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Published: September 6th 2008
No photos yet because my camera isn't with me right now, but I will throw some up next week.
I have been, since the middle of June, in Boulder. Utah that is. A place you've likely never heard of before, but certainly worth knowing about. Boulder has less than 200 year-round residents and it's a 45 minute drive to the nearest town (which has a population of 500). The closest grocery store, as you all know one, is a two hour drive. The town, from above, is nothing more than a small patch of serpentine green pastures nestled amongst white Navajo sandstone mesas all set at the base of Boulder Mountain. The mountain is the highest forested plateau in North America, soaring to over 11,000 feet and packed with meadows full of wildflowers interspersed with stands of Quaking Aspen and Blue Spruce. Heading away from the mountain to the south you enter the labyrinth of the spectacular white and red slickrock canyons that comprise the Escalante River watershed. Hundreds upon hundreds of square miles of domes, mesas, petroglyphs, spires, arches, caves, and canyons full of cottonwoods. The road into town wasn't paved until the 1970s and the road over the mountain wasn't completely paved until 1985. It was the last town in the country to get its mail delivered by mule. This place is, without a doubt, as remote and wild as you can get in the lower 48. And I arrived on a bike.
But more importantly I stayed. It all started with a few hours to kill at the only coffee shop in town waiting for the post office to open up. I found out that an upscale organic restaurant in town (there are only three restaurants here) called Hells Backbone Grill has a farm where they grow some of their food, and sure enough I ran into a few workers later that day at the post office (the post office, you see, is where everyone does their daily chatting in a town this small). For a few weeks I did a work-for-food exchange, spending my days weeding and planting in exchange for great restaurant food. Most people get this setup through a program calling WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), but I just walked into it here. It was life at its most simple and elegant and I loved it. In an odd and hilarious twist of fate I was fired from my position on the farm, which was not only my first time being fired but it from was a volunteer position to boot! Why I was fired is somewhat of an enigma; basically there was some friction amongst the restaurant staff and the owner and I think I was an easy scapegoat. I have since come to realize that the whole scene around the restaurant defies all standards of professional ethics, business protocol, and rationality. So it makes sense to me now that I was "released" on a whim based upon complete hearsay with the intent that I'd leave town.
Well, I didn't. It was a rational point of departure but not an intuitive one, so I stayed in Boulder. The week I got fired the Tao Te Ching fell into my hands and I spent my newfound free time reading beside a creek and meditating on the essence of not-doing. The concepts and approach to life espoused in that short book of poems have really struck me as profound and have fundamentally altered the way I approach decision making. The power and truth of living in the moment is amazing, and really embracing that concept at a time when I had nothing to "do" anymore was an important experience for me. I was where I felt I needed to be, and I lived in that truth as much as possible. I still am right to this moment.
As the Tao says, "When it's good it's good, and when it's bad it's good." Inevitably, getting fired from the farm opened so many more opportunities than I ever could have imagined. To begin with, I got a paying gig with the mayor of Boulder, Bill, moving irrigation pipes. He made his living raising race horses but during his younger years he spent a lot of time with the Hopi tribe. He is an interesting guy to say the least, with stories revolving between coming across crazy artifacts and returning them to the Hopi people via insane coincidental events and how such and such horse won a few hundred thousand bucks, broke it's leg, and almost killed his jockey in the process. It's a bizarre juxtaposition. The cool thing is that he's got huge pastures full of dozens of horses and when the monsoon storms start brewing and the wind picks up they start running as a herd all over the place.
Then I got hooked up with Grant and Sue, who don't actually live in Boulder. They live off the Burr Trail, a 35 mile, paved, unlined road extending due east out of town to the border of Capitol Reef National Park where it turns to gravel and continues down to Lake Powell. About 10 miles out runs Deer Creek, the last year-round source of water until you hit Lake Powell some 65 miles away. An old Boulder local homesteaded a chunk of land down there in the late 60s, making it one of the last homesteads granted in the lower 48, and Grant bought it in the early 80s. Getting to the property actually requires going through a campground, driving a few hundred feet in a running stream, 4x4 through long stretches of loose sand, and high clearance for massive pot holes and rocks. You should see the looks on camper's faces at the campground when I ride past them on my bike and head straight up the middle of the creek! It's priceless!
Grant and Sue are truly amazing human beings. They just got running water 6 years ago, and flush toilet in the last year. She raised their daughter with cloth diapers, hand-pumping the water from a well, heating up the water on the stove, and hand-washing them. They have lived in a 1950s travel trailer with some ghetto add-ons since they moved here 25 years ago. Right next to the tiny trailer is a massive 70-foot-tall red rock dome that Grant has blasted out the inside of with dynamite to make their permanent home. So far only the office is done, and it's unbelievably beautiful. When it's complete, it will have a suspension bridge between rooms. This place defies explanation. When you first roll up to the property you see this massive red dome of rock with a 15' arched plate glass window right in the middle of it. You think you're seeing things, but no, that's their office window.
The office is for their business. Grant moved to Moab from Michigan when he was 17. He would spend a term in college, a term mining uranium, and a term camping out on and exploring the land. The entirety of his life, of his very being, revolves around the land of the Escalante River canyons. I have never met anyone who knows a piece of land--every spire, petroglyph, clay pot remnant, grotto, weird plant, mesa top, geologic history, and river bend--like this man does. When he can't sleep at night he traces the path of the Escalante River, starting from its confluence with Lake Powell and continuing up mile after mile of meandering river until he passes out. A day with him is a stream of stories, all of a surreal degree: flashfloods and packhorse deaths, injuries and crazy acid trips. You might hear about life in a mining camp no larger than four whole guys over 200 miles from the nearest store of any kind, or you might hear about that time he took Edward Abbey on a packhorse trip. There is no line, no observable point, between where Grant and his stories end and where the land begins. They all meld into one mind-blowing experience of the sublime, that point where life and art and beauty and earth merge and take of palpable form in your soul. That is why Grant leads horse-supported hiking trips in this area to make a living, and that's why the vast majority of his customers return year after year. For $1500 you get some of the most remote and unbelievable scenery on earth, a week hiking in it with Grant learning about the land in every way imaginable while hearing the most amazing stories ever, a base camp with fantastic cooking, and horses to pack in all your gear.
So, what am I doing with these people? Well, Sue has a truly beautiful and absolutely massive garden. She supplies a lot of veggies for the food used on the trips, and she sells produce here at the local Boulder Saturday Market. I have been helping her in the garden, and at the market, while learning an insane amount about desert gardening. I have been helping Grant with trail work, and most recently I went out for a week with him as an assistant (unpaid) guide on his last hiking trip. The trips start out with setting up camp, so we take out 4-6 horses a day early with all the camp gear and get everything set up. Camp gear includes a propane-powered stove for things like cookies and brownies. The next morning we go back to the trailhead (5-6 miles one-way on this trip) and pickup everyone's gear and meet them in camp that afternoon. The next few days are fairly intense dayhikes from a central base camp which includes swimming in as many tinajas and waterpockets as rainwater has blessed (Grant knows where they all might be, of course).
Now, as you all know my experience with horses is limited. Sure Mae and I had horses on our property, but that was part of Mae's personal space. I have realized though that I picked up more than I realized just watching her work with them, and having to do things like move them between the pastures, etc. I certainly learned enough to feel comfortable pulling around a string of packhorses. In theory, as an abstraction, that is all Grant does. However, his trails are not normal packhorse routes. They start off innocent, a flat sand-slog through wash after wash of sagebrush scrub. Simple enough. But then, at a certain point, you actually have to get down to the river. This entails an 800+ foot drop from the rim, and there are no trails here. Anywhere, actually, in this entire area. You don't hike on trails here, you just take off through the desert (that's part of the reason people hire Grant, because you can get yourself lost real quick around here). So an 800-foot drop down to the river isn't like it would be in Oregon, along a nicely groomed and maintained Forest Service trail full of other hikers. There are two ways out of the canyons around here: 1) Follow the old eroded "Moki Step" hand/footholds picked out of the rock by the ancient peoples responsible for the petroglyphs or 2) Find your own way out, somehow, using ledges and steep side canyons full of boulders. Note that neither of these sound suitable for horses, and they're not. That's why Grant has hand-built horse trails in and out of the canyons.
"Horse trail" is somewhat of a misnomer, because they aren't even decent hiking trails. They are sketchy beyond description, being difficult to hike up at many points. In fact, I honestly wouldn't have believed it possible for a horse to navigate these trails had I not seen it with my own eyes. Had I not led them down myself with full loads. The worst sections--defined as being obstacles such as 4-foot ledges and drops--Grant has taken to with a pickaxe, creating stairs and footholds. The trail we used for the last trip is appropriately named "Scary Trail". The final descent to the river follows a short, narrow crack. Grant has picked out sandstone in the near-vertical face comprising one of the walls, up to 4 feet deep, creating a trail along a cliff a few feet wide with a 40-foot drop below. It's so steep it's hard to walk up it without using your hands, so the slope must be over 45 degrees. When you come upon this section of the trail, you think it must be some sort of abandoned CCC project, a remnant of the New Deal, carved out of rock during the Great Depression by starving young men. But it's not. Like many of Grant's trails, it's a remnant of southwest cattle culture. This particular trail, prior to his alteration, was used nearly a century ago by cowboys to get calves out of the canyon. He found out about it from one of the old-timer cowboys in Boulder, a man whose father was the first to settle in the area. But that original trail, as Grant found it, was completely inadequate for packhorse use. So decades ago, on a family packhorse trip, Grant started work on it because the area of the Escalante River that it accesses is amazing. He actually started working on it with dynamite. He had it all wired up, ready to blow, and his daughter who was then just a few years old begged him not to because she thought he would get in trouble. He obliged. Then, in the middle of the night, a thunderstorm came through. Grant jumped up, raced to the trail, and let off the dynamite in unison with claps of thunder. The next day they rode out on the trail, but as Grant said to me time and time again as I reiterated the insanity of it, "You should have seen this trail when we first started using it. I can't believe we used it like that. It's so much better now than it used to be, and it's still scary as hell. That's why I call it Scary Trail."
There is a reason to have reverence for Scary Trail. Years ago Grant had a horse named Muley that actually fell off the cliff on that last stretch of trail through the narrow canyon down to the river. Muley died while the other horses watched from below. Some of his customers were watching too. Muley's bones are still washing out of the boulder field at the bottom of the canyon. And it is with this in mind, Muley's bones still within eyeshot of the horse corral area, that I started leading a horse named Paulie up Scary Trail. We had set up camp the previous day and were now returning to the trailhead to pick up the customer's gear. Paulie is a real pro, a veteran of Scary Trail, which is why I was leading her up in the first place. Grant had just finished leading George up the trail; he watched Muley die and is understandably slow, recalcitrant, and fussy when it comes to Scary Trail. But Paulie knows what she is doing and pretty much doesn't need me to do anything but stay out of her way. So it was with great confusion that, upon rounding the corner onto the steepest, sketchiest part of the trail, Paulie gave a yank on the lead rope. "That's weird," I thought to myself, and gave an obligatory light tug back at her. Then she did the typical horse routine: One initial warning, which I had just ignored, then an explosive fit of rears. Suddenly I found myself being pulled downhill directly into a fully-loaded rearing horse at the edge of huge cliff! I yelled for Grant, who was around a corner at the top, and by that time Paulie came down on her front knees (instead of her hooves). I was riding that fine line between pulling on her rope enough to keep her on the trail but not so much that she would want to rear harder, forcing her off the cliff. I was also trying not to fall on my ass and slide underneath her. By the time Grant made it down she had given a few more rearing fits, starting from her front knees which made it even more sketchy. She was panting and moaning with exhaustion and fear, her face pinned to the rock with the lead rope I was holding. After a few more rears and some dangerously close approaches to the cliff edge, it was clear that she was done fighting, that she was ready for our help. Grant ran along side her at the only place there was room--which was on the cliff side--and he immediately started throwing her load over the cliff and removing her saddle as quickly as possible. One move by Paulie and Grant would go over the cliff, landing exactly where old Muley's bones are washing out of the boulders below. The rest is a blur, but somehow I came down and helped him remove her saddle, then we both jumped out of the way because once she was free she immediately reared up and backed down the trail. All this and it was only 10:30AM. We still had over 10 miles to hike and a return trip down Scary Trail with the customer's gear. Now I understood why Grant sat around for an hour drinking five cups of coffee that morning--I've never been so glad to have done the same. After we regrouped from the experience and decided to leave Paulie behind for the day, we walked up the trail and retrieved George who was patiently waiting untied at the top. As we continued up I started thinking, thinking about the fact that I was doing this for free, for the experience, and that otherwise he would be solo on this particular trip. "Grant", I asked, "What would you do in that situation if you were alone?" He took a second to respond, "Well, I would have been cutting gear off instead of saving it, that's for sure" Not satisfied with that response, I pushed further: "But seriously, what the fuck do you do in that situation? How would you even get to the point where you could cut gear off?" He let out a frustrated moan, a moan rooted in the memory of Muley, "I don't know. That was bad. I'm damn glad you were here. That was ugly, really ugly, I don't want to think about it."
A week later, when the trip was over, we arrived at Grant's house after driving into a phenomenal sunset. Guests were over, a defense lawyer named Jim and his entire family who also own property on the old Deer Creek homestead. Sue asked how the trip had gone and I relayed our harrowing story. "Earlier this year," she responds as she looks at the guests, "Ezzy slid off a trail and got jammed between a cliff and a tree." My interest was piqued because Ezzy was the other horse I had been leading on the trip. Grant took over the story from there, "Yeah, that was real bad. She slid off the steep part of a trail and got pinned in this tree. Me and Doug spent over an hour trying to get her load off and saw through the tree, but it was big and she had all her weight on it. She was heaving and moaning terrible. A few times we thought she was dead. Finally I had to pull the tree into her tighter to leverage it. The tree finally broke and she fell 15 feet to the next ledge." The intensity of my experience completely deflated. I haven't seen anything yet.
That mantra summarizes Boulder: "I haven't seen anything yet." Just when you think you're starting to understand the people around here, the land they reside on, you get blown away. I had hung out with this old guy named Gary a few times. He tells it straight up, and his cadence and tone make it sound like he should be saying "...BY GOD!!!" at the end of every sentence. At first sight, you'd expect him to be your typical small town old-codger, complete with the elderly three-legged dog and all. And that's what I thought Gary was, an old ranch-hand cowboy. But no, hell no, not in Boulder. Gary lives year-round in these crazy wikiup-type huts that he builds from juniper logs, sticks, and carpets. He hasn't paid income tax since 1965. His ancestral family left Utah after it became a state because they were hardcore Mormon polygamists. They settled in Mexico where they, along with other "refugees", had a ranch consisting of 30,000 cattle and 2,000 horses. His family eventually left for New Mexico, and Gary grew up in Lordsburg, NM, perhaps the bleakest town in the nation. Gary left home at a young age, tooled around, and after some trouble in his life decided that he needed to get as far away from people as possible. He looked up population densities, saw that this region of Utah was the lowest around, and headed on over. To Lake Powell that is, with a canoe and a dog. He canoed Lake Powell, then up the Escalante River. When he could make no more progress with his canoe, he walked--with his dog. He hiked up Boulder Creek, then headed up Deer Creek, and right when he figured he was about to land himself in a beautiful spot in the middle of nowhere, he walked into an insane drug rehab center/cult commune that used to be on the Deer Creek homestead before Grant bought it. Gary hung out there for a while, needing an excuse to be in the area, and threw up a few buildings. Now Jim, the defense attorney, owns one of them. I spent the day plumbing it and installing a solar panel system with him and a few lawyer buddies. Gary hung around and added background to our labor, about how some kid shot and killed himself just up the creek by those trees there, and over that way used to be a building that was used exclusively for enemas. In between Gary's stories of enemas, suicide, and LSD therapy, Jim's lawyer buddies would flick him shit because Jim is helping defend the polygamists in Texas. It's all just another day in Boulder.
I love this place because there is no sense of limitation out here. When you make a comment to someone such as, "I really want to set up a permanent camp where I can put my tent up and leave all my stuff" you come to expect responses such as, "Why don't you build a rock hut? That mesa top over there would make a great site for one." It's not uncommon around here to stumble across wikiup structures scattered about the wilderness, or to meet guys who have at one point or another headed out into the wilderness for 6 months with nothing but a knife. To see someone start a fire with a lighter or match is somewhat rare; it is often done by hand, and a typical BBQ will include things like antelope. I've sat around a fire at the farm next to a guy making his sandals out of animals hides he tanned, roasting a lamb I helped slaughter, talking about how to make a juniper post fence, listening to guitar songs a guy learned while working on a ranch down in South America. There is no end to the flow of ideas from this crowd of folks and the people they attract, the things that they have done and their aspirations for the future. There is an interesting subculture in Boulder of survivalists thanks to the Boulder Outdoor Survival School. Thus during the summer months the town has an influx of ranch hands, people dedicated to local, organic, and hand-made food (via the restaurant), and a bunch of survivalist types. The locals are, for the most part, beautiful and amazingly friendly and great people. But most outsiders would consider a lot of them crazy in some way or another. Since the path over the mountain had wildflowers growing inbetween the dirt tire tracks until the 1980s, Boulder was literally the end of the road and it shows. It has been a catch-all for dreamers and looneys alike for decades, but one fact remains about every single person in Boulder: They are here because they want to be. Every single person in this town is incredibly self-directed. No one gets trapped in some sort of daily grind in Boulder that they can't escape. It is refreshing beyond description to live in a community full of people doing exactly what they want to do with their lives.
A large part of the freedom here, the lack of self-imposed limitations on ideas and being, is a result of the land. It is essentially limitless in this area. Boulder is in a county the size of Massachusetts and there isn't a single stoplight in the entire thing. The county to the north doesn't have a single stoplight either. It reminds me a lot of Alaska, and not surprisingly Boulder attracts and retains quirky folks just like Alaska. Being in a place like this for a while you really come to understand the connection between land and the human ethos, our guiding character, and the way that open space fills the interstices of our psyches and spirits and continually stretches them open, forever expanding the boundaries of what is possible and what life is truly about. It is only a matter of time, of the ebb and flow of simply existing, before it gets under your skin and starts to work its magic. That is the main reason I have not left this area, to let the creativity and energy flow from the vastness of this land into the quintessence of my being. Through this process I have come to realize that knowledge is only as useful as the creativity available to employ it. It is not enough to know, it is necessary to have vision, and that isn't strictly a mental process. So my time in Boulder has been the least intellectual of my life. I have, in many ways, relaxed my brain for the first time. I feel like I am constantly absorbing here, all the time absorbing everything around me. Not in a way I can explain; it's certainly not cerebral. I hear insane stories that blow away my conceptions of what is possible and prudent, and I don't remember a single word of them, but they are in me, part of me, always stretching my soul open.
This, indeed, explains my lack of communication and blog posts. I apologize, but space of all kinds is necessary right now. To the extent that I skipped out on by buddy Thom's wedding at the beginning of August, which was a big deal for me, but I had to do it. Sorry everyone.
Right before I quit my job I had my new bike setup at work, and I came out one day to find that my coworker Trevor had put a sticker on my bike: "The journey IS the point". He placed it right on the top tube, so every time I looked down I saw it. I spent a lot of time looking at that sticker, meditating on the meaning while pedaling up endless hills. I started in Palm Springs, not at the Pacific Ocean, so I wouldn't be tempted to make my journey into a cross-country ride--turning it into yet another goal that I had to accomplish in my life. It was important to me that I enter into a true journey, a rambling crazy adventure and not simply a bicycle trip, because my entire life up to that point had been filled with nothing but goals and the pursuit of their fulfillment. Well, that sticker was made out of paper--of a limited lifespan--and I realized the other day that the summer monsoon rains have demolished it. There is nothing readable on it now, it just sits on my frame as a curled-up piece of barely attached paper. It hit me in the chest, hard, when I realized why it is falling off. My life has been slowly boiling down here like a giant pot of stew to a few simple and delightful truths, and its beautiful to just let it be. Let me be, as I am; and let me be, as I have been; and let me be, as I will become. I feel like I have, for the first time, finally entered into a resonant rhythm with my life and myself. When the sticker finally falls off it will serve as my queue to pack up my stuff and leave. Because it is here, in Boulder, Utah, that I have finally embraced life as a journey and started to feel out what mine will be like.
Thank you all for your support over the years, for tolerating and guiding and loving my unsettled intensity, for teaching me so many things that I am now only beginning to fully appreciate and understand. And you can all thank Trevor for this blog post; his email wondering if I was still alive made me realize that I needed to get my mind churning again and write some of my experiences and feelings down. The timing was, as always, impeccable: He emailed me the day I realized that his sticker was about to fall off my bike.
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kirkley
non-member comment
well well well
well said. will speak soon. carry on, as you are.