Arizona

I spent my childhood through undergraduate school in the Pacific Northwest.  But Arizona is where I became a man and made the transition from jock to outdoorsman.  During the thirteen years I lived here starting at age 21, I spent every free moment climbing, kayaking, hiking, skiing or backpacking the state.  It is where I learned to fly off the aircraft carrier known as the Sedona airport.  It is impossible to know every nook and cranny of a state, but I did my best during the time I lived here to explore as much of it as possible.  That made it hell on my girlfriends and ex-wives who weren’t quite so enamored with the outdoors.  I am looking forward to showing Babe this state of so many contrasts, from the overpowering Border Patrol presence in Southern Arizona to the pristine alpine meadows of the north.  Arizona is a state with many faces, but rugged outdoor beauty radiates from all of them.  Historically among the worst governed states in the nation (now being no exception), it is a blend of cowboy macho, rightwing conservatism and unmitigated capitalism that is being challenged by a steady influx of Hispanics from its southern border.  This is the battleground of illegal immigration and there is no shortage of opinions on that subject here.

We are sitting with Stan Mish and his girlfriend Pam in their breakfast room watching a family of baby quail flitter back and forth across the front yard.  The view is spectacular, looking out across the Verde Valley into Sedona from Stan’s hillside perch in Rimrock, Arizona.  The adorable chicks comically swarm about under the watchful eye of both parents, attracting the attention of a chipmunk who fancies them as its next meal.  Like an impatient cat, the chipmunk stalks the chicks, its furtive movement s alerting the father quail to the impending danger.  Instantly, it chases the chipmunk away while the mother quail does her best to herd the chicks back together.  Disaster averted for now.  It reminds me of the time I watched a squirrel stalk, kill and eat a chipmunk while Stan and I were camped out at the Granite Mountain parking lot on one of our many climbing trips.  Yes folks, it is still survival of the fittest out there.

Stan & Pam

 Stan is as good a friend as I have on the earth.  We were together on many of my most memorable climbs and have cheated death on a number of occasions.  Unlike the rest of my old friends, Stan is still climbing hard as I learned the day before when he, Babe and I spent the day at a marvelous new sport climbing area outside of Pine, Arizona.  Stan and I both lead 5.10 routes with relative ease, even though I take my first fall of the trip; falling about 25 feet while on lead and ending up hanging in air from a bolt with no injuries worth noting.  I was surmounting the crux bulge on a dead vertical route when my foot slipped off a smear after my left handhold popped.  If you are going to take a lead fall, steep is good.  I get right back on the rock and finish the long, sustained pitch with a somewhat more attentive belayer.  The rock here is outstanding, the day perfect and Babe gets several hours of instruction from one of the best climbers ever to come out of Arizona. 

Note climbers on center ledge

Stan Leading

Babe failing on 5.10 roof

Stan and I also started down the path of our flying careers at the same time when we took ground school training from the legendary Ralph Scarch within sight of Stan’s house in Rimrock.  After a brief career in hangliders I focused on powered flight, while Stan became a record setting hanglider.  Among Stan’s many accomplishments is jumping off the rim of the Grand Canyon in a paraglider to join a river trip at Tanner campground (think about that the next time you are standing at the edge).  He remains the only person to have jumped off the rim; a Bandito exploit if there ever was one.

Flagstaff

Babe and I had spent most of the last week in Flagstaff, Arizona connecting with old friends after taking my ex-mother-in-law June to breakfast on Mother’s Day in Tucson.  June is a good woman who has raised six wonderful children including my ex-wife, and it is good to see her again after so many years.  Both Babe and I enjoy her company and that of her oldest daughter Mary later in the day.  It goes to show that a broken marriage doesn’t have to result in the loss of extended family.  Later that day we drove up to Flagstaff to reconnect with Glenn Rink, aka Little Buddy or LB, one of the original Banditos.  He and Babe hit it off almost immediately, the first of my many women to have done so.  LB is a keen observer of the opposite sex with little sympathy for female weakness and none for bullshit.  He is no longer climbing or kayaking, but has become a well known, southwestern botany expert.  We stay for most of a week at the house he built.  LB spends most of his time outdoors on trips or jobs, and his living quarters reflect that.  There is more dirt in LB’s living room than in most of the campgrounds where we stay.

LB and his lover

 A mini-drama unfolds while we are with him.  Bill Ott has been missing in the Grand Canyon for over 3 weeks.  He is a friend of LB’s and his truck is parked in LB’s yard.  Bill, the first man to hike the length of the Grand Canyon from the river, has been gone for over 40 days on a planned 21 day trip.  If anyone is still alive and well in that unforgiving environment, it is Bill, but there is much less potable water than expected in the Canyon this spring.  Bill is 65 and moving slower than he used to, so the debate rages as to whether he is dead or just having a grand old time looking for ancient Indian art.  The friend that dropped Bill off to start his hike finally called Search & Rescue (SAR) and the follies began.

Listening to LB deal with three days of incompetence and misinformation, however well intentioned it may be, I am reminded of my own encounters with Coconino County SAR.  Apparently, nothing has changed in the intervening 30 years.  There is not a centralized command structure managing facts and coordinating the activities of the numerous agencies involved in the search.  With a couple of notable exceptions, none of the searchers is competent in the outdoor skills required in this situation.  One of the agencies reports Bill is found alive which touches off a flurry of emails.  The report is false.  Listening in on all of this reinforces my long-held belief that SAR is the last group I want called if I need help.  They can probably rescue cats out of a tree, but I’m not betting on it.  Please call my friends first if I ever need help.

Decades earlier I was serving as a backcountry ski guide for young UCLA coeds that came to N. Arizona for a weekend of skiing with a tour group run by my friend Steve Glass.  My job was to service their every need and keep them out of trouble in the backcountry.  Steve managed to break his tailbone and knock himself out cold several miles from the road after he skied over a sharp-edged boulder hidden by the fresh powder snow.  I skied out for help in the late morning, leaving a couple of the coeds to tend to his misery.  SAR showed up about two hours after I got hold of them, arriving with a whirlwind of snowmobiles and a large Sno-Cat, not to mention all the pomp and an attitude of “we are in charge now.”  None of their machines could make it more than 50 feet off the road before bogging down in the deep snow.  None of the “rescue” personnel could cross-country ski, and they didn’t even have a toboggan at their disposal.  It was getting late, so I was forced to borrow a Stokes litter and ski back to retrieve Steve with help from one of the coeds who had just started skiing that weekend.  SAR loaned me a radio and stuck around, but Steve wanted no part of them when we got back to the cars hours later after dark.  On a separate occasion, my climbing partner’s fiancé had called SAR when we were about three hours overdue from a climb.  Although the climb included an epic descent in the dark, we needed rescuing like a hole in the head.  A heated conversation occurred when I informed SAR that we were in fact fine; that yes, people did walk out through the desert at night without lights; and sorry, but the person who called them should not have done so.

In addition to Stan and LB, Babe and I manage to spend quality time with Eve Ross-Marstellar and her husband Michael, George and Jane Bain, and Jay Lincoln.  Eve is an attorney for Gore and an ex-roommate.  One of the smartest people I know, we have been extremely close since the day she was introduced to me.  There isn’t much Eve doesn’t know about me and I became close to both her parents, meeting up with her mom and dad unexpectedly while refueling my airplane during a climbing reconnaissance trip to Baffin Island.  Her mom Vivian joins us for lunch, but unfortunately her dad Lenny passed years earlier after a life of exploration.

George introduced me to climbing and taught me river etiquette on many multi-day trips down southwestern rivers.  Some of my best days were spent backcountry skiing with George by the full moon stoned on acid.  I performed the wedding ceremony for his quirky brother James, a well-respected PhD who now runs a sophisticated biomedical research lab at Duke University.  George’s mom is sick and in the hospital, while his wife Jane is headed off to a graduation back east.  George and I first met Jane on the same river trip decades earlier, and I regret getting to spend so little time with the two of them.  George is as irreverent as almost anyone I know, and he helped shape who I am today.

Jay and I became ordained ministers together back in the early 80’s.  We had become fed up with all the born again Christian hoopla and decided we too needed an undeserved tax break, so we sent our $3.00 to Rolling Stone magazine and became card carrying ministers in the Universal Christian Life Church.  At the time we could have become saints for $20, but thought that a bit pretentious.  The Rev, as we liked to call ourselves, and I promptly formed the Salvation Is Near church; “Heaven’s just a SIN away.”  Our weekly church services, otherwise known as all-night parties, became legendary.  They included multi-day river trips with dozens of parishioners that lacked any pretense of the moral righteousness which defines the far right in this country.  The Rev’s wife Karen, a phenomenal woman, had died of cancer several years earlier and it was good to see that he now has a girlfriend that means as much to him as Babe does to me.  It is clear that all of these folks are friends for life.  My only regret is not having been around each other as we raised our children.

Salvation Is Near

While in Flagstaff, Babe and I make a couple of trips to the Oak Creek Canyon Overlook for some single pitch routes on stellar, columnar basalt.  This is where I sent my first climb, and it is still a place where aspiring hard guys come to train and get their egos bruised on crack climbs that seem much harder than their grade.  It is also where I would often go to solo before work near the end of my time working for Gore in Flagstaff: flowing like water up 5.10 cracks that had previously repelled my every attempt to climb them.  Although a slip meant probable death, the focus and pure movement of soloing became for me a transcendent bridge to higher consciousness. 

Unfortunately, half of the Overlook is now closed to climbers.  The Navajo’s have been granted a concession to sell jewelry on this site to the numerous tour buses that frequent the road.  Apparently, climbers are too much of a distraction for this commercial venture so many of the best climbs are now off limits.  Babe and I get trapped half way up a climb when someone calls over the edge that he is closing the gate for the night and locking my car inside.  I hustle to the top, move the car and come back to belay Babe up the climb.  This is one more piece of evidence that climbing access, along with wilderness access in general, is being threatened around the country.

We decide to take a day off from climbing and visit the aspen groves at Lockett Meadow and the Inner Basin in the San Francisco Peaks outside of Flagstaff.  This is a magical place and I am excited to show it to Babe.  We drive out of town to the Forest Service road that leads up to it only to find it closed.  Not only was the road closed, but the whole area was closed and it was not even legal to hike the five mile up into the inner basin.  A devastating forest fire in June 2010 provided the Forest Service all the rationale they needed to close off access to everyone.  The solution was obvious: it was time for Babe’s indoctrination into the secret world of the Banditos.

Bandito Babe

The hike into the inner basin was stunning.  With temperatures ranging in the 70’s and no clouds in sight, we made our way through the 3,000 foot elevation change and watch the forest go from Ponderosa pine to spruce, fir and aspen.  Burned areas gave way to untouched, old growth forest and back again; the forest fire weaving a whimsical path of destruction much like tornadoes in the heartland.  There are elk tracks everywhere and an occasional bear print as we climb up through 8,500 feet.  That we have the place all to ourselves is a gift, but one that points out the danger of closing off access to such alpine beauty.  Closing off access deprives the land of its constituency, and lays it open to commercial interests when there is no one left to defend it.

Lockett Meadow

Inner Basin

 We leave Flagstaff the next day, both of us knowing that we could live here, headed to watch the solar eclipse from its viewing epicenter further north and to climb Mt. Hayden in the Grand Canyon.  We will spend several days on the North Rim to access the climb and avoid the busloads of Japanese tourists on the South Rim.