Skiing Sympathies

Living in Little Cottonwood Canyon during the winter, I'm lucky to be able to enjoy backcountry skiing in both wilderness and watershed areas, zones that are free (read - prohibited) of snow-machine travel.  If you're reading this, most likely you're a skier or snowboarder, and even if you use an old beat-up sled to get deep into the mountains, once you're there you probably trade it for skins and slog your way up the mountainside to earn your face shots.  Backcountry skiing is about solitude and isolation, a dance with the wilderness.  When not used correctly, snow-machines can create a noisy, hectic, and often dangerous atmosphere.  If you value you value the solitude and serenity of a quiet mountain range dressed in white, then you should know this: on June 18th, the Forest Service issued a long-awaited rule for public comment on designating areas as open or closed to winter motorized vehicles, this is a good first step, but comments from our backcountry community can make it stronger! Your help is both needed and essential to capitalize on this opportunity to bring balance to the backcountry.  By designating specific trails and areas where over-snow vehicle use may occur, winter travel planning is an opportunity to bring balance to the backcountry.  The community of backcountry skiers needs to be heard!  Please consider adding your comment to the voices of support for human-powered winter recreation.  To get a better grasp of the issues at hand, and help you draft a comment worthy of consideration, the Winter Wildlands Alliance has put together a very helpful page to aid you in navigating this beurocratic issue.  Keep reading to see a few links that can help you along, as well as my annotated comment if you're interested.  LET'S DO THIS!!!

(Another) Case for Place

Winters, for me, have always been a practice in hibernation.  Not in the most literal sense, and I haven't always seen things this way, but as my time here continues to unfold and my views and values continue to evolve, it's easy to see how the seasons affect many changes in my life.  My food, sleep, work, my mobility, my drive, and so much more, all are grounded and shaped by the colder months, where and how I spend them.  This year marks the ninth winter season I've come to Alta, Utah.  Each of these seasons has seen progression, regression, evolution and expansion.  I've loved, learned, limped, and continued to move forward.  While I've never had a vehicle with me for any of my winters here, it's only been since 2008 that I haven't owned a car year round, and only in the last two years that I've truly embraced the bike.  This season makes the second winter of Nature of Motion, and it's interesting to see the hint of a pattern here.  Winter is truly a time for introversion, a time for reflection and renewal.  As I look back, look forward, and look inward, I continue to notice new things, re-connect with the familiar, and find my creative spark to progress.  It's easy to look to the side of the screen and see the pattern, the abundance of posts and activity in the summer months, and the scarcity in the winter.  Granted, there's been a lot more than just my change in transportation in these last few years, but I think that reflects a lot of what goes on behind the scenes.  Recently, I've been thinking and journaling a lot about this topic, this sort of seasonality and localism that plays on my life each winter.  March is usually when I start to wake up and dig myself out from the haze of the winter, it's also the month of my birth, so it's a pretty appropriate time to be reflecting inward on my progress and position.  A little over a year ago I wrote a piece on this subject entitled A Case for Place. Here now with a year gone by and I find myself in the same place, thinking along the same lines.  But what do I have to add?  What have I learned or how have a grown?  I find it helpful to look back first, to gain some of this perspective of time and place, so before I spewed out all the nonsense below I took a minute to read the original piece, if you've got a minute, and think it'd help you too, check it out here. Enjoy.

A Call To Climbers

Here I sit, hand bandaged in gauze and cotton, temporarily sidelined and forcibly inactive.  The slightest miscalculation and most seemingly insignificant accident and I’m left with a torn ligament in my thumb, and it’s resulting surgical repair.  After another summer of movement and adventure, I anticipated returning to a relatively sedentary winter existence, one with an abundance of reflection and introspective time, but this is hardly what I expected.  A sense of déjà-vu pervades as I re-live Liz’s recent injury and remind myself that life is full of surprises, their being good or bad depends entirely on perspective, which in turn itself relies upon your grasp of reality, your worldview and your version of sanity.  So as I recline with the subdued awareness I will not be climbing for months, that my work and play in the mountains will be limited equally, I cannot help but feel excitement and optimism for the future, and know I might be a little insane for doing so.

Return, Reload, Absorb...

Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in.  Often times you realize the way as it unfolds.  The last month of my life has been an incredibly trans formative time, but the lessons and insights are lost in time.  To retrieve them requires quiet contemplation and presence, things that have been sacred but scarce for me recently. Over the last month I've moved from the east coast by plane, lived in cities, embarked on what was essentially a bicycle powered vision quest, been thrust back into the world of professionalism and academia, then raced off to the desert to shred a motor-less dirt bike.  It's been wild and crazy ride to say the least.

Now, as I regroup, repack, and reload for hopefully another adventure before work grounds me for the winter, I'm trying to keep the presence and perspective I've gained through it all.  Each night I reflect on what has happened recently and what is really important in life, to live with passion, patience, kindness, and courage.  I owe it to myself to remind myself often of life's fragility, beauty, and awesomeness.  As I reflect and digest all that I've experienced, I keep wishing I could sit an put my thoughts to words and pictures and share with you all I've seen.

But now is the time for movement and I'm still caught in the flow.  Soon enough I'll be able to slow down and transform all I've experienced to share with you. It's clear that another phase of this experiment has begun, the realization.  Boundaries are being crossed and limits being expanded, what is really possible and what I'm capable of is being realized like riding through a tunnel towards the light.  We've found the path and it feels right, I'm continuously overwhelmed with the understanding that this is the way, and it is only a matter of time and my effort to help show others and encourage them to join.

This is just to say that I'm thinking of being here often, excited to share some of the perspective and awesomeness I've gleaned over the last few weeks.  Emerson put it best when he said that it's a poet's job to transform the beauty and wisdom of nature for others to understand, but Terence McKenna's analogy for psychedelics is apt as well, that we're all cosmic fisherman, and it's our responsibility to come back from these journeys with some piece of wisdom to share with the world.  Although I haven't been trippin' balls recently, I feel like the experiences and realizations I've had are like giant creatures from the deep that I'm still trying to reel in.  Soon enough I'll have to weigh and measure them, to prepare them in a way that others can appreciate.  If you have the time or the inclination, keep up with us on facebook at Nature of Motion and on instagram @natureofmotion.  Until then I'll continue to search....

Quietly Crushing

I met Amos during the summer of 2009 while I was working at a small farm outside Palmer Alaska.  I'd caught a ride up to Anchorage with my friend Rich, who had work lined up as a sea kayak guide out of Whittier.  Rich was gracious enough to let me throw my bike on his roof and stuff my bicycle trailer and gear in his trunk.  My original plan was to spend a few weeks seeing the state before riding back down to the states later that summer, but after our road trip through southern Utah and up to Alaska, I found that the meager savings of a ski bum really didn't go that far.  So faced with a little new found perspective I spent some hours surfing the web and the WWOOF directory trying to line up some work-trade jobs and possibly something with some pay or stipend that could see me through the fall.  After cycling about 1000 miles back and forth from Anchorage to Fairbanks, catching a ride down to Homer, I managed to find some paying work with this small farm located in the Matanuska Susitna Valley.  When I wasn't pulling weeds or washing vegetables, I hiked the nearby mountains, went for some bike rides, and sampled some of the traditional local harvest, Matanuska Thunderfuck.  That is, until I met Amos.

Coastal Ambiguity

I'll always be an East Coaster who's heart is pulled by the smell of fresh cut hay and cow manure, the thought of a steamy sugar house or a crisp autumn day filled with the fiery color of changing leaves.  I don't know what it is about growing up in New England that at once makes us so nostalgic for the simpler life of rural self-sufficiency, but at the same time lights a fire for the passion of a far flung adventure.  Every so often I wander home and find myself torn between these sentiments, and as I grow older, I may not become wiser, but I certainly do gain the perspective of time, place, and experience to better understand these two sides of my personality.  While this struggle has existed in me to some degree always, it's when I return home that I consider it most often.  The East versus West discussion can take on many forms; migration, motivation, mindset.  Ultimately it's about where we come from, and where we want to go, parts of ourselves that we can't escape or deny.

I started writing this piece when we were still back in New England, but it's been with me for some time before that.  I'm back west now, and it's even more apparent how different things truly are.  Weather or not you grew up on the east coast we're all a part of this discussion, we all came west at some time, unless you're one of the people from whom we took this land, and unfortunately that's equally as true in the east.  The decision to move west is written into the blood and history of being an American, and that's true even if you feel comfortable staying put at home on the east coast.  Traveling west is part of our individual and collective manifest destiny; experiencing freedom, independence and generally being unbound.  What does it mean to you, to live where you do, to travel in one direction or another, does your home call you or is it exploration you seek?

Apology and Affirmation. A tribute to Stuart Smalley

 When you take a look around at your favorite blogs out there you’ll find that most amateur ones have a similar theme of entries asking forgiveness, apologies for not writing so often, and a promise to try harder.  While most folks seem genuinely sorry for their lack of conviction in keeping a post going every week or whatever, I’ve always found it to be a silly and slightly conceited thing to apologize for.  I can’t really imagine their readers, sitting there patiently, anxiously waiting for the next piece of prose and genuinely angry for having not received it in a timely manner.  But I’ve begun to realize, at least for myself, that this apology isn’t really for the reader at all, but more accurately, an apology to myself. 

catching up...

Hello old friend.  I still don't really know weather or not to treat you as a mouthpiece, or a journal, or something in between, but I do feel as though I owe it to you, to myself to do a bit of catching up, as the last few months, weeks, and days, have held a lot of change, and there's always some sort of tugging reminder to share, or record it, here, for you, for myself, for whatever reason.  This has never felt like a project with boundaries, deadlines, or an end, but rather an ongoing and evolving space to share my thoughts and actions, organize them, realize new ones, and continue to strive to be a better human.  I've always told myself I would not apologize for not blogging, and I won't.  I feel no obligation to myself, to you the reader, or to anyone.  Much like the ebb and flow of physical awareness, where it takes an injury or illness to get realigned with the priorities of health and wellness, my aptitude for clear thinking and writing often falter and fizzle, but will in time return.

The Air We Breathe

"By now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life; clothing, shelter, food, even water.  Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution."

Every winter the air around Salt Lake City Utah gains national attention for being some of the worst.  It’s unique geography, dense population, and numerous industries often trap air between mountain ranges, creating a thick, foggy soup of air that can often be the worst in the Nation. As residents once again protest the quality of their air and argue that breathing clean air is a right that we can’t be denied, I have to wonder, what’s exactly making this air so unhealthy, and whatever it is why can’t we just turn if off?  What could possibly be worth our lives, poisoning our air and killing ourselves? 

Links You'll Like

Sometime during the winter of 2011, shortly after our decision to embark on this car-less adventure, I began what has become an in-depth and on-going, online research project into human powered adventure and the car-less lifestyle.  The internet is a vast place and while I've only begun to probe its deeper depths I do feel like I've scratched enough of the surface to create a small offering of interesting links and information to share with you.

Progression

Winter is here.  Although the millions of people just a dozen miles away might disagree as they play golf, go for a climb, or walk in the park with 60 degree temps, up here in Alta, there's snow everywhere, icicles are forming, and I'm skiing every day.  Sure feels like winter.  In reality the shift is much more of a mental one in which I'd rather go for a ski tour, or find a half frozen runnel of water to climb then catch a ride to the valley to try and climb a few pitches in the sun or play a round of disc golf.  I guess my point is, it's winter in the mountains, and that's where I live.  But my intentions aren't just to give you some sort of over generalized weather forecast but to give you all who've been following along a heads up on what this change of seasons, and change of locations means for the Nature of Motion, and what you might expect to find here in the coming months.

Our summer's activities had such a profound and impressive effect on me that I can't help but acknowledge that I've uncovered a deep seated passion.  In combining my loves for climbing, cycling, the mountains, and sustainability, I've discovered something that requires so much from my mind and body, challenges me in so many ways, and is so incredibly rewarding that I cannot imagine not continuing it.  But as we settle back into the routines of winter, I can't help but look back and consider, whats next?  How can we continue to live this passion, to share it with you, and reach out to others as well?  

Becoming lost.

The act of travel, and the art of becoming lost, are at once related and reliant upon each other.  Although travelling, at its essence, is the simple act of moving from one place to another, as we all know, it can also be so much more.   Travelling imparts knowledge, it signifies rank, class, and intelligence, it can humble, embolden, and enlighten.   For all time traveling has been used by humans to expand understanding and cultivate awareness.  To begin to truly understand the nature of the world around us, and ourselves, it is necessary to move around, and experience that world.  Additionally, the means by which you travel have drastically different influences upon our bodies, and minds.

Just a Reminder...

This is a blog.  Simple.  A quick deconstruction of the word reveals its true meaning, a web log.  A diary.  A journal.  But more then that, the format and purpose of today's blogs is to share.  I'm writing for you, even more than for myself.  Writing and photographing for me has become a way of expressing my worldview, sharing my thoughts, feelings, insights, and adventures.  The format and structure of this site and those like it allow for the sharing of ideas and following of readership.  You can comment, subscribe, or share it with your own friends and families.

This is a journal, and I usually treat it as so, my entries flowing mostly from a stream of consciousness that receive little or no editing.  But this is a journal of purpose, and while I often get lost in the web world of climbing, the hopes and dreams of a kid who loves mountains, I'd like to take this moment to remind myself, and you, why I created this space, why I'm still here writing, and the direction I hope to be going.