The Honeymoon is Over

Yesterday after we finished Nutcracker, Morgan and I drove to El Cap Meadow and ogled the Capitan. The sun was sinking below the walls and lit up the West Face in a golden glow and split the Northeast face off into shadow. It was beautiful and exciting to sit and watch the wall. Some people had chairs, and I’ve seen people out there with a spotting scope. We sat for a while, comparing lines in the book to the ones on the wall, picking out features like Boot Flake, Texas Flake, Hollow Flake, the Sickle, Changing Corners and the Great Roof, North America…This wall has so many lines on it, yet it’s so massive it’s hard to see all the parties on the wall. It’s not obvious that there are probably a hundred people climbing that wall at once. I assumed there were many I couldn’t see, hadn’t yet picked out, and I ached for a pair of binoculars to scan with.

Instead, we took the long way around the meadow, following the trail girdling the outside that gets progressively fainter and weedier the farther West you go. Well, the trail petered out, so we cut along the stream back to the road, through the fiddlehead ferns and prickly brambles to the line of cars parked. A crowd had gathered and was staring at something in the meadow. It was about dusk, time for deer to be out, so I figured it was a herd cavorting for the tourists. Morgan pointed out the crowd that I’d just dismissed as being townies from LA. Well, he got me to look and there was a good-sized cinnamon-colored black bear sitting under what I think was a spreading oak tree. I got the impression it was a female just cause she sat, sometimes wandering around the tree, never going far. Cameras flashed, cars pulled over willy-nilly, (Memorial day Monday and a bear stops traffic flooding out of the park), too excited about the bear to park off the road. Morgan and I watched this bear thoroughly enjoying its life, throwing its head around, simply sitting on the ground and hanging out. As we began walking back to the car, we stopped and looked periodically at El Cap rising above us, still picking out lines, monitoring the parties we could see on the wall, and we decided to walk up to the base. I’ve never been, and Morgan said it was a short hike. So we went, fighting the skeeters, and ended up at the base where we talked to a couple of guys who’d been blown off Freebase.

I touched the start of the Nose, a shallow flared fingery crack, and imagined myself starting up for a three-day suffer-fest. Hauling hundred of pounds of gear, sleeping on ledges, no escape from the wind or cold or storms or other parties or even myself, losing sight of the ultimate goal of finishing instead being caught up in doing the King Swing and hoping my rope doesn’t get eaten by the flake and bickering with my partner and eating ravioli out of a can.

Hey, I can do that. Rack that’d be fun!

What a goal. What a fix. What a lot of work.

Can you imagine the crap you’d have to take with you to make it up there? Hauling that much gear with one other person makes for an intense experience where you’re learning how well you work with this person, what they sound like in the morning when they’re sore and tired, when they take poops, what you do when you’re strapped for water or low on food.

I want it. I want to do it. I want to experience the line, to get comfortable with this wall the same way I’m comfortable at Smith, knowing every area, every feature, knowing stories of the history and the epics and the shortcuts and the innovations that made the climbing possible. I am fortunate in that I call the birthplace of sport climbing my home crag. I got a sense of the development of the sport, the experimental nature of climbing in the ten plus years I’ve been at it.

Sitting up there on the terrace with Morgan I could see across the valley and scope the Cathedrals – and I could imagine myself on the Nose. I can imagine it would get hard, once the honeymoon period of actually being on the wall wore off, to the point that you are immersed in the work, feel nothing but tired at the immensity of the task ahead of you, can’t see the big picture anymore but are only an ant on the wall, trudging up unrelenting granite.

But I won’t know this until I try it. And I really want to try it.

Wow. Climbing. There is so much more to it than just going up.

Partner Trust

The last week’s been work work work. I opened the Cone Stand yesterday with a fellow climber, and we scooped banana splits and sundaes, prodded hot dogs to check temp, and filled giant paper cups to the brim with vanilla ice cream balls and root beer. Truly, I work in a diabetic’s nightmare. A dietitian’s as well.

I’ve been climbing a little bit since last week. The old excitement is coming back, still flickering, still holding. I wonder if anything’s changed about it.

I’ve been climbing with some sketchy characters from work. Colby, my coworker, and Joe, the I.T. guy and I went after work one day, to go do Jam Crack. I’d told them both I’m a 5.8 leader, and I guess I’m shortchanging myself because I feel pretty comfortable on single pitch .10a. Multipitch is a different story.

So we got going at 6pm, walked five minutes to Sunnyside Bench, one of the wonderfully short approaches here in the Valley, and arrived at a beautiful slabby 5.7 hand and finger crack. Immediately I wanted to lead, but because I’d outlined my abilities as being such, Joe and Colby assumed I’d be following.

What is it with guys and taking the lead?

Do they automatically assume that since I’m a girl I don’t want to get on the sharp end? That I don’t have the confidence? That I’m just here for, what? A free ride? They didn’t even ask me if I wanted to lead. Yes, there were only two pitches. Yes, Joe did invite the both of us to climb, thus he assumed some responsibility in getting the rope to the anchors. I felt like I was imposing by insisting on leading, so I just shut up and followed, taking my sweet time and enjoying each movement, placing my hands just so, and critiquing the anchors at the top. I felt like a bitch.

Remember that post about climbing partners? So far I’ve been lucky. This night was the catch-up, the way the other kind of climber does it. Joe belays lazily with a grigri, sitting with his back to the wall, unsure of which hand is on the brake and never really aware of what he should be doing. He’s more concerned with seeming like he knows what he’s doing. At least he uses a grigri correctly and five piece of gear in his interestingly-equalized anchor. At least three of those piece would have held.

Colby, on the other hand, just goes for it. On the second pitch, he ape-armed his way through a third of it before placing his first piece, and that was after I realized if he fell it would be a factor 2 on the anchor and we’d all plummet to our deaths, and I yelled, “Jesus Christ, Colby, place a piece! Do you want to factor 2?” I felt like his mom, and really annoyed, pissed off that he would endanger us all like that instead of putting in a simple little directional.

Later he said he would’ve free soloed it except for one move.

Good for you, asshole, but I’m not about to. So don’t take my life for granted even if you do yours.

I got to the top of the second pitch, belayed up on the grigri again (off the anchor, thankfully) and rapped down first.

Why are climbers so lacksadaisical about their lives? Do they assume it’ll all be OK? Is ignorance bliss for some of them? Is thinking too much work?

One of the things I really enjoyed about climbing with Mason and Christian was the way they assumed I was in it with them. We swapped leads, made safe, took care of each other. Joe and Colby were clueless, Colby more so because he just didn’t think, and Joe was too concerned with what we thought of him to be a good climber.

My challenge this summer could very well be finding a partner I trust rather than climbing anything hard. I'm just trying to make peace with it all in my own mind.

Afraid to Climb? Me, too

I have been afraid to climb.

Afraid my body will give out on me like it did in Indian Creek

Afraid I won’t live up to my partner’s expectations

Afraid I’ll end up in something over my head, where I really will get hurt or scared for life.

I’ve been afraid that I don’t like climbing anymore.

So I haven’t been climbing.

Last Tuesday was my last day, the day of the Royal Arches almost-epic.

I didn’t realize or give myself credit, but I did two big routes within three days, Braille Book and Royal Arches, and it worked me.

What I’ve realized is: my expectations are too high for myself. I haven’t given myself time to recover. I haven’t given myself time to get used to the climbing here, I just jumped into it head first (like I always do…) and came up gasping for air.

It’s taken about a week of air for me to want to climb again.

Today I’m headed to Sunnyside Bench for some cragging with Christian and TC, North Carolina guys I met in Camp 4. I’m really looking forward to stuffing my paws into a crack after a week’s hiatus, and I think I’ve got a more realistic outlook on the whole thing. I’m not about to charge up any hard 5.10s or 5.11s, but I’ll be happy to get some pitches in, make it a long day, get some experience, challenge other parts of me besides my pain tolerance, and generally have a good time. That’s what it’s all about, right?

While we’re on the topic of realizations, I figured out that climbing with so many new partners is exhausting. (Duh, Anchen). Gauging their climbing style, speed, efficiencies, safety techniques, and climbing ability is as nerve wracking as leading any old-school 5.8 here in the Valley, and I’ve met so many people, had so many one-route stands, my standards are way down. I’ve decided it’s up to me to stay safe and that means climbing below my limit on well-placed gear. Or bouldering by myself. My new strategy is to find partners who will be around for the whole summer.

I’ve met people who exclusively boulder, crack climb, or who are here only for big walls.

Yosemite takes all kinds.

The majority of employees here party. That’s a nice way of saying they get drunk every night.

Then there are the dedicated few who go out and climb – the community is comparatively small, I expect to know them all by the end of the week. OK, that would be nice. The end of the month, then. A lot of the climbers just come for the summer to make money for the rest of the year. One guy, Alex, (exclusive boulderer) has been coming back for three, four years. He has a circuit in the Valley, goes exploring and does some “gardening” on the boulders with potential, says the bouldering guide maps out maybe a quarter of the boulders in the Valley.

This is what they do. They come back for jobs within a year of leaving to keep their seniority. Then in fall they leave to go surfing or climbing for the rest of the year, and come back in April to repeat the process. Those are the happy employees.

The majority of workers in Yosemite I would not say are happy. I would say they’re overweight alcoholics with attitudes who don’t make me want to stay longer than the three months I signed up for, for fear I might turn into one of them. Especially in the winter months when it’s cold and rainy, when it gets dark by 4 o’clock and the sun dips behind Half Dome even earlier, when the tent-cabins turn into dark clammy dens good only for hibernation.

In lieu of roped climbing I’ve been bouldering. I found a boulder on which I can do two problems over at LeConte, and a fun heel-hook traverse at the Ahwahnee boulders. I hopped onto the start of Cranium Crusher, a V3, and got about one move in – I figure I’ll just try it every time I go by and by the end of the summer I’ll be able to pull two moves – but all the rest of the boulders here remain nameless and gradeless, a status I prefer in my quest to find the easiest problems possible. I think I end up climbing the walk-offs more often than not, but you have to start somewhere. I figure, the more time I spend on the rock the better.

Yesterday I realized that bouldering is a form of meditation. It forces me to be conscious of every movement I make, to accept the consequences and act in spite of them. Bouldering forces me to start small – one or two movements is all I can make on most problems – and build up to finishing. The cool thing is, since I’ve started bouldering, I’ve made progress.

Small Pride, Small Power

Sean introduced me to the concept of Small Pride. Sitting at one of the innumerable pitches yesterday, I can’t remember how it came up. He commented that we’re both small people, and don’t I have Small Pride? I said I’d had a bf who’d made fun of my size, who’d called me “his little honeybee” and used baby talk, who’d mimicked my ‘girl noises’ that escaped when I climbed or hucked a leg to get over a boulder and I’ve bristled at being called small ever since.

“I can do anything you can do, better.”

Remember that song? That’s been my mantra in an effort to prove small doesn’t mean incapable.

I make it a point to show I can take care of myself, that I don’t need anyone’s help, blah blah blah. I’m protective of myself, my abilities, and my independence. I’m learning to accept help from others because they’re not offering out of pity or because they think I can’t do something, it’s out of that old-fashioned desire to help.

Yes, I have Small Pride. I just don’t think of myself as small.

I really don’t.

It surprises me when other people comment, sometimes enviously, about my size, and I’m not sure what to say. It’s like when people comment on the way I climb – Len said the other day he watched me do this pitch and he thought it would be much easier than it was. I can’t help the way I climb, and I’m not sure how to take this – apologize and promise to warn him in future that I’m a misleading climber? I told him I wasn’t sure what to say and he said, “just say thanks.”

I didn’t realize it was a compliment. That’s me, always trying to fix something. A statement without a purpose – the purpose is to express admiration and give pleasure. A reminder to relax and enjoy the moment.

On my two-day sojourn with Jeff into Moab to rest then climb a tower, I told him he’s a good listener and he paused, then said very deliberately, “Thank you.” Then he explained he’s working on accepting compliments. The rest of the time I sprinkled in compliments just to see if he’d do the same thing. I think he caught on at the end, when the “thank you’s” came quicker, a little less deliberately. I think the lesson here is not to take compliments too seriously, not to think of them too much because it’s the same as thinking about yourself too much, it magnifies one aspect that may or may not be true, since it’s from someone else’ perspective and who cares what they think?!

It’s amazing how much I care what other people think of me. I let it affect my mood, my actions, what I say and how I say it. I’m working on being my own person, making my own decisions for my own reasons. It’s a lot of work!

Not many people acknowledge how much work it is to be oneself. Or that it’s any effort at all. Or it could be that I’m an anomaly in the world and everyone else is born with a sense of themselves. Somehow I doubt that. Otherwise, why would mothers tell their children to ‘just be yourself’ ? So what I’m struggling with a lot of people struggle with. Perhaps it’s universal and that’ what ‘coming of age’ novels are all about. I’m just ten years late on this one.

Being small doesn’t mean I have small desires or a small intelligence. I am my own person, not some large child, and just because I’m small (so they tell me, I don’t feel it) doesn’t mean I deserve less of anything. Sure, I’ll take the back seat of the truck every time, I’ll eat less because I need less (this is only a recent development. It used to be I’d eat anyone under the table), I drink less so we can be even (don’t expect me to keep up with you unless you want a mess on your hands), but I’ll carry more and go harder to prove I’m equal. I think of myself as small in body, large in heart and soul. Actually, I don’t think of myself as small, period. I know I am because everyone tells me I’m small and honestly, I wonder who they see when they say that. Is being small person such a big deal? Maybe I try to compensate by acting larger than life.

Nah, I’m just me, sometimes more. When I’m most me, I feel my largest, like I occupy all of my brain, and when I’m uncertain I feel like I shrink until it’s empty up there, no thoughts happening.

Small Pride. I prefer to call it Small Power. I like being small. I fit into a lot of places normal-sized people don’t, I get to climb onto counters to reach tall things, I have an excuse to roll up my pants and I don’t have to pretend that highwaters are still in fashion. I can wear clothes from the kids section, I slip under the radar, I fit into the crook of a shoulder quite nicely, and I get to be the top on human pyramids.

The Way of the Climbing World

I met my climbing partner yesterday at Camp 4 – He was the Yellow REI Tent who left an ad, I wrote him a note addressed to said Yellow REI Tent, and he ran up and caught me before I biked away.

The striking and distracting thing about Sean are his rings – a pair in his lip and a pair in his nose, on the same side of his face, and he likes to play with the lip studs, running them in and out in a way that’s kind of disgusting. On his right hand is tattooed “SOLIDARITY” up his forefinger, and I wonder how old he is now (I’m guessing 21) and at what age he got it. His fingers are grimy, the pads pink under the brown, the mark of a boulderer. He just came up here from J-Tree, so his skin must be a little thicker than most. Rail-thin, shortish, he could pass for punk in San Fran. Fine features and curly dark hair (from what I could see under the hoodie) give him an alternately dark or young look. He could pass for a girl.

This is my climbing partner today. We talked for maybe 20 minutes, half an hour. I don’t know how much climbing he knows, except by what he says he’s done, which is more than me. We settled on doing Royal Arches today, a nice traversing 5.7 A1 or 5.9+ classic that’s not too committing, that we could build a relationship off of. He was hesitant to tell me how long he’s here for – it’s difficult to stay more than a week in Camp 4 without becoming paranoid the rangers will kick you out. We’re having breakfast together this morning.

**

I am trusting my life to someone I’ve known less than 24 hours. This is the way of the climbing world, these are the skills we share. Everyone knows the basics, everyone has their own philosophy and individual experiences that compel them to do what they do. Thanh, the guy I climbed with on Sunday, ties a sling around his waist and ties the rope through the sling, so that if the belay loop were to fail, he has a backup. I met a Spaniard the same day who very casually belayed his partner, taking his brake hand off the rope to gesticulate a lot. I stopped talking to him so he’d go back to holding the rope.

I have my own hang-ups about climbing. I always have a hand on the brake, I lead belay with an ATC and not a grigri if I can help it, I lower with two hands, I don’t talk while I’m lead belaying. I’ve seen too many close calls because of slacking belayers, I’ve been in too many because of my own negligence. There’s the time I slung a tree whose root structure moved when I belayed. I prayed the whole time my partner wouldn’t fall. The time I lowered my partner off the end of the rope – he fell all of two feet. The time a cam bounced off the rock a foot to my left, dropped from 60 feet above me. I wasn’t wearing a helmet, wasn’t even wondering if I should be climbing below another party.

Today we shall see. I rely on my feelings in picking out partners. I feel neutral about this one. Possibilities await.

For the Love of...

I had my best climbing day yet yesterday on a 5.6 with a retired geezer I met last week and didn’t think much of. Fortunately, he thought more of me and gave me a chance as a partner, and helped me remember why I climb.

After After 6 (our 5.6 on Manure Pile Buttress) it was only three o’clock, so I looked around for another route and settled on what I thought was a 5.9 bolted slab to a crack. I racked up to 2”, added some quickdraws and stepped up. And back down again. And up and down, about eight more times before I stayed on long enough to clip the first bolt.

With a start like that I had my doubts about making it to the next bolt and I prayed that was the crux. I wasn’t that lucky.

Standing on the rounded backbone of rock, my stiff shoes sliding off slick crystals, I told myself to trust the equipment and make the moves. It was all about feet – little steps, high steps, balance, oh, delicate balance on this slightly-more appealing dike instead of the worn white face and step up – don’t breathe – and inch the fingers across the face to the next crust of granite. Then you can breathe, blink the eyes to remove the glaze and consider all edge/smear/mantle possibilities for the next move.

This was the first time in Yosemite that I’ve felt scared and out of my league and I’ve climbed through it.

I could’ve taken, I could’ve backed down, I could’ve hiked the 4^th class gully to the left to retrieve my gear once I decided my shoes were more like shoe boxes and I couldn’t do the moves. I had a moment where I almost grabbed the draw – it was right there – but I tucked that fear into the back of my mind. I gathered all my slab-climbing experience, from the .10b slab at the base of the Hobbit Roof in Joshua Tree, to the slab to the left of Bloody Finger in City of Rocks to the slabby arête I’d pulled just last week where I hung right at the crux, two inches and mental miles away from the jug – and I breathed. Looking around for my next hold, the wall was sadly blank except for a knob three feet north. Instead of putting up the wall that said I couldn’t possibly use these big-bird shoes to smear my way up there, I high-stepped both feet, mantled with my left hand to reach right and had to stand on tippy toe to reach that damn knob. I settled my fingers into that fingernail edge and sagged onto the comfort of an almost-hold. Once I clipped I almost grabbed the draw – the wall looked just as blank and my calves were giving out from (what felt like) hours of waffling.

I knew I could do it now. I’d trusted my shoes, my body, my mind, it had all worked together. Part of my confidence was the continuity and feeling of the day, the need for a challenge at the end (I like to get scared, remember), and Len’s belay. I’d spent the whole day building a climbing relationship with him, and I knew he was paying attention to my every move. Having a competent belayer (not one who tells stories about his partner whipping 40 feet while he belayed) is key to my confident climbing. I pulled through another dicey section and finished that damn route. I felt proud of myself, and I felt like I’m back. I’m back in control of my lead head, and my desire to climb, my love for the sport, my itch for adventure are all back to their rightful place – at the top.

Sidenote: The old geezer is Len, a retired doctor living out of his Sportsmobile who bums around climbing areas and gives out cards identifying him as a PIMP – Personal Income Management Professional. If we could all be so lucky. Plus, he’s pretty cool guy.

Writing philosophy...climbing philosophy...

How-to articles and books are all good for ideas, but it’s only you that can make the changes. For a couple of years now I’ve been reading books on being a writer. They all tell me to write from the heart, write what you know, start small, be honest, use simple language and change up your sentence structure. I know these things but I haven’t been able to use them until I realized them for myself – even though I’d been told to write what I know, I still tried to do business profiles. With each new experience I have, I inch a little closer to the honesty and openness that make a good writer. John Muir described trees and rocks like they were his family – I’m still working on describing myself.

My best writing comes out when it’s true, and it’s what I know. Thus, I write a lot about climbing, and I share my revelations about life. It’s hard to be honest about a lot of things I think are embarrassing, but I’m finding it’s a lot easier to be upfront about my limitations than to deal with them later. As a climber, I overlap activities, trying to fit too much into a day. As a climber, I expect that half my activities won’t happen, so I overplan. And as a climber, I bail or flake on people when too many things come through. (An overzealous nature – inherent climber trait?) I like to be busy. It keeps me from thinking myself out of doing things.

Yesterday, as I biked up to Mirror Lake, I asked myself, “what do I want?”

This can apply to anything in my life, in any time frame. What do I want right now? I wanted some exercise and to explore a section of the park I hadn’t seen before. What I want in a job here is flexibility to climb. What I want out of my park experience is personal development – I want to rise to a new level of me-ness, I want to mostly solidify so that I can start focusing outside of me.

For a long time I substituted wanting things in place of knowing what I wanted for myself. My mom told me it was my scorpio nature. I just ended up with a lot of things – a violin, a new mountain bike I didn’t know how to ride, a pair of pointy blue flats I never wore, a fast car that was too expensive for me, fancy clothes, some of which I’ve only worn in the store or in my room…a lot of stuff. It’s easier to to skitter around on the surface of stuff than to dive underneath and find what you really want.

So I’ve gotten in the habit of regularly asking myself what I want. This question can apply to anything in my life, stuff included. Since I’m paring down my possessions I’m much more into figuring out what I want from this Yosemite experience than what kinds of souvenirs I can bring home. Home is here, I guess.

I ask myself so often what I want that wanting things becomes mundane, and I dig deeper, branch out more trying to find out what I really want. I finally dared to say “I want to be a writer” once I got past the stigma of making no money. You could say I’ve taken it a step farther; I live out of my car and literally make no money. I must have made it.

What do I want? “I want to be a paid writer.”

I’m learning the value of defining my wants, of working out those nitpicky details that make the difference between life and debt. (God, that was a bad one. How could I resist?) My next want is to submit my work – there are a lot of wants here. I want to finish pieces. I want to find the right market. I want my work to be accepted. I want my work to be requested.

How am I going to accomplish all of this?

By knowing what I want, I can go after it. So much of my life, I was afraid of knowing, afraid of going after it because I was afraid I’d fail. It got to a point where I wasn’t happy with anything, and I started examining the points in my life. I couldn’t continue on the same track, I couldn’t keep buying clothes or gear or food to make up for this lack. I started writing a lot. I liked it. I’ve always kept a journal, but writing in high school turned into a chore I chose to bullshit my way through, an obligation instead of something I could have fun with, and I kept that stigma attached to writing throughout college.

I liked writing partly because of the feel of pen on paper. My pen, blue on white, filling the page with shapes, was beautiful. When I focused on the art of writing, I became a visual artist and the words lost their meaning. A lot of the time when I write I spill everything onto the page (thus the pen is really important), then I go back and type it up from memory – only the good stuff remains. The writing on paper is raw art, the writing on a keyboard is edited. I do more drafts than I think.

When I finally started writing for myself, it wasn’t very good, and I was protective of my work. It felt like each criticism made a dent in my psyche, it was a physical pain like shaving off a piece of my arm.

Now I understand I have to separate my emotional attachment to the piece and the reality of the piece – what works, what doesn’t…the way I’ve decided to handle my fragile ego is to save two copies –I keep one as my original. The other I unleash the critics upon, to torque as they wish. The critics have their piece complete with changes and I have my original that might be better or it might be worse but it’s all mine, and an ego that’s not too bruised, and writing continues to be an entertaining conspiracy.

Empty Space

Bree and Dana left this morning, and I made them scoot before I started crying. Why are goodbyes so darn difficult? I know I’ll see them again soon, within the next two or three months, but after they left I felt a weight on my head and bags under my eyes, like I was filling up with tears. A heaviness surrounded me and the lack of their presence was like a physical wound in my side. Like an ice cream scoop had taken a swipe at me. I felt sad.

A couple hours later, I still feel sad, but distanced, and I’m conscious of all the other stuff that needs to get done in my life before I can go have fun.

I forget I can have fun sometimes when I lose people. In fact, my mind kind of blanks on all the possibilities of what I could be doing and I end up sitting – reading a book, writing, eating, until I click back on and I can function again. Sometimes is takes hours, sometimes it’s only a couple minutes. It’s best when I have appointments or somewhere to be after my friends leave – activity helps me get back on track. Otherwise it’s easy to sit and feel the empty space.

Photos Phor U

Here's a brief photo diary of the last couple of weeks.

Here's Nina at the base of White Satin

the first route I placed my new cams on, and my last route on Smith Tuff.

This is me at the top of BloodClot, after I wiggled and shook my way up. Thanks to Marco for the fantastic belay and hey, it was good to see you!

Nathan has the coolest phone cover ever.

My oh-so-brief stop at Castle Crags on the trip down induced massive salivation and palm sweating. And that was just the 2.7-mile hike up.
My next stop I felt obligated to take a picture.


And another one, closer up.



This one I didn't feel obligated to take, I just wanted to catch a whiff...



These are all Yosemite Falls, Upper and Lower sections. Ironically, I forgot to take my camera with when I hiked the Upper Falls trail, but I felt freer without it. Plus, that means I'll have to go back.


My first day in the Valley, and I take pictures of my feet. In the cold, cold Merced. I almost wanted to swim.


My first night, setting up my tent, I found this on the ground. A lot of the leaves had designs. I like it.

This is Vernal Falls, from the Mist Trail. What you can't see and what I didn't manage to capture were the thousands of stairs I had to climb to get to this point. Plus, there was so much Mist I had to be careful of my camera not getting too wet. So you'll just have to believe me about the million stairs.

Also along the trail, I found this,

And for a comparison, I took this -

And then this morning, I woke up to this:

Catch a Whiff...

What a trip. First the euphoria of getting out, the freedom of the road, the falling in love with the country and the scenery. Then, the disillusionment, the feeling of ‘what am I doing here?’ and, ‘do they really want me?’ All that’s available as far as jobs go is housekeeping positions. I didn’t come here to clean people’s rooms. I came willing to clean up after their meals, but it looks like that’s not an option. Apparently bussing is one of the higher-end jobs – yikes!

So I went for a long hike, checked out the library, rode the bus around, slept in the woods, hung out by myself, went bouldering once, wondered where all the climbers were, made a plan for myself, forgot it, got bored, and then it rained. So I started talking to people.

I saw a man who looked like he could have been from Eugene, a hippie Santa, sitting on the porch of the Curry Lounge, which is why I approached him and proposed a conversation. This is not an easy thing for me to do, but because I’d seen him around the last couple of days and we’d shared smiles over something, I decided I could do with a conversation and this man seemed fairly innocuous. It could be, if nothing else, good practice for me. Before I even had a chance to introduce myself, but after I said, “hi, would you like to have a conversations?” he said, “Hi, I’m David.” And we talked comfortably about our respective road trips, life, living, Buddhism, life philosophies…I confided my painful shyness and he said not to be too conscious of self, just to think of myself as an extra on the movie set of life – what I’m doing is just not that important.

That helps a lot.

And we talked about saying yes and no and maintaining a balance. He’s an architect from Ohio, and I asked him how he finished projects, since I have trouble finishing pieces of writing. He said, “I get fired.” I guess I’m not the only one who has trouble.

The point here is, I made an unexpected connection by moving over two deck chairs and saying ‘hi’. It’s easier than I thought, easier than I made it out to be to meet people and it’s just me, being me being self-conscious and lacking confidence (read: being ridiculous) that made it so difficult. Once I decided to be open, to put myself out there as I am, I started making connections. The next person I talked to was a couple. The husband was reading Naked, by David Sedaris, and we chatted about the park, etc. I talked about being a writer, the way I want to write outdoorsy stories that inspire the everyday nobody to get out and DO these things, how I want to convey that they’re not that scary. We talked about the Ahwahnee Lodge (the four-star hotel hereabouts) and the architecture, and I mentioned how it’s an intimidating place. The wife said I should check out breakfast – it’s really not that expensive, and I get the Ahwahnee experience. I hemmed and hawed, until she said, “you could go there and write about it as a new experience for people.”

Duh, I thought. This is what I want, to do stuff that scares me and probably a lot of people out there, and it doesn’t just have to be outdoorsy stuff, it can be anything. Like breakfast at the Ahwahnee.

My next meaningful conversation was with a man who’d been sitting in front of the fire, (in front of which I’d been standing, talking to a woman), reading a Western his friend had written and listening to our conversation. He asked what I was writing, and I told him it was about how forging a connection with someone in a place makes that place and your relationship with the person more meaningful. As I explained, I felt like I was full of shit because I really didn’t know what I was writing about. I was just recording my porch conversation with the architect and analyzing it and trying to decide if it was meaningful enough to remember in a year or five. I told the Western man this, and he kept talking to me. I must have been at least more interesting than his Western.

We segued to dealing with fear; I talked about spending four months in Yosemite and how I felt scared right now more than anything. He said you just have to push through the fear, and that courage is acting in spite of your fear. We talked about change; how it’s scary but necessary, and failure; which is one of those things – it’s not final or fatal. You learn from failure and you move on.

This was getting deep, until another man, bald with a belly, also sitting and reading a book, chimed in about how you have to change with the times, kind of a repeat of what we’d been saying, and then he mentioned the rain outside, and our conversation got a lot more mundane after that.

All these men I talked to were older, probably retired, probably single, except for the married couple. Yosemite seems to attract the old traditionalists. This is where they come to pretend they’re still in the Wild West. It felt oldschool in front of the fireplace – the Western man tended the fire expertly and kept us all warm on a stormy afternoon, and I think he liked having a job to do. He was that kind of guy.

After my day of conversations I feel better about being open, smiling at people, more willing to believe others are looking for a connection too (even if none of them are my age or sex). It adds to my experience, and I feel I understand better where people are coming from, why all these tourists are here and why Yosemite is one of the most-visited National Parks. There’s not just climbing here. There’s everything. And there are people from all over the world, of all shapes and ages, who are here to experience this seven-mile square piece of land.

I think I’ve got a lot more exploring and experiencing to do in this Valley. I’m not completely sold, although last night, after the rain stopped and before it was really dark, I headed out to take pictures of the mist around the granite spires. I walked up to Lower Yosemite Falls (all of ten minutes on a paved path, lined with signs warning of icy death) and marveled at this completely accessible piece of beauty.

Why hadn’t I come before?

Because it was mainstream.

Now I know that’s no excuse to skip something. Yosemite Falls is something I should’ve seen the first day. I was lucky and caught it just as the last people were leaving, so I had the splendor and power of the falls in silence and solo. I didn’t feel alone, however, there was no sense of solitude. I felt comfortable and reverent. I tried to freeze a moment of that greatness into a picture, convey an inkling of the scale of the falls and the arcing wall beside it, catch a whiff of the spray heavy enough to be rain. Everyone else and their foot-long lenses seem to be trying to do the same thing. I caught it in my heart.

The definition of discovery is finding something that’s been there all along. So for example, I can ‘discover’ Lower Yosemite Falls and find it amazing and beautiful like millions of other people without trivializing my discovery, because it’s a personal discovery more than a “look at what I found. The third tallest waterfall in the world,” kind of discovery.

I like Yosemite, it’s surprising. It makes me smile. I can’t wait to see what else I discover.

Love and Thanks

Of the millions of thoughts racing through my skull on my drive down, I thought the most about how much I love you guys. All of you. Throughout the last couple of years, I feel I've been coming into my own, and now I'm finally stepping out. It's been a lot of hard lessons, heart-wrenching and physically demanding, but, I'm in the light at the end of the tunnel.

Yosemite. It's just the beginning.

I'm coming to a lot of realizations here, about the park (slackerville), myself (it takes me time to acclimatize), my work situation (hostessing or housecleaning?) and the people all around me (where are the climbers? Here's the boulders. And here, and here...).

As I wended my way along the 25-mph highway into the park, I stopped, I lollygagged, I ate lunch, I was scared. I camped out at the Upper Pines Campground, by myself, in my tent, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I rode my bike around the valley, admired the trees, the people, the granite spires, the RVs. And I wondered where I would sleep the next night.

Ah, focus on the present.

Presently, my calves are tingling from the 8.4 mile hike I did this morning up to Yosemite Point, slightly higher than Yosemite Falls, and a better view. Get this, I was alone up there.

That's never happened to me in a National Park. Alone at a viewpoint?

The solitude was pretty cool, but I'll admit I didn't feel alone - constant sounds of birds, the roar of Yosemite falls that sounds like a jet taking off, squirrel chatter...it was nuts.

Ha! I mean, it wasn't quiet.

I felt comfortable up there, after two sections of slippery granite switchbacks, and the view from the top, well, it was cool. I miss the desert, specifically, the red rock desert I've come to know and love. Everything is Green here, or blue, and I grew up in green. I want red!

Until then, I will take what experiences I may here. So far it's included poaching a sleeping spot by the river (my best night's sleep yet since I'm not afraid of bears eating me), bouldering at 4-mile in the blazing sun, hiking Yose Falls before the crowds arrive (I rode my bike to the trailhead and got there before the earliest bus), experiencing the din of Yosemite Institute, a glorified outdoor school for high school kids. Or maybe middle schoolers, they certainly ran around and screamed a lot. I got a go-cart tour of Curry Village from Brian, the guys I also went bouldering with, and had my picture taken in front of Yosemite Falls by an Asian woman who cut off my legs. In the picture.

There is much, much more to come. However, internet time is limited. And so is my brainpower, it seems.