Blog
Desert Days
I have come to greatly appreciate the peace found in remote desert canyons, whether I am partaking in climbing or only indulging in the endless photography opportunities of being in such a place. It’s wonderful to have these Edens to escape to during Flagstaff's cruel winters. These ancient cracks in the heart of the southwest provide such an overwhelming playground for a passionate climber and photographer with such talented, photogenic friends.
I feel that the days spent together down there, with nobody unwanted for miles upon miles, fosters closeness with each other and the natural world that few people will ever truly find. I mean it when I say that for massive stretches of land, every step you take engulfs you in a beauty that you feel truly blessed to be experiencing, and you experience it within a sea of silence that will swallow you up and hold you comfortably for hours at a time. Colossal walls tower overhead with details etched in time, and scattered around you are the most inspiring boulders you might ever find. The desert canyons of Northern Arizona truly beat and sing the songs of the Southwest, blocking out all things exhaustingly commercial and brainrotted.
Above are what I believe to be some of the best photos I have ever taken on some of the best days of my life.
Community Spaces Vol. 1
There is nothing that can't be cured by pulling plastic with people you could not live without. I am eternally grateful for Flagstaff and the community it has presented me with. When looking back upon who I was before inhabiting these spaces, I am met with a stranger. Thank you all. Whether you are included in this post or not, you know who you are, and I appreciate you.
For the past 4 or 5 months, Brian, Isaac, and I have been invited to and attending a good friend’s gym set up outside of town once a week. Over the course of these few months, other close friends have joined this weekly pilgrimage to this safe space for pushing your limits and an intense passion for climbing.
This has served as a beautiful refuge from the environment of commercial gyms (although they have their place and I would be nowhere without them), as well as a refuge from classes skipped. However, due to an unfortunate strictness within my class schedule, I was forced to miss nearly an entire month of sessions during October. The month of October was wrought with lows in climbing motivation and a rollercoaster of exhausting emotions in my personal life. Returning to these Wednesday sessions after a sneaky exit from class last week and a canceled lecture this week was an unbelievable remedy for the suffocating nature of lackluster climbing performance, as well as stagnance and even pain in my life outside of climbing.
This experience and haven has a lot to do with the incredible nature of the boards, but it would simply be nothing without the people I share this space with. I am endlessly thankful for the piece of the Flagstaff climbing community that I exist within and look forward to the years ahead that I may spend growing as a climber and member of the community.
Thank you all for sharing these experiences with me, thank you for caring enough to read this and look at my photos, and thank you to T for the invite, support, and community work that you do. I hope I can give back to this community as it has given to me; I will be working on figuring out what that would look like.