Friends and family,
Here we are three (!) years later, happily writing from somewhere magical on Sherwin Summit in the Eastern Sierra. While Greg, Teddy and I have been relatively lucky during the pandemic, the past few years have been a real struggle - one in the making since before Covid started, that has gone through big losses and weird changes, and that whirlpooled me right into a remote teaching tailspin that I never quite crawled out of.
After not feeling like myself for the past several years, I've recently decided to make some big changes. I'll be sharing those here fully once things are finalized, but for now I'm excited thinking about how mixing things up will keep me more active, adventurous, and challenged by new stuff - important things that had slipped away.
One piece of fun and admittedly ridiculous news is that we got a camper van in June! Here it is, looking happy and right at home somewhere far above Burcham Flat.
After barely careful consideration we've named it Van Go (Greg calls it Vinny), and this 4-wheel drive mobile tiny house has been a total dream. Here are a few pictures from our recent adventures around the Eastern Sierra.
 |
| Greg and Teddy near Lobdell Lake. We saw two black bears up here. We also went swamping through a bog that was all liquid cow shit and the grass felt like you were walking on the surface of a bubble waiting to pop. It's wild and quiet up there. The next day we drove the back way to Walker, overlooking the Walker River Canyon. |
 |
| Sardine Falls, off Hwy 108 (Sonora Pass). |
 |
| Wandering near Sonora Pass. |
 |
| Beary and Teddy tracks on the banks of the West Carson. |
 |
| Carson River dedicated fishing and spacing out time. |
 |
| House circles and mortars everywhere. Sherwin Summit wandersessions. |
 |
| A decade after being driven off the trail by mosquitoes, I finally made it to Bennettville! We spent a day around Lee Vining. I was heartbroken to see that SCE has blocked off all dispersed campsites along Utility Road - we can no longer stay at the Lee Vining Creek home where Mattie and I spent so many summers living out of the truck. We ate fish tacos at the Whoa Nelli Deli, caught a rainbow and a brook and a brown trout in the creek, then headed up the pass to visit Bennetville. |
 |
| Greg & Teddy hanging out in (what's left of) Bennettville. |
 |
| I found an old desert purple whole whiskey bottle up on the Sherwin Plateau. I'm still trying to date it. My best guess so far is 1905 - 1914. It's my best bottle yet. |
The coolest thing that we've done recently (...for me, actually, ever) is a 12 day rafting trip through 187 jaw-dropping miles of Grand Canyon from Lee's Ferry to Whitmore Wash from June 25 - July 5. Yeti planned this whole trip for us, and it was without a doubt the most unbelievable experience of my life. With Yeti & Dad, Scott & Lauri, Sid, Emme, August & Aidan we set out in late June with 7 other passengers and 6 rafting guides into the the canyon.
Powell rightly wrote: "The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself." I can't describe the canyon, but the feeling I had every day of that trip was one of awe and an overwhelming sense that I am very, very small, and our time here is so very short and precious. It's cliche, but that's it. That's how it feels.
One hot evening while camped at Lower Nankoweap we walked up a small slot canyon with walls of swirled rock that was over a billion years old. It made me wonder why I stress out about my job.
We camped below Stanton's Cave - now blocked off to protect the bats, split-twig figurines made by Ancestral Puebloans (or Anasazi - which we learned means "Old Enemy" so isn't a great name to refer to the people who have called the canyon home for thousands of years), and skeletons of now extinct condor relatives - and took short walks to petroglyphs and granaries along the cliff wall. Vasey's Paradise, a spring that until recently would gush water out of the cliffside, is now just a trickle. We constantly saw the heartbreaking impacts of climate change on the canyon and river.
At Black Tail canyon, we looked for fossils and rested at the Great Unconformity with our feet on 1.7 year old Vishnu Schist and our hands on 500 million year old Tapeats Sandstone, trying to wrap our heads around how 1.2 billion years of earth's geologic history was worn away.
Every day we looked up at the younger sedimentary layers of the canyon. Kaibab, Toroweap, Coconino, Hermit Shale, Supai, Redwall, Muav, Bright Angel, Tapeats. At some point I realized that every single thing I love in this world will, in millions and millions of years, all exist together in one of these little layers that together make up the earth's geologic history. It has left me asking why all of my time isn't spent with the people and creatures and things I love.
In a stroke of amazing luck, after several days of thunderstorms early on in the trip had turned the Colorado (which started clear emerald green at Lee's Ferry) to opaque clay red, we pulled up to the Little Colorado River to find that it hadn't blown - the Monsoon Gods had spared its canyon - and we were treated to swimming in the iconic otherworldly bright blue of the Little Colorado.
At a dried waterfall called Pot o' Gold - which used to flow year-round - our guide Jimmy read a poem by Vaughn Short from his book Raging River, Lonely Trail called "Floyd's Void." You can find it in full here, but here's a bit that I kept at front of mind for the rest of the trip:
So give three cheers for the Bureau boys
And a special rah for Floyd.
Though he buried the Moqui and he shortened the wall,
He did it for the good of all
He did
He did it for the good of all!
But there's a breed of men both hardy and free
Who lie at night on the lonely bars
And there beneath the glittering stars
They dream of TNT
They do
They dream of TNT.
Havasu Canyon - an inviting little slot canyon that begs you to follow it upstream - remains closed. The Havasupai People (people of the blue-green water), in whose homeland the canyon and falls exist and who manage the land, have made decisions to manage restoration and limit Covid-19 exposures.
We swam in the waterfall at Deer Creek, watched bighorn sheep on ledges along the river, rode rapids (my favorite was Horn Creek), hiked to springs and falls up small side canyons, ate well, slept easily to the sound of the river, saw a million bats, listened to guitar songs, played ring toss with glow sticks, and napped on very old rocks.
Even as a newbie tourists on my first ever rafting trip it was hard not to feel immense sadness about what's been done and is being done to the Colorado River, and to the homelands and resources of people who have lived in and around the canyon for thousands of years. There is also gratitude for what remains (Marble Canyon was almost lost, but for the effort of heroes like Martin Litten - who I later learned had written a letter about protecting Mono Lake in 1938, even before the LADWP water diversions began!), and that we got to experience it at all.
I wish every single person could raft Grand Canyon. I feel incredibly lucky that I got to do it once. I hope we can do it again someday. I've spent weeks in big mountains and vast deserts, but nothing has even come close to putting things into perspective like rafting through those canyon walls on the river that cut through it.
 |
| Side hikes every day. |
 |
| Lunch and frisbee at Redwall Cavern. |
 |
| Water fights. |
 | ||
| Convergence - Colorado River (red) and Little Colorado River (blue). |
 |
| Greg floating down the Little Colorado River. |
 |
| Hike and poetry at Pot O' Gold. |
 |
| Waterfall and a nap at Deer Creek. |
 |
| Threatening monsoons at Eminence. |
I'm looking forward to sharing more about our changes soon. After several years, I am starting to really feel like myself again. We've spent 26 of the past 38 nights outside. Reviving the blog might stick this time. I'm excited to share it all.
With love from a van by the river,
Allison (+ Greg & Teddy!)
Comments
Post a Comment