Part 1

Greetings!

My name is Nat. This blog post is the first of a bi-monthly sort of personal column I’ll be writing for Coast Mountain Collective / Unparallel for the next year. It will likely take many forms. There will be some spray, for sure (you’ve been warned). I’m hoping to interview some other folks, and will probably do some gear reviews as well. I’ll start each post with a short list of recent, small moments that I found delightful.

-The other day at the crag I met a couple from Guadalajara. We discovered that we had a mutual friend and spent about five minutes laughing about how much we love them.

-This morning at the grocery store I was grabbing some salsa verde to accompany a burrito. One of the employees, who was hispanic, saw my very white and very sunburnt face and assured me that the salsa verde “wasn’t too hot”. I chuckled to myself.

-This interview with Nick Offerman.

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I found myself in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison this spring with my friend Matt. We were fired up to try the Hallucinogen Wall. After a 19 hour drive, I turned onto a quiet road outside of Crawford, Colorado. It was snowy, but not too snowy. The quiet, paved road turned to gravel, and suddenly not too snowy became very, very snowy. Darkness had fallen and my headlights illuminated fat, wintery flakes. By the time I got to the North Rim road—which isn’t maintained in the winter—it was a full-on blizzard.

Fast forward to the next day. Shit inevitably hit the fan, but not without a considerable amount of theatre.

We decided that perhaps the five miles of unmaintained road (which had about two feet of drifted snow on it) may be manageable with Matt’s Subaru. It was mostly a spiritual decision: We weren’t about to drive thousands of kilometres and prematurely bail on the last nine! About three hundred metres down the road Matt’s Subaru almost got stuck. We were barely able to turn around, and headed back into town to brainstorm how to get to the rim of the canyon. We were determined. Our friends Luke and Tyson had just returned from a climbing trip to St. George where they were met with similar wintery conditions (no, we didn’t clue in that we may meet the same fate). They showed incredible grit, shovelling off the lip of the route they were trying, stuffing seeping holds with tinfoil, and forcing the experience they wanted. We had to force it! We decided to buy chains, a shovel, and have a go. Huzzah!

Chains installed and shovel at the ready, we made it a noble eighty metres further than our previous highpoint before the Subaru sank into a very final feeling snowdrift. Our bubble of confidence popped and we felt like idiots. This was only the beginning. The shovel was no match, and the Subaru wouldn’t move. After a few hours, we lit a cigarette (Matt’s first; it was that kind of day) and walked back to the road with the intention of finding help. Eventually we flagged down a truck. The man behind the wheel was hearty, Colorado born and raised, and was excited to help. I’m blanking on his name but I have his realtor card somewhere in my minivan; I’ll update this blog with some wholesome spray!

Like the Corb Lund song, the truck got stuck. We felt like even bigger idiots. Our new friend, however, was unphased. His brother had a tractor, he said, and would come to our rescue. So unphased was this man that he grabbed three cans of Busch from his back seat.

There in that wintery March field, between our two stuck vehicles, we drank to Colorado and to being neighbourly.

Busch, cigarette, and a bit of redundant shovelling later, a John Deere Tractor appeared over the hill with a commanding rumble. They promptly pulled the truck and the Subaru out. Matt gave them some cash, we thanked them, and accepted that the Black Canyon was not in the cards this spring. Indian Creek was close though, and I knew there’d be friends there. We drove to the Creek that night.

I was there for about three weeks; I left for Zion the other day. Matt left Indian Creek after a few days; he had to defend his PhD the following week and wanted to close that chapter with grace (he did! He isa MATH DOCTOR!).

I enjoyed climbing around for a few days. It was great to climb finger cracks and be in the spring sun with friends. Eventually though, all that Hallucinogen Wall energy needed to go somewhere. Enter the Carbondale Short Bus. It is the wildest route I’ve tried on Wingate: the biggest piece of protection is a Black Totem, and the movement is constantly insecure. It is amazing. AMAZING! Get on it.

Anyway, I didn’t do it. I got close—my foot popped off a smear on the last really hard move—but I didn’t do it. What I did do was manage to convince a bunch of my friends to come and belay me in the shade over the last few weeks (thanks!), and it was always surprisingly fun; I was preplacing my first piece when I started leading it, so it wasn’t too stressful.

So, that was a nice place for which to pivot my purpose. I love Indian Creek. I love the community of friends I have here. The first time I came here, I was eighteen, couldn’t climb 5.11 on Wingate, and drunkenly crawled back to my minivan at 4:00pm on American Thanksgiving. Some things have changed. I’m twenty three now, and have paid some of my crack climbing dues. Some things are the same. It stills feels easier to overindulge here more than anywhere else; the other night I accidentally (sort of) took a large dose of mushrooms and had a harrowing night that though concluded as a net positive experience, featured a moment where I was speaking in tongues, to myself, alone in my minivan. Friendships have been strengthened over time, and great new people are always rolling in. The parties are as awesome as they’ve ever been, and Darude’s Sandstorm has really been revived here. And climbing! You can’t forget the amazing climbing! There really isn’t a word to describe the feeling of driving back to camp after a really good day of climbing; life feels so perfect and beautiful, even if just for a moment.

I’ve racked my brain trying to pinpoint what it is that makes this place so good. Everyone has a different answer. The people, for sure, first and foremost. The climbing is really freaking good. The landscape is awesome.

What I’ve landed on this year is that time is one of the things that makes this place really good is time. It is twofold. There’s the time to be here with little distraction, where you’re forced to be present and appreciate the people and place around you. That’s obvious and inherently good. What I’m learning now though is that there’s almost time to the point of boredom, which is a more painful kind of good. You have the time to think about how when you’re here, you’re inevitably neglecting other parts of your life, and that can sort of rearrange your priorities and make you reflect on what matters—put simply, there are some things you miss, and some things you don’t. You also have the time to miss people that aren’t here, with no way to immediately tell them that they matter to you, and that you’re thinking about them. That feeling of really missing someone is so often remedied with a text or a phone call now, and here, you have to sit with it. That’s good. If you take enough mushrooms, there’s also a demonic figure here that towers over you, and assures you in a shrilling baritone that “YOU ARE ENOUGH.” I guess that has to be good too.

Yes, Indian Creek is beautiful and perfect, even if just for a moment.

Post Script

Thanks for wading through what is likely the frothiest instalment of this blog. If you have any ideas of what you’d like to see, or just want to send some hate mail to knock me down a notch, please email me at nbailey5@live.com

Carbondale Short Bus Photo credits to Anthony Aarden (Instagram linked below)