Arizona

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By now we were about a week into the trip and my ankles were finally feeling better. The sense of independence and freedom that being in the middle of the desert, thousands of miles away from the world I was used to was exactly as I expected it would be. I loved how I could run into the desert, climb a rock and scream at the top of my lungs and not worry about seeing another person. I would often just sit by myself in the dirt, looking at everything around me and reflect on what it was like being hundreds of miles away from civilization. It was perfect. It was everything I wanted it to be. It was rugged. I loved the feeling of being covered in dirt and dust from playing on rocks all day. Two hours would feel like an eternity when the only time you worried about was daytime and nighttime. I felt like a little kid again and was overwhelmed by the adventure and excitement we had found. Arizona only intensified this feeling.

The first place we stopped at in Arizona was the Painted Desert. This was one of my favorite places of the whole road trip. I remember being in complete awe as we drove in and just wanted to scream because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There were views that held both of silent as if we forgot how to breathe. We parked the car and strapped on our boots in the brisk morning air and in complete silence, walked onto the landscape that triggered this response in us. We spent the entire day here. The landscape around us so indescribable all we wanted to do was experience it. We spent hours just running from one hill to another, climbing rocks and voyaging into the desert wilderness. I walked around for hours with camera and still could not believe what I was experiencing. The only sound we heard was of our boots crunching the dirt below us. It was an authentic, organic moment that put the whole world in perspective. I cannot describe enough the feeling of sitting in the middle of the desert, looking over cliffs that extend thousands of feet below or being the only thing around you making noise—no birds, no wind, no cars, just you. It is humbling and addictive. I felt like nothing in the world mattered except for living.

Anything we saw that caught our attention, we would go explore it. It was all about feeling and experiencing nature on a personal level. We would climb up and down huge rock faces, jump over cracks between rocks, stand on edges that dropped straight down for what seemed like miles. Living like this gave me such a feeling of insignificance in the world---realizing how small I am compared to everything else. I had never realized there was so much in the world to explore. I had forgotten the importance of experiencing things by just doing it. Forget the books and documentaries, I wanted to experience everything with my hands and feet from now on. I felt like doing that gave me a much greater respect for nature and at the same time, pumped adrenaline through my veins with every step. It is a humbling experience to be part of a landscape and world so much greater than you, a place that in all reality, doesn't care about you. Being out here, free climbing rocks and living life for the sole purpose of experience put life into a new perspective. Realizing how little control I have over my life was liberating. Why not go out and explore, venture into the wild and live. It gave living a whole new definition to me. It was the simplest yet truest form of the word.

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Photos

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Me running down a long hill to meet Nate. Im still about 10 minutes from him

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A nice spot to read a book.

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the red below me in the picture was a couple thousand feet below...

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Our view after climbing up a cliff for a few hours.

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We just climbed up from down there