Into the Wild West

Haven’t posted in a while. I broke my ankle three weeks ago, and it’s been pretty rough.

Hopefully I’ll get some photos back from my last few months on trail to post. Also hopefully I’ll be back on my feet in not too long. Until then, I don’t have much positive to contribute to chronicling my time here, so…

I just got a ton of photos back from my time at Aspiro, all the way back to my second week. I’ve worked ten shifts now, and when I go into the field this coming week I will work a double, bringing me up to 96 days, the requirement to be a Lead Guide.

This past week went really well. Recently the past few weeks have been exceedingly difficult, so it was nice to have a week that was difficult in the normal way. We had two girls in our group, and we did some backpacking in the Arches area. We hiked in the Sovereign/Klondike Bluffs area for three days. On the fourth day we backpacked the entirety of Courthouse Wash, which begins west of the park area and crosses the park, actually passing under the main park road where a bridge spans the wash. The wash was beautiful, lots of cool steep sandstone walls with HUGE icicles. As we got close to the bridge, the halfway point, we saw some arches and cool spires and hoodoos. We continued on to where Courthouse Wash ends at 191 and waited by the locked vehicle for the boys group to show up with the key. We made it to the end of the wash at 4:50PM, the boys didn’t get out until 8:20PM. Then we found out no one had the key, and had to phone up the staff of the adult group. They came to the rescue eventually, but we had to wait awhile because there was a big storm where they were and they had tarped off the vehicle.

Finally we drove into Arches National Park and made it to the campground around 10:30PM. We set up shelters and settled in for the night, but a huge hail/sleet/snow storm came with heavy winds and destroyed all the shelters. We all ended up huddling under our tarps, tucking the ends that came loose under us as best we could, and sealed off all openings to try to get some sleep.

Other than that night, the weather was amazing all week. For the first time this winter, temperatures barely dropped below freezing at night. In the day time it was usually in the 40s, once or twice probably about 50. It felt like a luxury not to have to worry about my water bottles freezing, or having to keep my electronics and propane in my sleeping bag at night. There was even one afternoon that we got to our destination early and enjoyed lying out in the sun, reading, journaling and drawing. It’s been months since it was warm enough to sit still in the field forget having warm enough fingers to draw.

Arches was super cool. We spent a day hiking around and looking at rock formations. Devil’s Garden is an area right next to the campground, so we went there and saw Pine Tree Arch, Tunnel Arch, Landscape Arch, and Navajo Arch. Landscape Arch is over a football field long, and a section of it broke off in 1991. Someone had even been there when it happened and got a photo. Navajo Arch was probably my favorite. It just has a nice shape and creates kind of a little room. It has a nice feel to it. There’s also some awesome rock walls near it that are fun to traverse. There’s lots of pockets and kind of tufas sticking out from the wall.

Later we went to the Visitor’s Center and learned about how arches, fins, and bridges are made, as well as about some of the wildlife in the area. There’s a species of mouse they call “the mouse that roars.” They bite the tails off scorpions so they can’t get stung and then they eat them. After the Visitor’s Center we did one last sunset hike over to Sand Dune Arch. My co-guide Jesse and I had a lot of fun climbing around on everything, but the girls weren’t too enthusiastic all day. so we didn’t stay long.

Driving around on the road there’s also a lot of cool formations to be seen, and we also saw some Desert Bighorn Sheep.

I’ve been going to the climbing gym a lot in my off-shifts, and last night started working on a bunch of V2s, which is the hardest grade I’ve bouldered. I completed two and now I have two projects I’m working on that are really fun. One of my goals for the rest of my time in Utah was to climb consistently at a 5.10 level and boulder at V3. So it seems that I’m doing pretty well and it’s an accomplishable goal. I can’t wait to go back to Rumney to climb.