in the now

so...to all of my friends that i have not been calling and keeping in touch with or whatever, just know that it is not personal, i have simply been caught up in the here and now.
working doubles and gardening, etc. have been taking up almost all of my time and when i have down time i have been taking it for myself.
you'll hear from me soon enough...

work work work

all work and no play is no fun!!!!!

Work, ugh. How to escape it?
I was amazed to figure out the other day that I am working more hours per week now than ever before in my life. How the heck did that happen?
I suppose I should be happy to have so much work and people begging me for hours considering the current state of the job moarket elsewhere.
So, now, not only am I holding down the fort a few evenings of the week at Hills & Hollows as well as baking pizzas on Friday, but I am working a steady 2 days housekeeping at boulder mountain lodge and will be starting to work a few laundry shifts there as well next week.
of course, before ya know it, the end of the season will be here and there will be virtually no work to be had, so it is time to save save save.
I don’t want to have to work much at all this winter – to simply concentrate on art & music for a few months, and it is looking as if I will be able to do so.
H&H will close for about 6 weeks mid winter, so I know that I will definitely have that time completely free if I want it.
I’d like to do a bit of traveling at that point, explore the 4 corners area a bit more or something. Time will tell how it works out.
It feels good to know I already have a fair amount of the art supplies I will be needing.
It will be interesting to see how space issues work out as well. I had a place to myself last winter but this one will most likely be shared with my girlfriend (we’d discussed separate places but the latest thought is to try to share the space and not get on each others nerves even though there is not much space.)

I have not been able to get out onto the slickrock like I prefer lately. It is driving me a bit batty. I SHOULD be getting the work schedulre set so that even though I will have 4 double shifts, I will have weekends off with every other Friday off as well.
Wish me luck with that. I just hope I will have energy to get out after working 45 to 50 hours over 4 days!

I’ll get a short break the first week of september when my mom comes to visit, which will be good.
Then I will simply have to rough it out for a couple of months.
Like I said, wish me luck.

i am a desert creature (part 1)

Edward Abbey…sigh…
Love him or hate him, he just gets under your skin.
I remember thoroughly enjoying my first experience of reading his work when I was given a copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang back in the late nineties, way before my days out here in canyon country. I’m definitely needing to reread it having come to know the many locations which occur in the book.

I recently read “Down the River”, a collection of his essays, and loved it.
Yes, there were points he would make here and there that made me cringe, but I find myself increasingly in tune with his thoughts.

Having roamed a bit of this landscape, however small in ratio to its entirety, I’ve come to understand the type of possessiveness that comes along with finding special spots, living in harmony with this landscape, and having to deal with outsiders and weekend adventurers coming in and treating it as nothing more than a vacation spot.

Heck, I’ve even had some thoughts of my own of particular ‘rules’ that I think should somehow abstractly be enforced out here. One being that if a person does not know what cryptobiotic soil is, they should not be allowed into the canyons or onto the benches.

In between those reads, I also read his classic work “Desert Solitaire” as part of my Arches National Park Interpretation information package when I volunteered at the park for a winter season a couple of years ago. While I was lucky enough to be working there during off-season and did not have to deal with gargantuan amounts of visitors, I came to understand the impact that has occurred due to the improved roads, etc. within the park.

I also came to an understanding of the fact that if those roads and trails had not been created, the impact could very possibly be much greater as visitors would not have been funneled into particular areas, but would have been seeing the park in a more scattered, higher impact way, crushing everything underfoot.
I got to spend many a day exploring the park off trail and practicing treading lightly.
It led to some amazing moments. One in particular was a moment when I crossed over a drainage between petrified dunes above courthouse wash only to come upon a group of bighorn sheep napping in the sun, truly a moment that is meant to be earned and not gleamed through a car window.

I don’t think I really had the depth of understanding of the wildness of canyon country until I moved to Boulder, UT and started to explore the wilderness of the Escalante Canyons. Few marked trails here. Memory and landmarks serve as guides as one creates a mental map of the landscape. Anthropomorphic rocks here….pictographs or petroglyphs there, or maybe a majestic tree, such as a ponderosa pine unexpectedly appearing far downstream from Boulder Mountain somewhere along a creek bed.
Being able to go merely a few miles from home and be immersed in wilderness is an experience that cannot truly be translated into words. Instead, one must truly get out there and experience it for oneself. Even experiencing the drive into Boulder over Boulder Mountain from Torrey or over the Hogsback from Escalante is an experience that one must have directly in order to really understand. Pictures do not due justice.

There have been moments when I have thought of attempting landscape art out here, but every time I do it, I almost immediately have to stop. My hands cannot translate that immense granduer.

I’ll leave that to some of the local artists already doing it, such as Scotty Mitchell. Her work is amazing. I’ll stick to the abstract, to collectiing and grinding sandstone in order to somehow express this place and what it is doing to me.

That process in itself grounds me, creating an ever more intimate relationship with this landscape. I discover where Wadis existed in the original Navajo Sandstone Erg, when the now petrified dunes flowed across this landscape in a desert larger than the Sahara. In those special spots, varying colors and textures show themselves exposed after millions of years. Special places where water and mud were gathered and trapped creating punctuation within the landscape. Then there are the layers of iron concretion where once again water was trapped in the sand and created a gathering place for iron bleached out of the surrounding sand by water percolating through the pressurized sand for untold years.

I am always awestruck by the magnificent organic forms that this process creates. Some are focused on the Moki Marbles – those infamous marble like round iron concretion pieces that the dunes release to gather in low spots. To me, those do not compare to some of the other forms I have seen – lingams and yonis, miniature versions of the landscape, small dish-like and fin-like forms, you name it….
Sometimes I will arrange them in artistic ways on top of the basalt boulders which remain from the days when the Aquarius Plateau/Boulder Mountain top flowed with lava.

I recently attended a geology talk at the Escalante InterAgency Center given by wayne Ranney, co-author of the wonderful book Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau.
I had a short discussion with him after the presentation in which I asked his opinion of how the Aquarius Plateau was formed and why there is so little information available about it. I was told that there really have been very few studies and that he only had one paper on Boulder Mountain.

In his opinion, which I think sounds rather sound – especially alongside his theory of headward erosion of the Colorado River Basin (see his work in order to read more about this)- what we may be looking at with the top of the Aquarius Plateau may possibly be what is left of the original Colorado Plateau before the canyons were cut. The estimation he stated to me of the age of the top is 8 million years old. Boulder Mountain and the Aquarius Plateau are not included in the Laccolith formations such as the Henry, Abajo, Navajo, and LaSal Mountains. It was a completely separate occurance, as far as I can tell from my studies thus far. Of course, I am no geologist, just a desert rat with an obsession with the stories of how the lands I roam were formed, someone seeking an intimate relationship with the land I live on.

There is so much exploring out here that it will take a lifetime, or two, or three, or maybe more. I don’t think that this land will let go of my soul. If anything, I will one day be a part of it left for others to discover during their own wanderings.

cool weather.

spring continues to be rather cool. it has made watering the garden easier but the tomatoes are not happy and growing much.
i will be posting pics of the garden soon.

Katherine and I managed to get out of town for 4 days last week. We went down to gallup NM (what a hole!). She wanted to check out an education job fair for teaching on the reservation, but as soon as we were in the area we knew there was no way we wanted to live there.
but i DID get new truck tires for my Eagle (whoohoo!). We camped in Comb wash both on the way down and back and took different routes heading south and north thru NM and the reservation. also camped a night in Cibolo National Forest.

things are going well. busy with work and gardening....

looks like we will be staying in Boulder and hopefully becoming more involved with teh new Red House Farm (more on that later).

busy-ness

tourists flood the store.
beautiful sunny days in the 80's.
gardening.
hiking.
web design.
art.
reading.
writing.
baking pizzas in the wood fired oven.
figuring out what happens in august.
from rising until going to bed,
it seems i am going nonstop.
a day of rest would be good.

So, finally, a bit of an update....

The season is getting into full swing, a lot of tourists coming through now.
We're busier at the store, etc.
The art show at the Anasazi State Park went well. My art looked amazing in the room and i had the perfect number of pieces to arrange it all. Only one piece sold - to a local.
Since taking down the show I spent a Saturday in Springdale (with Katherine!)showing my art in a both at the Earth Day festival. I then dropped off 6 pieces of my sand art at the Manzanita Gallery, just outside of the south entrance to Zion National Park.

Also, Katherine found out that she has been accepted into the Sustainable Communities Masters Program at NAU in Flagstaff,AZ, so it is looking like we will be moving there in August.
This is a very exciting thing. We've been watching documentaries and I've been reading up on earth homes over the last few weeks.
She is currently in Logan UT finishing her Utah Conservation Corp training, but will be returning to southern utah next week.
I can hardly wait for her return!

It is feeling like it will be an adventurous season.
I am not quite sure how I will manage money-wise in terms of both meeting expenses and saving for our move, but I trust that things will work out.
There is really no telling what we will find in terms of housing or what I will find in terms of work, but so far, in this life, things have had a tendency to flow smoothly for me with only a few bumps along the way.

My only other worries in terms of money are about the Eagle. It is in ned of new shocks and tires. badly. Considering the amount of travel I will be doing this spring/summer in order to go visit Katherine in the field, it needs to be taken care of sooner than later.

I've got a lot to be happy about, even with the coming challenges. I look forward to how it all grows and develops, and it is amazing to know that I have such and amazing and wonderful partner to share it all with.

spring fever

Spring is moving into canyon country and it feels wonderful.
I have been back and forth between different weather patterns over the last month having traveled twice to the Cache Valley area.
it's been interesting.
It has been a bit difficult at times having Katherine gone for the month, but we have managed to visit each other during that time.

some pics:




It is always amazing to be in her presence. Such a feeling of 'home'.

I've been starting to get out on a few hikes a week. getting sun, working on that good ol' hiker's tan.
I've revisited the area west of Boynton Pass where the old wagon road follows the rim of the Escalante River Canyon and finally made it up on top of Schoolhouse Ledge.

here are some pics from those hikes:
a view from on Schoolhouse Ledge towards Boulder Mountain-


A view towards the area where we live & where Hills and Hollows is. we live towards the bottom of the boulder spill at the base of the ledge in the mid-ground.


escalante river canyon-







i will try to post more soon. there is a lot to update....