Carrots and Peanut Butter

This blog is a space to record and share the beautiful, silly, and absurd happenings in the lives of myself and my friends.  We always dream big, often make plans based on these dreams, seldom prepare enough when we put these plans into action, and pretty much never arrive at the outcomes we expect.  I'm learning to give up my attachments to these plans, because right in that "ehhhhh" moment when we can no longer deny that things are going screwball, just as we accept that situation is getting ridiculous, that is where we are finally free from the incessant grind of life's chores and schedules and we become urgently and unmistakenly alive.

Sorting through the ransacked storage unit of my memories, I find boxes of dull material punctuated by brilliant objects: these encounters with absurd reality: Straddling a granite spire in the Wind River Range watching the sun's last light spill over the mountains, then turning to the gaping icy chasm beneath us and wondering how we will get down. Standing on the road in Indian Creek as the tow truck turned around and drove off, with five miles and two swollen river crossings between me and my stranded car.  Post-holling through thigh-deep snow in tennis shoes and shorts in Kolob Canyon in march, searching for sport climbs, and watching plumes on snow and ice avalanche off the canyon walls and land in our path.  Hanging from my last good cam placement on a headwall in Zion, staring down 40 ft of pencil-thin crack with nothing but 6 small nuts, some tiny cams, a handfull of biners and slings, and an idea of how this is supposed to work.  Collapsing in exhaustion at high camp after summiting and descending from a mountain in Peru, then realizing that my partner and I had about 400 calories between us, and a ride to food lay 15 miles and 5,000 ft below us.  In all these experiences, what came before was more or less planned, what followed was scary, exhausting, or drudgery, but that one exquisite moment of realization that things are getting silly, and then embracing the silliness and plunging in, that moment makes the endless rambles, tanks of gas, weeks of going to sleep marinating in sweat and body odor, and countless meals of carrots and peanut butter worth it.