Change of Heart - Lack of Photos

I'll have to steal the pictures for this blog from other places on the interweb, so please forgive me. I'm not permitted to take pictures on the trail at Anasazi.

1. Friction Fire - While still difficult, certainly not impossible. I was able to create a coal and drop it into my tinder bundle shortly after I was shown correct methods and materials. Just after that I used a hand drill and got a burning coal on my first try. Wikihow has nothing on the people at Anasazi. I do have some small burns on my hands, because apparently, I was not instructed properly on how to hold my tinder bundle as I blew the coal into flames. It's rather necessary out on the trail since we don't have flashlights, lighters, matches, insect repellent, or even really warm gear. Out there, fire is life.




2. Cow tanks and sleeping on the ground - (had to straight steal this image from Gilz) Yeah, that's not the cow tank that I drank from, but it's only slightly greener. We don't filter our water, we drop it. Two drops of clorox per canteen. Well, I'm still here. Cow tanks are pretty much tiny man made lakes out in the desert. They get pretty gross. I really don't mind sleeping on the ground. It's just cold without anything between the body and the ground. Good thing for pine needles and leaves. It's also quite nice to heat up a rock in the fire and put it in the sleeping bag. Any number of sexual innuendos could be applicable here, but I'm not even going to start.

3. I'm T-pain, you know me - Imma buy U a drank, so just get used to it. One of the young walkers in my band had completely convinced himself that he was the rapper T-pain. Thing is, the other four young walkers were pretty well convinced of it as well. Actually, he was just a confused blond kid from the East Coast who wanted to buy everyone a drank. That kid has a heart of gold and he's laugh-out-loud funny. All of the young walkers have incredible potential, and they show it out there in the wilderness. Here's where my change of heart happened. I truly thought that I was going into the wild to babysit a bunch of punk kids who were too spoiled all their lives to obey their parents. I was humbled like a boxer in a gun fight. My expectations were left in ruins as I became part of a dynamic and interesting family. In true cliche style, I learned a lot more from them than they ever could have learned from me. I had decided to give Anasazi a "trial week" after which, I would return to Utah to climb rocks. Integrity would not be on my list of qualities if I were to turn and run now, so here I am. I'll be here a while, so for those of you who I should be missing, I will. Eight days on the trail and six days off make for ample visiting time, though, so plan on seeing me at regular intervals.

4. Trail food - Our supplies are plenty, but not exactly gourmet. Notable though is that these kids have learned how to make everything from muffins to lasagna in their little tin cups. I mostly stuck to simple foods-cheesy rice and lentils, corn meal, oats, and the occasional ash cake. Ash cakes are rather simple. They consist of flour, water, and whatever happens to be left in your food pack. Powdered cheese and chewed up tomatoes make a pretty good ash cake, brown sugar and chewed up almonds make a better one. You then clear the fire away so you have a nice bed of hot white ashes and toss it in. I suppose the ash probably helps digestion if anything. Chewing up ingredients is just part of cooking in the wild. It's the only way to make tomato sauce. You could spend an hour trying to cut up all the ingredients you need for a tasty dish, or you could quickly chew them up, or love them up as we like to say, and then spit them into the mix. Everything is cooked on the fire or in a steel cup like the one above. Even muffins. It's rather amazing.

Well, I'm here for a while. I'll try to blog on my time off, at least once a week. If you're not hearing from me, I'm in the woods, changing my heart for the better and inviting others to do the same. The Creator takes us to amazing places in this life.