For Me and my people of Malta

That's all.

In the beginning, Jesus did some skywriting.

"You betta' be believin'."

Some Del Parson ripoffs in there. I wonder how he feels about that.

What I've done today

Today is an excellent day. I make every day that way.

Today I woke up from excellent dreams. These excellent dreams involved excellent friends and excellent girls.

I have an excellent sister. She has an excellent husband and an excellent son. He's an excellent nephew.

I went for an excellent run. It made me excellently tired. My companion on this run was an excellent dog.

I took an excellent shower.

I ate an excellent lunch. I made this lunch with rice, raisins, milk, sugar, cinnamon, and honey. All of which were excellent ingredients.

I am listening to excellent music.

I have had an excellent time writing this blog. I hope you had an excellent time reading it.

In fact, I hope that today is the most excellent day of your life. If it's not, give me a call and I'll do everything I can to help.

Be excellent to each other.

Trip Report - Middle Leprechaun Canyon

Okay, Time for a real blog.

I'm still having trouble getting up to speed with my typing, so bear with me. (ha ha, bear)

Dodge and Krissy and I, after a wonderful night of chatting and jimmer-jammering around the campfire, got up and finally got going around 9:45 am. I hadn't read over the beta for the canyon, but I figured I mostly knew where I was going and I only got us lost once on the way up. I would have gotten us lost on the way down, but there's only one way to go.

Here's Dodge and Krissy, and you can see the canyon that would be descended zig-zagging down the middle-right side of the frame.

They really had no idea what they were getting into at this point.

You see, Middle Lep is one of the narrowest slot canyons around. Krissy is tiny, and Dodge disappears when he turns sideways, but even so, they thought the canyon was awfully tight. This is the canyon that stole my wallet about a year ago. Read about that one here.

So in we went. Krissy rappelled the first drop, after that we put the rope away and it was just a lot of squeezing, stemming, and downclimbing. Dodge and Krissy were troopers and the canyon was really a walk in the park considering how difficult most people find that descent. Teeny-tiny and skinny really does help here.

I'll just skip to pictures now. No point in bringing up Leprechauns, unicorns, or desert fairies.

Well, She didn't make it down all the drops without help. Thanks Dodge.

The Sandstone is very fluid in parts of this canyon.

This is from a scene from Titanic or Alice in Wonderland, or something.

The end.

It's been a long time, now I'm coming back home

There's no way I'll bore everyone that reads this with one long blog, so for the sake of both of you, I'll divide it up.

First, the end of an era. Maybe it's not the end of an era, but it's the fading out of an era. I don't believe that I've worked my last week at Anasazi foundation. I don't think I've ended my time in the wilderness with young people. It is something that I believe in, and it makes my life better.

I came back to Utah to be around family and friends, all the while knowing that they have lives and jobs that they must attend to. I think it's the 2 inches of snow we've received since April 14 that's really getting me down. I wanted to go back to climbing right away. The snow will melt though, and my nephew will get to know me, and things will be good. I'm positive about it. I don't want to sound like I'm down either. I'm just a little put out that I'm not out doing things. If anyone knows me, they know that I'm a doer, and not a sitter. I have constant need for adventure and an appetite for destruction.

I cut my hair, and trimmed my beard. I'm here, it's me. So listen up.

Feb 19, Two thousand whatever . . . .

I ease my '95 Isuzu trooper onto Baseline Road in third gear. I'm tired of shifting. It's just one more drop in the bucket of what's become an exhausting day. There are to-do lists that grow with every blink of an eye and I've spent more than I wanted to . . . again. Seems that the simple life is a pretty complicated goal for this mind. My head hurts just enough to annoy me, but the pain is bearable. My appetite has been gone for two days, ever since I bit my tongue. The little canker sore at the very tip makes me loath food and anything else that would upset his delicate little world. He thrashes and burns whenever something disturbs his slumber. He's definitely best left alone.

It always smells like cows as I drive down Recker. It's a wonder that anyone lives in a town like Gilbert, Arizona. It's a wonder that it's constantly expanding, or at least that the new houses haven't driven the dairy farms away. The houses are like mistletoe on an old oak tree. They'll soon suck all the available resources away, and the dairy farms will have to quit spreading their rank manure on the land. People won't stand for it on their lawns.

There are so many lights. Each one of them burns into my retinas like battery acid. There are so many lights. Even the reflectors that mark the lanes send the light from my corrosive headlights back into my mind, reminding me that I'm contributing to the horrible pollution that blocks out God's little decorations in the sky. Oh well, it's a full moon. At least that's visible. My old friend, my one-time answer to a prayer, my half-month salvation in the wilderness.

I hit next . . . wait a second . . . next, next, next. All the songs sound the same. Wait . . . what's that one? I don't recognize this. How in the world did that get on my Ipod? I like that song, but I need something new. Nothing is quite new enough, nothing that I've added recently. I should really be content with the old, the classic, and the faithful. Smashing Pumpkins seem to be making a strong stand against the new. Maybe the new just won't cut it. Maybe the talent ran out in the early 2000s.

Things are about to get good though. Things are going my way. Ha! There are a lot of stop signs in this neighborhood. The subdivision just south of this one doesn't have any. Do they have more wrecks? I doubt it. I'll justify it that way as I roll through one. I haven't seen the sheriff in the black SUV that patrols my streets in a little while. He's just waiting for me to roll through a stop. It's his evil scheme. There he sits, rubbing his fingers and hands together, up and down, like an evil witch on some old Disney cartoon. Nope, not tonight, but soon.

So now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . home.

This is for all the lonely people . . . who like to climb mountains.

Not really. I'm actually in a pretty good mood, and despite recent events, I've been meaning to write up this blog for some time. Emily gave me the fortune that she got out of a cookie when we were up in Idaho.
"Finding true love is like climbing a mountain. You must keep climbing until you reach the summit."
I was immediately reminded of this picture:
Let me talk a little bit about how finding love is like climbing a mountain, and how it is not. I'll try to use pictures to illustrate my main points.

You don't have to keep going until you reach the summit. Sometimes it's just plain unwise. In the photo that you see, Two Jasons and a Joe are looking in great disappointment toward the summit of the Grand Teton. There was a snowstorm blowing in and we had to turn around just a couple hours from the summit. If we had kept going, who knows? We could have been killed, or had to call Harrison Ford to come rescue us. Sometimes it's best to examine the situation that you are in and decide to keep going or turn around.

Some of the most amazing mountains are far far away and yet to be discovered. There are beautiful mountains that I've seen in Chile. You can drive clear up into the tops of them. Honestly, a lot of mountains these days have roads going up them, so it's not that hard to get to the top. On some of the biggest mountains in the world you may have to hike, but you can pay Sherpas to pack all of your stuff up for you. Wasn't it the Beatles who didn't think that money could buy them love? Silly Beatles. So here's a picture of me on top of a little mountain in Chile.
Some mountains are really photogenic. Some are really easy to summit. Mountains and love. They're so similar.

So how are they different? Well, you don't necessarily want you and your friends trying to "summit" the same girl at the same time. That just makes for hard feelings. Most mountains can be best enjoyed in the company of your companions.

If you climb more than one mountain in a month you don't get in trouble. It's not just your guy friends who think it's cool, and the mountains don't ever get pissed. They're rather ecstatic for you if anything.

If you get to the summit or true love with a girl, you should do your best to stay there. With a mountain, it's usually best to get a few pictures, enjoy the view for a bit and then head down before the weather rolls in. Hmm . . . I guess the same could be said for some relationships. That one could be similar or not.

You can climb the same mountain years later. The trip can be as enjoyable as the very first time. I wouldn't recommend that you do that with your relationships.

So really, do you need to work toward the summit? I'll just keep enjoying the hike and let you know when I get there. I'm not going to guarantee that the summit is any better than the saddle or the canyon, or even the meadows.

Price

If Joe can, I will

MiscellaniaFlagstaff, AZ

1. Pictures - I don't even know where my camera is. I've pretty much been on the trail for the last 3 months, and since I can't take a camera out there, I haven't really bothered finding the dang thing. I do miss taking pictures and posting about my adventures. I have started every sentence in this blog with the word "I".

2. Friends - You have not been forgotten. Upon receiving your voicemails and text messages, I have promptly felt guilt and yet not taken the time to call you back. Even as I type this, I wonder why I haven't called Jason Miller, Jeff Andrus, Joe Griffin, my little brother, the Gregories. Sorry guys. I'm feeling a little exhausted, but I'll call each of you before this short off-week is over.

3. WFR training - I'm a wilderness first responder, did you know? This means that if we're out in the woods, I can reduce your dislocated shoulders, fingers and elbows. You have to keep your head still until I perform a focused spinal assessment, so just don't move. Also, if I don't have any latex gloves with me, don't expect me to touch you, especially if you're bleeding profusely. It's rule #3.

Actually WFR training was really cool. Here are the crazy instructors, Shari and Pete.These two are crazy. Why is the bold messed up on the blogger? WFR training is a lot more than class time. It's scenarios with fake blood and guts and amputated hands. It's real life hypothermia, and how to take care of it, so whoever thinks that Anasazi is out to kill kids, well, I know how take care of them.



This was one of my patients during the night rescue. It was about 20 degrees cold that night. This guy had to be carried out in a litter, and luckily survived to tell his tale of climbing the tree to escape a bear. I kept singing the Davey Crockett song to him, but I don't think he was amused. Having your guts poking out through your abdomen wall is never a pleasant experience. The worst I ever received during the training was a broken collar bone and sever asthma. Weak!


4. Anasazi - Greatest thing to ever happen to a lot of struggling families. Why? Well, kids do get cold. There's some danger of getting hurt. Hey, sometimes they're even angry about being sent out into the woods/desert. Anasazi gives families a chance to have a new beginning. It's no guarantee that everyone is going to have a perfect life. I'd guess that a lot of the kids that leave our program go back to what they were doing before. It's a chance, an opportunity. It's a place where seeds of greatness are uncovered and have an opportunity to grow. That's all. I met a young walker who was on the trail 13 years ago this week. He doesn't have a perfect relationship with his family. He doesn't always make the right choices. He even thinks that some of the stuff that Anasazi does is pretty ridiculous. That's what he told me anyway. Then he proceeded to tell me about all the good times that he had out on the trail. He told me about how Ezekiel's kids were really cool. He told me about his remembrance pouch and his gatherings bag. To say that Anasazi didn't have an impact on his life would be a bald faced lie. It's a good thing, and it's saved many more lives than it has endangered.

5. Summer - I don't think that I'll be staying at Anasazi any later than May. I'll need to make some money to pay off debts this summer. I'd like to go do some traveling. I'll be looking for a good job that doesn't involve the word "sales" and has a close proximity to the Salt Lake Valley. If you have something in mind for me, I'd be willing to come as soon as mid-April, so let me know.

6. Goals - Well, I'm not making goals to get married, get a real job, or even cut my hair this year. I just won't do it. I will however work on thinking about what I say, before I say it (or post it). I am trying to be completely honest, even when it means letting people know that they are right and I am wrong, or I am right and they are wrong. I'm not going to be critical of anyone, but I will judge righteously.

7. Tangible goals -
A. Get completely out of debt.
B. Climb the Grand Teton and go through the Darby Canyon Ice Caves at least once.
C. Take a backpacking trip in Central Idaho.
D. Go to Central America.
E. Feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my face.

8. Want list -
A. Spend time with my family.
B. Climb some rocks.
C. Spend time with old friends.
D. Gain some weight.
E. Listen to Cross-Eyed and Painless' new recording.
F. Peace and Love in the world.


Thanks to Pete and Tyler for the photographs.

A long crazy month of wilderness and wild

A blog will hardly be adequate to cover where I've been, what I've done, and how I feel about the last month or so. I'm listening to a nice playlist that should be on a CD for Emily Gilliland right now, but, as will soon be shown, I haven't gotten nearly as much done as I would like to. The dates are just a frame of reference as I describe the last month+. They are not individual posts.

Nov 28 to Dec 5 - It's going to start about the 28th of November, my sister's birthday. I headed out to the trail thinking all the while that I needed to give my sister a call, but of course, I never got around to it, and being on the trail makes that kind of thing quite the impossibility. It was a good week with a band of teenage boys that needed a lot of love in their lives. It was skills week. The very famous Ryan family and the Holladay family showed up to teach trailwalkers and youngwalkers alike new and interesting primitive skills. Most learned how to carve soft stone into various shapes. I wasn't so much interested in carving the stone, but i took the opportunity to carve out a couple things and then help myself to the stone supply. I'll get around to carving the stone later. I had bigger frish to fly. Dave Holladay was kind enough to teach me a little about the art of flint knapping. Joe, I've got a pretty little arrowhead with your name on it. Well, it doesn't have your name on it, I'm not that good, but it's yours when I get a chance to give it to you. I made a pair of moccasins, but they need some work. My next pair will be better. I would have liked to learn some more survival skills from those in the knowledge, but Mother Nature would look after that soon enough.

After the skills teachers left, the rain came. It was already scouting, but seeing the wise teachers leave, the water sent in its entire infantry, heavy and light armor divisions, and calvary. I was lucky enough to have my band in a good place and plenty of firewood. I spent the next couple days crawling out of my shelter in three hour intervals to stack my fire 5 feet high and check my traps. Sometimes it would stop raining for a few minutes, sometimes it wouldn't. It was a fun dance, but I had no idea the danger the other bands were in. I figured they were like us and able to weather the storm quite easily. Hit up Emy-G for information on how to survive a flash flood that comes through camp in the middle of the night. She really saved the day there, and I must also shout out to Dodge, the Anasazi King of the Ridge, for his good actions in that disaster.

We eventually made it to our final destination for the week and since rain and mud had closed most of the roads out to the area, I was able to help with some logistical items. It gave me a swollen head, but I had a fun time, and I hope I earned some trust with the field team for what I did. My boys were good that week and they did what they had to do. The complaining was minimal, even though they kept passing around a bug that was giving them all diarrhea and the pukes. I chose not to share food (I never share food) and was able to avoid the illness.

Dec 6 - I had a day off after that which I spent mostly at the Anasazi office. I had expected to have an entire week off, but it wouldn't be so. A young walker had special need of my expertise, and so, on short notice (8pm) I agreed to head back out to the trail. This decision would prove to be a hard one. Not a bad one, but a hard one indeed. I had planned on taking the week to prepare to work 3 weeks in a row including Christmas and New Years. Now I would have one day.

Dec 7-10 - The days I spent with that young walker were hard, cold, and wet. I was hypothermic at least 3 times myself. The other trailwalker that was with me passed out in the snow and mud, and it was the first time in my Anasazi walking that I felt like survival skills were absolutely necessary to see us through. I won't make a longer story out of a long one, but I've seen hypothermia, looked it in the face, and laughed. It then proceeded to totally kick my ass.

Dec 11 - I spent this day in a dysfunctional car running around Mesa, Gilbert, and Tempe trying to round up the gear that I thought I might need for the upcoming 3 straight weeks on the trail. The gal I was with was super accommodating, and we had a good, though stressful, day. I believe that stress got the better of me that day, and I felt broken and bruised as I went back out to the trail the next day.

Dec 12-Dec 19 - Plans on the trail changed, I heard rumors and slanders, I didn't feel well. It was not shaping up to be the best week ever. Even so, I was with some of my favorite young walkers, and I was determined to make the most/best out of every situation. It ended up being a cold, but environmentally relaxed week. Sometimes when you have time to think about life, rather than staying alive, you can have a really good week. Well, I hadn't finished anything that I wanted to for Christmas and my thoughts were heavy all week. I didn't have a good week. It was hard, and I must admit that I am no superman, at least not all the time. I did what I had to though. I worked hard to love that people that I was with. The young walkers are easy to love. They are easy to see as people because I am with them. Nature doesn't allow them to hide their souls, and they are as honest as anyone can be anyway. I had a hard time loving those who were not there and those who I felt were not honest with me. Honesty is a natural cultivator of love, but I'll save that for another blog.

Dec 20-27 Christmas week. Quite possibly one of my favorite weeks on the trail, though it had very little to do with the dates or the holidays. The young walkers made this week special. We had the option to do easy hikes. We chose the hard ones. We could have been grumpy about the cold weather. We chose to be happy. We chose. Isn't choice a wonderful thing. When we chose to do right, do the hard, grow, be happy, etc, we strengthened our gift of choice. That's what life is all about, if I haven't mentioned it already. Christmas was a bag of non trail food until I got a letter from Emily. That made my Christmas choice a lot easier. Thanks, Gillz.

Dec 28-Jan 1 - I got the word that I would be able to come off the trail for a night to do intakes. Wild stories about this week too, but I'll give my readers and myself a break. I was happy to come home, and though my car only starts part time, I was able to get to where I needed to go and get done what I needed to.

Jan 3 - Now - I'm at WFR training. That's Wilderness First Responder. I'll save you if you break your back or get a hangnail or whatever and it's out in the middle of nowhere. Basically, all I do is make sure that your back isn't broken and send for help. That's what I've learned so far. :) Nah, I'm kidding. There's a lot more to it. I'm having fun, but I'm in the mood for a break. You? Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Maybe there's some humor I can end with. Hmm . . . What do you get when you cross and elephant and a rhinoceros? Eleph-ino, you? wah wah.