The Cure

There's nothing quite like an adventure to take the mind off of problems that seem to be taking up all the space in there. I headed to the desert after a hard month. It's been lonely in a mid winter sense. The drive was long and when I arrived my mind was spinning. I left Truckee in a state that I'd never been in before. I felt lost and directionless and i tried to think of reasons to stay in the Sierras for a few more weeks until I could find more photo work or directing work but that was just an excuse so that I wouldn't have to come all the way out here and face the calmness and the quite of the desert and really get some perspective on what's happening in life, not only to me but those around me, all of us, really.

Matt Mienzer and I have been climbing together for about 10 years now and it feels strange to say that. Time has started to fly and climbing has become the way that I reconnect with old friends and rediscover my connection to the earth. Around the time when we first met I came to the desert and climbed the Moonlight Buttress, in Zion National Park, with him in 2000. It was my first big wall climb and it started a revolution in my life as to what types of climbing were possible for me. Since then i've been out to the desert many times but never back to Zion. It feels good to be back and to be camping along the river in freezing temperatures. It brings back memories of the old days and makes room for the new.

We decided to climb on Mt. Kinesava. It seemed like a good adventure climb with a nice treat at the end, indian petroglyphs. The drawings carved in to the sand stone depict the indians herding the big horn sheep to the edge of the bluff and forcing
them over the cliff walls to their waiting families below.

I almost became one of those meals when a hold blew out and I flew about 20 feet backward in a cartwheel from the boulder problem and slide toward the edge of the 2000 ft cliff. I thought I was going for the big one as the edge approached. My hands slid across the sandstone and it took the skin right off as I tried to stop my body and backpack from getting closer to the edge. I almost met my end but just as I slid off the edge I could see another smaller ledge about 6 feet below. My body hit it, head first and I jumped up happy to be alive. I took my helmet off and looked at it, huge dent. I'm glad that I had it on. Bloody and sandy we continued to climb toward the top of the cliff and when we arrived on top we where greeted with a grassy meadow perched on top of this beautiful mountain and of course the petroglyphs.

That is certainly a change of pace from the climbing gyms and ski resorts littered with x-girlfriends. There has been something missing from my life for a long time. I have had a feeling creeping in on me that somehow I have been doing something wrong. That I have somehow been doing things badly and a constant anxiety has been hanging around ever since I can remember. I think that it has been there for so long that I was unaware of it's existence. It's been hard to ask for things that are important to me, like somehow they didn't matter. Strangely, only pursuing financial success and developing the "dream" could stave off the feeling that I constantly needed to be doing something to further my career. Screw all that.
I guess the reason that I'm saying it here is that I really believe that it matters what people are thinking and doing even if the ideas are still in development. To what extend these photos or stories effect people I have little idea but I do know that writing and experiencing life on this level brings me great relief from a society that seems to only focus on how many deals you can make and how good you look doing it. What really matters is the relationships that you make when your out, fully exposed to the world, unhidden and free. Let go and see what happens.

Here are some photos from the current adventure.