Six days in Yosemite

The Miwok Indians, the original inhabitants of Yosemite, called the verdant valley Ahwahnee or "mouth" because of it's resemblance to a gaping bear's mouth. Once the home to grizzly bears and grey wolves, Yosemite now sees around 4 million visitors a year.


My first visit to the valley was facilitated by my friend Joody, who has spent the last six years in Yosemite as a park ranger. I felt very blessed to have someone who knew all the secret paths that led away from the swarms of overweight tourists in their rented RVs. We spent the majority of the week hiking off-trail to hidden swimming holes and remote waterfalls.


Every spring, the rivers and waterfalls surge with water as the snow melts from the high country. According to Joody's ranger friends, this spring has brought a particularly bountiful volume of snow melt, resulting in extremely turbulent rivers, swelling waterfalls, and flooding of usually dry meadows. Here I am swimming in the sun-warmed pools in El Cap meadow, which is normally covered only in grass.


You can see the blades of wild grass beneath the reflection of the granite cliffs... it was soft on the feet and tickled when you swam over it.


Another view from a dryer part of the meadow...


Here you can see the flooded meadows from the top of the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral, an eleven pitch 10c climb I did with two French men I fortuitously met, Julien and Xavier.


Here is Middle Cathedral, considered one of the 50 classic climbs in North America, as seen from across the valley on El Cap. The 1100 foot route goes up the mid-left section of the cliff, descending behind the mountain on several repels and a long, exhausting field of scree populated by aggressive mosquitoes.


Here is Julien starting the crux pitch- a sloping slab with microscopic holds- my favorite kind of climbing.


Here's a close up of the intricate beauty of the granite- something I spent a long time observing while hanging at belays.


Another phenomena I spent most of the day observing was the wild, anomalous clouds, including these radiating spires coming from behind El Cap, and this corkscrew cloud that appeared to be shooting out of a spire across the valley.



The climb was a success, so two days later we decided to try something much more challenging- a route called Free Blast, the first ten pitches on the Salathé Wall, one of the original technical climbing routes on El Cap. Royal Robbins referred to the Salathé Wall as "the greatest rock climb in the world;" it's also included in the 50 classic climbs of North America.

I hesitantly agreed to come along, knowing full well that I was signing up for a day of suffering, fear, and challenge.


We started climbing a little after 6 am, beginning the first pitch of 10c finger crack as the sun broke over the trees. A novice crack climber, I groveled my way up the first pitch, grunting and sweating as my anxiety about my ability to complete the climb grew from mild hesitation to intense preoccupation. When I reached the first belay, I asked as casually as possible, between panting breaths, if I could see the route description. What I thought was going to be a climb of six pitches of 10c was actually going to be ten pitches of 11b. Shit. That'll teach me to do my homework.


Determined not to make Free Blast the third multi-pitch route that I've had an emotional breakdown on, I kept my qualms to myself and endured the freezing wind intermingled with broiling sun on the 100-million-year-old rock. By the time we reached the eighth pitch, a supposedly 5.8 chimney that was one of the hardest pitches of climbing I've ever done due to my lack of chimney-know-how, I was falling asleep while hanging at the belay. Here is Xavier traversing the roof, about to begin the chimney of DOOM!!


Eventually, we finished the route as the sun descended behind the valley walls. Rather than using words to explain how I felt at the end of the day, I think these two intricately related images will suffice:




Battered and sore, the next day, Joody and I hiked on hidden trails through mist and moss to the prolific Yosemite falls...

...coming to the rainbow at the end of the trail, springing from the spray of the falls over the edge of the cliff.

At the end of the day, we descended into a secret cave, squeezing our way through the pitch black, muddy passages of rock and stone, and somehow spotting this snake eating a frog in the light of our headlamps on the way out. Whoo!!


Yesterday I said to farewell to the magical peaks of Yosemite, including Half Dome- the 87-million-year-old monolith of granite, which the Miwoks called T’ssiyakka, or crying girl, because of its resemblance to a weeping woman's profile.

Next stop... Los Angeles.

An afternoon in the Berkley Botanical Gardens

Upon arriving in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, my lovely friend Joody whisked me away to the UC Berkley Botanical Gardens. We spent the next few hours roaming around a spring paradise of flowers from around the world, taking the time to spot lizards and snakes darting into the foliage and to watch beetles and bees going about their business with the flowers.

The garden is separated into various world regions, like this lotus garden in the Asian section...

...or these rugged desert plants in the arid South American section.

Other beautiful sights included poppies before blooming...

and after.

Anyone who has ever walked past a floral section of a grocery store with me knows how much I love smelling flowers- I just can't resist the possibility of a sweet smelling bloom.

I was so pleased to discover that Joody shares my penchant for olfactory delights. She proved to be an enthusiastic participant in smelling every rose bush in sight, comparing the subtle differences in scents between the various varieties and colors- some with a hint of lemon, some with a splash of spice.

We wandered the ambrosial rose garden, filling our lungs with the literally intoxicating smell, fully enjoying the sensual experience.

wheee!!!

We walked away from the roses a little dizzy and blissful, following the meandering stone paths through the Chinese medicinal plant garden, past the culinary herb section, right onto the edge of a private party. We peeked into the walled veranda bordered with palms, our eyes brimming with longing when we viewed the plates of cookies and glasses of white wine that the lucky party-goers were touting. Now suddenly very thirsty and hungry, we decided to crash the exclusive event- if only for a cold glass of chardonnay. With a few furtive glances, we snuck past the three piece latin band, straight to the bar. Success.

We eventually discerned that we were at a celebration for post-doc Berkley students, which explained the prevalence of glasses and the lack of suntans on the other attendants. Joody and I became acutely aware of our yoga pants and tank tops amidst the sea of khaki pants, collared shirts, and modestly tailored sun dresses- it was quite obvious we were crashers. With four glasses of wine and a pile of cookies in our stomachs, we decided to call it a victory and escape before being noticed.

We relocated to a giant rock overlooking the bay, watching the sunset while clouds like giant sea creatures migrated across the misty sky.

I'm currently in the process of doing a book review for Elephant Journal (http://www.elephantjournal.com) on Buddhist teacher Andrew Holecek's new book called "The Power and the Pain- Transforming Spiritual Hardship Into Joy."

A few years ago, I took a seven week course on death and dying taught by Holecek that profoundly impacted my life and transformed my paradigm. An acute awareness of impermanence has followed me since taking that class during which we visited mortuaries, viewed embalming instruments and crematoriums, and attended an anatomy lab with six corpses, both male and female, dissected in different ways to show distinct parts of the human body. This view of the ephemeral nature of life, rather than creating despondency or morbidity in my mindset, has allowed me to greater appreciate fleeting beauty, to forgive more easily, and to love more unconditionally.

In Holecek's new book, he discusses the obstacles and difficulties that accompany the spiritual path. While I was reading this morning on my couch with a cup of steaming green tea, I learned that 250,000 people die everyday. Struck by the immensity of this figure, I texted a friend to inform him of this fact. He texted back, "And I could be one of them." As obvious as that seems, his observation hit me in the heart and made that number personal- when I was just reading it in a book, those 250,000 people who are going to die today seemed somehow removed from me. Realizing that any one of the multitude of people I know and love could be part of that equation reminded me of the uncertainty of life and how precious this human existence is.

on a spring day in boulder...

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end to all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. "

-T.S. Eliot

"We have to be willing to come apart at the seams, to be dismantled, to let our old ego structures fall apart before we can begin to embody sparks of the essential perfection at the core of our nature." -John Welwood

Birthdays and Belays at Shelf Road

For my 25th birthday last weekend, three girls and three dogs packed into a tiny car with all of our climbing gear and drove down to an area in southern Colorado called Shelf Road. The weather was hot and sunny but cool in the shade, making for perfect climbing weather on the extensive vertical limestone cliffs.

This was my first all-female climbing trip and it was a very different experience- the dynamic was much more relaxed yet I felt inspired to try much harder and take some bigger falls. We all suffered from some mysterious, villainous pollen that was causing us horrendous allergies, but despite all the sniffing, sneezing, and nose-blowing, the trip was a great success.

Many climbs were climbed in the heat of the sun, many beers were drunk under the crescent moon, and we returned home with sore fingers, already planning our next trip back to Shelf.

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space

in which you see all forms intensified.

(Out in the Open, you would be denied

your self, would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and construes the world:

to know a tree, in its true element,

throw inner space around it, from that pure

abundance in you. Surround it with restraint.

It has no limits. Not till it is held

in your renouncing is it truly there.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Abundant sun, luminous water, and ever-blossoming flowers- Guatemala is a place of endless enjoyment for a nature lover such as myself.

As the days passed I grew to love the slow-paced hum of the place...

...even when the occasional scorpion would fall out of my pant-leg while I was peeing.

Recently though, I woke up to the resounding early morning birdsong of San Pedro and had a strong intuition of some vague sensation. I sat up in bed, watched the auroral sun filter through the heavy foliage outside my window, and tried to get a firmer grasp on this message that was being delivered to my conscious mind. Suddenly, it hit me- it was time to go home.


I received this news with a fair amount of disbelief, yet despite my hesitation, the message seemed clear- get home as soon as you can. When I told my traveling companions, they too distrusted this and tried to convince me to stay a few more weeks with them in Guatemala. While their persuasions sounded seductive, I really couldn't argue with myself and told them sadly that I was going to go.

Two days later, I was in the notoriously dangerous Guatemala City, squeezing myself into tightly packed buses and enduring the frenzied swerves of highway taxi drivers. As the day progressed, so did a piercing pain in my abdomen. I vehemently ignored this growing discomfort and focused on not getting robbed as I made my way to the dingy airport.

After a drawn out day of flying and increasing stomach cramps, my plane was hovering over a dark and drizzly Denver. Storm clouds consumed the sky and turbulence rocked the plane. Unable to land because of a massive thunderstorm, the captain informed us that we would have to fly off course to avoid the "unfriendly skies." I squirmed in my seat, observing my impatience rise with my level of pain.

Eventually, the skies cleared and we landed safely. I made it home in one piece, dropped my bags near the door, and took the first hot shower I had had in over a month. Luxury. By the time I made it into bed, I could hardly stand due to the waves of pain that were flooding my body. I reminded myself of one particularly bad case of food poisoning I had while in Thailand three years ago, and told myself that this possibly couldn't get worse than that. I was wrong.

The next day, I made a deal with myself that I would give my immune system 24 hours to fight this off before even thinking of going to the doctor. Later that afternoon, after spending hours moaning and sweating while racked with pain, I called my doctor's office to inquire about some very concerning symptoms I was having (I'll spare you the details- they were grim and gory). At first she told me the doctor was booked all day and couldn't see me, but as soon as I told her my symptoms, she paused dramatically and said, "How quickly can you get to urgent care?" I was ordered to come in as soon as I possibly could, without even stopping to check in with the receptionist. I decided to interpret the nurse's rather fervent reaction to mean that maybe, just maybe, I should really go see the doctor.

After seeing the concerned physician and receiving several prescriptions, I was sent to the lab to have a few tests done. Still hunched over with pain, I grimaced when the nurse explained to me, in a voice loud enough for the the whole waiting room to hear, just exactly how I was supposed to collect a stool sample. Everyone in the room looked up to see what unfortunate person had to poop in a cup. Yup, I nodded to the room, that's me.

Thanks to my intuition to come home, as well as the wonders of antibiotics, I had recovered enough after a few days to sojourn to the desert of Utah to a climbing area called Indian Creek- some of the best crack-climbing in the world.

Camp fires...

crag dogs...

and stunning stark cliffs stretching out into the vast expanse of space.

After several days of bleeding hands and torn skin, we went to a climbing area called Mill Creek in the La Sal mountains in the distance. It was a wonderful way to be welcomed home.

Now that I'm back, I'll keep this blog updated with photos from my various misadventures (I plan on doing quite a bit of traveling this summer) and ART!! Check out my latest- I've been experimenting using watercolor along with my usual pen and ink style. You can click on the image for a closer view, and click again to see detail. Thanks so much to everyone who has been keeping up with this blog- please continue to do so! Love!!