What I've been up to since I posted last (there's nothing ERE related in this post, really).
I patched my truck back together, finished the camper shell, and packed everything up in a mad dash before leaving Michigan. After a stop in Chicago to meet some folks, I took the shortest route to Telluride, CO, where I spent 5 days climbing with friends who just finished their own cargo trailer conversion.
(all these pics are going to be blurry, by the way. My phone's cam is pretty much shot.)
It was quite cool for sleeping in the equivalent of a garden shed with a tarp for a door, at 10,000ft. Lows in the 20's F.
After CO I shot across the southwest to get to the family land out in the desert. I promptly came down with a cold (sore throat, runny nose, mild cough... no fever though). Covid?? Who knows. I isolated myself from my parents, unpacked, organized, and did some maintenance on my motorcycle.
Once I was symptom-free, about a week later, I drove up to Truckee to drop the truck off to DW so she'd have a vehicle once she sold her van. I took off on my motorcycle for the Eastern Sierras. It was my first time going that distance and on such major roads, particularly that loaded up. I was apprehensive setting out, but became comfortable with it after the first hundred miles or so.
I met up with my vanfriend who I last saw when he left our shelter-in-place compound in April. We camped just outside of Tuolumne (yosemite NP). The view sucked:
Early to rise the next morning, Election day, and we climbed Cathedral Peak. I'd attempted it before, in July, but rapped off at the halfway point due to a) crowds, b) one of my partners' mental duct tape came unstuck, and c) thunderstorms. As we walked up to it this time, there was one party topping out and one party beginning. There's typically >20 people on the face on any given day - having Cathedral basically all to ourselves was special. We spent an hour on the summit block after the five-hour climb, just the two of us, which basically doesn't happen.
That night we drove down to a hot springs. By the time I arrived I was very chilled (probably only 40's or high 30's, but the windchill at 65mph is no joke). A beer, hot springs, and watching the moon rise over the white mountains was a great coda to the day.
I woke up to frost on my stuff the next morning, and vanfriend had an icicle hanging from his faucet, so no coffee that morning. We went to down for a coffee (my first time buying coffee out since 2019 I think), saw a cold snap coming in with projected lows of -2F, and decided to part ways. I rode back down to the family land.
Two days later I rode out to Death Valley ahead of the cold snap, as it was the only place where the lows were going to be above freezing. I rode up a canyon, checked out a mine, staked out a camp spot, made dinner, watched the sun set....
....
...and realized I didn't want to be there. At all. Like not one little bit.
Now, this was a strange feeling to recognize. I *love* death valley. I've been going there since I was three, and I have many, many special memories of trips there, mostly solo. It's one of "my" places where I go to recharge, reflect, and revel in the stark sublime horror of billion-year-old rock strata in an environment that will kill you in a minute if you don't respect it.
But the feeling was very clear. I wanted out. And I knew Towne Pass (~5,000ft), my only real way out, was forecasted for snow the next day, so I packed back up in the dark and rode out.
The ride up the grade to Towne Pass was interesting. It was cool down at sea level, maybe low 50s. It's pretty much a straight shot up an alluvial fan system, with signs every thousand feet of gain. 1000' was noticeably cooler. 2000' was chilly. 3000' was cold, my fingertips were going numb. 4000' my core started cooling (I was wearing an expedition weight wool baselayer, wool sweater, nanopuff vest, a heavy puffy, and a lined moto jacket). Towne Pass was somewhere around freezing when I went over it. I wouldn't have been able to spend much more than a couple minutes at that elevation. Luckily the far side drops down to 1000' or so in a couple miles to the Panamint Valley so I was back to high 40's, but I'd dropped enough body heat that I had to stop every 20 minutes or so to do jumping jacks.
The family land was socked in, snowing and well below freezing, so I crashed at a friend's place in town that night.
I woke early the next morning, checked the weather, and saw that I had maybe a 30 minute window of clear weather to get up home before the snow closed back in. I hit the road immediately. The winds were intense that morning: sustained at 30mph with gusts up to 60mph. They closed the highway to big rigs, campers, etc, because the wind will literally blow them over. There's a ten mile section of highway that is broadside to the wind sweeping off the Sierras that I couldn't easily ride around, so I took it at 30mph or so, leaned way over in to the wind, watching the power lines whip around like a violent game of Satan's double dutch.
The snow was starting to fly as I got up to the pass, and the road was wet but not icy yet. I made it home just as the snow was starting to stick.
So why didn't I want to spend time exploring canyons in Death Valley? Well, the best I can figure, I go to Death Valley as I said to reflect and think. Guess what I've been doing for the past three months? Reflecting, journaling, thinking, etc. I don't need any more reflection, I want to be doing, I want to be executing my plans for my life. Thirteen+ hour nights with just my thoughts and journal for company, and short days of solo slot-canyon scrambling felt like a waste of time, I guess. It would have been maddening, I felt, to be there unable to move my life forward in some really high-value ways.
More on those ways in my next update.
PS My friend offered his condolences that my trip didn't work out the way I wanted. Au contraire, my friend. Getting there and back in one piece was painful and dangerous, thus, a win. And my trip allowed me to have a really profound, unmistakable encounter with my own intuition and sense of direction in my life, one that I could not have had so clearly if I were just puttering around. I've never really had such a clear message from myself like that. So this trip is going right up there with all my other cherished memories of death valley, the one where my special sacred spot said "dafuq you doing here? You got stuff to do, get outta here!"
