!
I have been pondering the idea of comfort lately, I’m not sure why. I think it’s because physical discomfort is an inevitable result, or maybe even at the heart of training for and being outdoors. Thinking about discomfort inevitably gets me to thinking about Missouri.
A number of years back, Gear Queen and I rode our bikes for a good while, covering the span between Eugene and Skidaway Island. It was a rich experience to say the least. Of all the states we visited it was Missouri that broke me, that made me truely and undeniably uncomfortable. Up until that point we had biked in snowstorms, been chased by rotties, charged by a bison, experienced heartbreaking windstorms. We’d been over the Cascades, and the Rockies. Endured a string of soaking wet, sloppy abandoned campgrounds. We’d slept in a truckstop junkyard, with little food, and some maybe 70 miles on either side. We’d been rescued twice in Kansas from tornado conditions. But when I look back on all of that, I remember great adventures but I don’t remember the discomfort - it’s not indelible. So, why wasn’t all that categorically uncomfortable and why was Missouri too much so?
What I have decided is that the memory and experience of physical comfort and discomfort has everything to do with hope, and opportunity. After only one day in Missouri, I was so thoroughly demoralized, I said to myself, I’d never make it across this state. The very landscape was given to inducing depression in it’s riders.
Specifically, old ungraded roads over short hills. When you got to the top of one, all you could see was a ribbon of 5 million other short impossibly steep hills undulating into the distance, forever. For me, there was no hope in that. Additionally, there were no vistas, only miles of densely packed treescape with said diabolical ribbon of road leading through. For me, there was no opportunity in that. The people were stranger, the weather was all wrong - the storms came at night, instead of the day, forcing us into a humid tent, spoiling my sleeping bag, keeping us awake. The ants ate our food at night, big ants, chewing through packages. I broke my tooth on a nectarine before entering into the Ozarks, as the physical discomfort, without hope to temper it, pressed on me in the hardest way. I now wore the badge of discomfort in my very smile.
Finally, one day we came upon an intersection of 2 highways, with one offering a shortcut southward out of the state. I say shortcut but it was 80+ miles of unknown, but we knew at the end of it, we’d be in another state. So, we took it. Between the Lewis and Clark Trail to the west and Sherman’s March to the Sea to the east, is this stretch of highway that leads the hell out of Missouri - it should have a name and a place in history, too. Thankfully, when Missouri ended, the landscape changed, and hope returned and discomfort faded.
Now, my family is no stranger to Missouri. Some of my relatives, like so many Americans here, came out from Missouri in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. Missouri was, back then, the official jumping off point to the American West. The diving board for hope. I can’t say I blame them for wanting to making that profound choice to leave whatever discomfort, which I assume was hopelessness, and physically move toward opportunity. I wonder if they remember their journeys across the plains, and the ranges, as being uncomfortable, or if they were so filled up with hope, and vistas, and good people along the way, that the opportunity of it all erased anything else. I wonder if they left their Missouri when they came here.
Maybe 10 years after that trip I taught an Outward Bound course where my co-instructor was trying to encourage and teach a young person, and somewhat coach them through their dark moments. He got down on one knee, took off his hat, and said thoughtfully and simply: “comfort, is irrelevent”. For a long time I thought about that, and wondered about it. Now I know, he is right. Because the truth of the matter is that comfort IS irrelevent, but hope and opportunity are not.
- P
PS - I hope you post some of your used outdoor gear on iGearList!
Tonight I have the river on my mind. (Cataract Canyon, in particular.) Rafting is a funny beast. It has the ability to both empower people, and to beat them down. After all, thousands of pounds of water pressure are constantly at stake. It is absolute control in the face of frenzy, and luck despite a lack of control. It is only the illusion of control, at times. It’s physics: force, ferry angles, surface tension, momentum, timing. It’s like riding a hundred horses all at once, only it feels like floating on air. It’s loud. It can be desperate and physical, or it can be flowing and easy and free - the most natural thing you could imagine. You can gasp and tense up one second and belly laugh the next. It’s that raw, unpredictable fine line between your biggest hopes and your worst fears, all in motion, all at once. You can love it, you can hate it, but if it were any other way, it simply would not be compelling. Why would you go?
Here’s a YouTube video of Cataract Canyon, I think it’s probably Big Drops 2 and 3 (a.k.a. “Satan’s Gut”) at high water - higher water than I’d ever guide on this river. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to say that. Enjoy.
Stay tuned for the next few posts. I’ll be continuing with my “Mad Props” series, as I mentioned before, working back through time. I’ll post about Missouri, and just a few more of the many women who have left their mark on the outdoor world. Come back!
Summer has officially caught up with the iGearList gang. If you haven’t noticed, our website has been sitting and simmering almost untouched for the last month. Why? We’ve been out playing, it’s that simple. At this ripe old age, the three of us have decided to commit to doing a little more car-camping. It’s easy and it allows for more fishing. LuLu has an insane car camping set up, full of all sorts of wares, and more utensils than I’ll own in my lifetime (yes that’s a Prius in the background):
At this particular destination, Deer Creek, Gear Queen and LuLu tried their hand at flyfishing an open section in the noon heat. 2 Osprey were attempting the same feat, with the score at even after 2 hours (each team with 1 nibble). Myself, I read the sign on the gate: “Be a Sportsman”, and took that to mean that I should open my bottle of Porter on the brittle barbed wire, hop over the step gate, and splay myself on the gravel all afternoon. Which I did. The view was not half bad, but the sunburn was:
The following weekend Gear Queen and I ran in the Reno-Tahoe Odyssey (relay), where we also participated as “sportsmen” i.e. we mixed in a few brewskies with the running. Only because they took out a huge section due to the Angora Fire, and because we were in close proximity to Team Lagunitas, who only required a simple dance for a 6-pack. Seriously, though, it wasn’t nearly enough running, but it was more than enough fun.
Of course we celebrated 4th of July heartily, like only a crowd of internet start-up wannabes could. With a whole lot of cookies!
Slow down there Gear Queen!
Lastly, the three of us took our gig to the streets of Marin county last weekend, where we rode our ensemble of old road/cross/mtn bikes up and down the waterfront, slipping behind roadies with fancy jerseys and making them nervous. And making them speed up. This was also more or less a “sportsman’s” event, complete with a mid-ride pitstop. (You know what I’m getting at.) We’re not very “hard-core” this summer now are we?
When we slow down (or speed up?) a bit, we’ll launch our new Trip Planner, and go on some bat-&*#% crazy trips. We’ll also introduce some more characters (like Ms. Gear-A-Lot), get the gear reviw thang going, announce a contest AND some partnerships. We will, in fact, wow you all! If there are you’s out there to wow. (OK, actually I can see from my end that there are a few of you!)
Everest has always has been a source of very popular news. Dispatches from teams, routes, tragedies, with oxygen, without oxygen. Clean-ups, rescues, history. It has moved into the realm of the truely sensational - attempts using historic gear, attempts in shorts, the oldest person, the youngest person, speed records, climbing up, skiing down, on and on! I’m not saying Everest is easy, nor am I trying to detract from all of these heroes, athletes and good humans who have to sacrifice, risk, and train to extensive degrees to make this happen. I’m in awe of the accomplishment. But at this point, for me, all the stories tend to blend together. I read an Everest article and 5 minutes later I couldn’t tell you who it was about and what exactly was compelling about it.
A few weeks ago, I got an email newsletter from Arlene Blum, who was dispatching from near Mt. Everest. Now, I saw the word “Everest” in the title and expected some version of the same, perhaps a story from the trail. (She is, after all, of mountaineering fame.) Instead, she says:
“I am writing you from a cyber café in Namche Bazaar (11,300 feet) below Mt Everest, where I just learned that AB 706, our bill to regulate toxic fire retardants in furniture and bedding, passed the CA assembly by a 46-30 vote yesterday as described in the press release below. I have been the scientific advisor and my New York Times op-ed helped motivate this bill.”
Not only is Arlene Blum an accomplished mountaineer, who, among other things, led the first all-female team up Annapurna, but she is also a respected scientist. Not just any kind of scientist I might add, but one that has been instrumental in leading the way to remove toxic flame retardants from consumer products. One of the most complex types of science to accomplish is that of correlating chemical exposure to human outcomes. Much like climbing Everest, the cause is riddled with variables - there are many places and ways to fall short. In this case, her work - this climb - as illustrated by this piece of news, is paying off, and not only that, it will help to protect you, and your family.
Now, THAT is an “Everest dispatch”. When you’re good, you’re good.
Tonight, something a little different, perhaps entertaining. Thanks to gmail, the service which makes easily searchable, archivable email, I stumbled upon an old email I sent to my friend Denise prior to embarking upon the last 400 miles of the Great Divide trail (mountain bike tour) in 2005. This is an exerpt from that email which was written after one desert and before another (dehydration induced typos and all). The “axel grease” comment alludes to dreadfully black semi-burned office coffee, and for those of you in offices, you know what I mean…
”I think the end is in sight maybe 400 more miles. the last stretch across the desert was something. standing over a mud bog (truely resembling rob’s “axel grease”) biting back on my dry throat - staring at this, the only water in 120 miles - I wondered why all the wars ever fought weren’t over lemonade with ice. Or Coors. Or why I let myslef get so far away from a coke machine!!!!! or why on earth I thought 7 litres would last me 2 hot long days (or why I was so careless to lose some in an untimely and violent dispatch of a 2L bottle of water on a rocky descent).
Im more hydrated now (I know you can’t tell necessarily) and we just sent 16 pounds of food to ourselves 3 days away including over 1 pound of semi-sweet chocolate each (the densest calories we could imagine)…thus the next crossing we have dubbed “the chocolate days” . I guess there’s no grocery for quite some time.”
Wishing I could predict the perfect bliss of the next chocolate days. Wishing chocolate days upon you and yours.
