salt flats, cowboy boots, and moonlit desert revelry

pick a number between 74 and 77.

oh yes.  you are correct.  that is the number of degrees…. in fahrenheit… that the high-desert presented to me when i returned here last tuesday after a week of holiday celebrations back on the east coast.

it is also the number of degrees it has stayed since… all the way into a cloudless 2012…

it is absurd!!  and amazing!!

but i must say, it certainly takes some getting used to seeing christmas lights alongside rich pink skies.  and it was still hard for me to believe i’d be ringing in the new year without a bitter cold ski mountain or frost-slickened sidewalk to parade on.

and so, faced with the holiday weekend ahead of me, there was very little question at all as to how i would spend it:  sleep hardly at all, spend as many daylight hours as possible in the park and climbing, and spend the starry nights in pioneertown at pappy’s. 

steve & ruth had been wanting to come out to the park some day we were climbing, to watch, and see what all the fuss was about.  i, of course, had been eager to help that happen, and to share this other part of my life with them.  luckily, todd had called up and was heading out on new years eve, starting at 5am, to help his friend milt attempt to climb 57 routes on his 57th birthday (this is now something i may have to start doing.  if i begin now, i may be able to actually do 57 by the time i am 57).  they were going to be climbing in indian cove, a beautiful, wind-sheltered bowl in the northern part of joshua tree, isolated from the rest of the park by a rugged, almost uncrossable (there are no trails that go through it), wilderness called the wonderland of rocks.  indian cove is thus enclosed by 300 degrees of gorgeous, towering, rockpiles.  there are hundreds of formations, with hundreds of routes, all within short hiking distance.

thanks to todd gordon and gina barrera for the photos.

we showed up on saturday morning, met john as well, and got to join the team of supporters, who were stringing ropes and preparing routes so that milt could just hop from climb to climb on his mission.  while it was already amazing just getting to be out in the park and climbing a ton of routes with such a good crew of friends, by far the best part was when todd offered to get steve up on the rocks.  there was a slight (but only really slight) hesitation (or maybe it was just politeness), at first.  but as soon as todd began digging shoes out of his bag and taking off his harness to offer it up, steve was agreeing to get on that rock in a heartbeat (not that i was, and obviously neither was ruth, surprised).  he climbed right up onto the rock as i belayed, and as ruth proudly looked on.  it was freaking amazing.  being out there with the two of them made me one damn happy gal.

it was pretty ironic because the night before, they had invited me up for a yummy ruth dinner, and to watch a documentary about climbing that had showed up in their netflix queue.  it was called vertical frontier, and told the history and legendary evolution of climbing in yosemite, narrated by tom brokaw, and featuring commentary by a whole ton of famous climbers.  yosemite, and especially the free climbers who now populate its soaring walls (they solo climb without any protection at all), seems to be the highlight of news attention lately, with feature articles in national geographic and highly-rated segments airing multiple times on 60 minutes.

that movie night had capped off what was actually quite an exciting day for steve & ruth, and me included.  we sold a piece to a couple that day, which steve and i had been working on since thanksgiving, and which we are nearly (but not yet) finished with.  the couple has apparently been dreaming of owning one of steve’s pieces for at least two years now, and had come by during the art tours back in october, eyeing the raven kinetic (my favorite), which had unfortunately just sold to another family.   they had visited steve & ruth and the studio multiple times since then, and finally fallen in love with our newer piece, the hummingbird.  it has two big stainless steel forms (one “driftwood” bird form, and one circular form), each with 4ft long veins to catch the wind, which are mounted atop two different bearings on an 8ft steel mast.  at the base of the mast, where it joins the rock it is mounted on, we welded an endless screen with hidden climbers (remember the recent piece with the climbers on the copper blocks?), who scramble and throw themselves up over the stone and a foot or so up the mast.  we put the patina on the whole thing just before i left for the holidays, which was as exciting a process as ever to watch the colors transform and come alive.

while i was gone, cherishing a precious week spent celebrating (three separate times!) with family (and generally eating way too many sweets for my own good), steve essentially finished the piece.  not completely, but enough that my naïve, refusing-to-face-the-future self was totally surprised!  i was of course selfishly sad, at first, but soon came to appreciate how amazing the process is regardless, and how interesting to step back for the first time, and see how it came together in steve’s brain.  and of course ruth’s brain too… because the discussions, debates, and honest feedback along the way are all amazingly integral (and really some of the most enjoyable components) in how a piece such as that evolves.

when i flew back east this time, i flew out of vegas instead of LA.  best decision yet.  i traded 2 (or 3, or 4 with traffic) hours of smog-filled, sprawl-flanked driving for 3 (or 3.5, or 4 because i had to pull over so many times) hours of spilling across an epic mojave desert at the end of the world.  on the way to vegas i drove at about 11pm… in the pitch black.  i don’t think i have ever experienced darkness like that before in my life.  i drove for hours, literally, without seeing a single light.  the stars were so incredible i had to stop the car multiple times.  it was absolutely amazing.  and all the more bizarre to emerge on the other side of the desert to a scene that could not be a more polar opposite.  really… hard to imagine a starker contrast than the mojave desert and the city of las vegas.  especially at nighttime...

but just as exciting (and probably more) as the drive to vegas was the drive home…. this time in the daylight.  and better yet, as the sun was preparing to go down.  i drove through amboy, california…. a deserted, 7-building town where the horizon was blue and the earth glowing red, and roy’s motel café called your name from miles away.  and as the sun finally went down, i was hurtling through beautiful, desolate, windswept salt flats, and then…. with the last bit of light (i literally couldn’t have timed it better), i passed through wonder valley.  man, it was a hell of a way to come back to my desert home.

we spent the week putting finishing touches on the hummingbird and working on the newest piece which i am most excited about!  yes, i realize i say this every dang time, but so far, i truly mean it.  although i guess i won’t jinx anything yet, and will keep my mouth shut for the time being.  the piece has only just begun.  you’ll get some pictures of the progress soon…

so then the new years weekend rolled in before i knew it, and two days of incredible climbing in the park gave way into evenings of total chaos... 

i was at pappy’s all night saturday and sunday, squeezing through hoards of heavily-boozed desert revelers to deliver the jars of tequila and plastic cups of champagne that would keep the party rolling long into the morning.  we closed pappy’s from 3-6pm (totally unheard of) on new years eve to set up for the evening.  we shuffled rental tables, lit the oil lantern candles, hung streamers and sparkly tiaras, and were briefed on our “fancy” new years menu (meaning lemon rosemary glazes replaced woodsmoky bbq rubs).  it was a brief, but welcomed, calm before the storm… and we capped it off by toasting shots of tequila before we swung open the heavy wooden doors to the line of cowboy boots and sequined jackets waiting eagerly outside the windows.

the dancing started well before the band even went on, we ran out of wine glasses and shot glasses and pitchers and prime rib, and we couldn’t even stock alcohol fast enough for how quickly it was disappearing.  but thankfully we had more than enough bottles of cheap champagne for the midnight toast…. enough even to have leftovers to spray all over the crowd as they cheered and kissed their way into 2012.  i didn’t leave until after 3am, and i cleaned up more broken glass than i knew was possible to create.  but when i finally walked out the back, through the dusty open-air beer garden, past the smoldering bonfire, and sat down in the seat of my car, the quiet was finally, and miraculously, all around me.  i rolled down my windows and drove extra slow down the cherished canyon road home…. weaving my way amidst silhouettes of rock piles and joshua trees against the blackened starry sky.  i was thinking back to how truly incredible the day was, spent in one of the most beautiful coves of the park, on one of the most beautiful days of the year, getting to climb and be with the people i love most out here.  in many ways, they have become family to me, and this place, clearly a home.  given that i had to be 3,000 miles away from the rest of the people i love most, it was one of the best new years i could have imagined.

reincarnation!!

after a lonesome and spider-filled 2 months…. the miracle i’ve been praying for has finally happened…

a new cling has arrived in my cabin!!

i mean… pardon me….. his name is slink.

he’s young.

he’s spry.

he’s sleek and sassy.

i love him already.  (okay, i’m easy… but still).  the first interaction was startling – i caught him snoozing on my sweatshirt stack, and he wasn’t expecting to meet me so suddenly.  but saturday morning he was sitting on my windowsill, sunning his back against the morning light, and quietly waiting to lock eyes when i emerged from bed.  it was a beautiful and long moment.  we sized each other up, made introductions, established our lifelong friendship, and i even gave him “the talk” about mr. roadrunner outside.

it pretty much feels like a total rebirth.

and it was a timely one, because it’s been a totally nutty past couple weeks!  (hence the lack of posts, which i’m so sorry for!!)  in this time between the holidays, which is already an infamously slippery slope, we’ve had a lot of moving and installing of pieces to do (which has kept us out of full-time creating mode), and on top of it, two of the closest people in my life have come out to visit.  it has truly been some of my most treasured time out here, but also made me realize that my departure from j-tree is suddenly looming on a very tangible horizon.

still not sure where that horizon is… but all too swiftly (almost in the span of a single night), it went from being a notion i was very openly avoiding, to something i actually have to deal with.

which ultimately is okay, because it wont ever really be a goodbye anyway.  but that’s not even worth discussing now….

slink and i have a december desert to love, creating to do, adventure to unfold.  and things to update you on!  let’s see here….

two weeks ago, steve and john and i spent a day in the low desert, retrieving a bunch of steve’s work from a gallery.  i’m talking a giant trailer and suburban full of pieces, including a tryptic with three 10 or 12 foot masts.  steve and john did most of the heavy lifting while i stood around, loosened bolts, laid down protective carpet, and cheered.  luckily, steve has acrobatic skills as well as all other imaginable talents, and he was, without hesitation, hanging off the top of the masts, fireman’s-pole-style… hammering out the 40 pound kinetic mounts, and hauling them down on his own. 

to top things off, ruth had packed us a ziploc full of their famous (and by famous, i mean secret and legendary family recipe, passed down through generations) peanut brittle.

now let’s take a nice pregnant pause here.

this stuff may be…. MAY BE….. one of the very best things i’ve ever eaten.

i kid you not. 

i may have mentioned my unbridled obsession with peanut butter.  peanut brittle is an old, old fashioned traditional recipe, arguably the first type of candy ever made…. apparently appeared in cookbooks back in the nineteenth century.  i was fortunate to gain an appreciation for the art of peanut brittle making as a kid, since my grandmother and her sister have famous family recipes as well, and still make it for us around christmastime (along with my other favorite treater… popcorn balls).

i was thrilled, upon googling peanut brittle history, to find that the candy has been linked to a “lumberjack folk hero” named tony beaver (perhaps a distant relative of my grandmother’s family, the weavers?!!).  apparently, in a stroke of genius, tony beaver uses peanuts and molasses to stop a major flood, creating peanut brittle in the process, which he then delivers as a special treat to the town he has just saved.

i’m just saying…. he could very well be my great, great, great, grandfather.  and either way, i think in order to get the recipe from steve and ruth, i’ll have to at least pretend so.

my god is that stuff heavenly.  but moving onwards…. 

the other episode of heavy-lifting excitement around here was the day steve rented a forklift.  we’re going to be installing two large pieces down in manhatthan beach on friday, and so two weeks prior, we dismantled them from their locations around the property, and loaded them onto the trailer.  i won’t lie, i was initially hoping to get a shot behind that forklift wheel.  but after watching steve maneuver that thing flawlessly around the sandy, sloping property, i was intimidated enough that i was content climbing ladders, rigging straps, and walking alongside… keeping the 600-pound pieces of metal balanced while he drove them to their resting place.  ruth helped as much, if not more, than i did.  it was an exciting day all around, and while we lost two amazing and enormous pieces, we got to replace them with new ones we’d retrieved from the gallery, and perhaps more excitedly, shift older pieces around the property to new locations and watch them come to life in a whole new setting.

steve designs his pieces to interact with the landscape in such beautiful ways, but it’s so fascinating to see how that happens, and to see how a piece can shift and change so dramatically depending on where it’s placed.  perhaps most exciting and rewarding was the shifting of the new birdhouse, which is finally in a location where it looks awesome, and we all love it (including the birds, which have been making many rental visits, pooping on the roof, and fighting for tenant occupancy as steve takes pictures).

next came patagonia photo shoot day.  absurd!!  climbing with todd one day, i was fortunate enough to meet a friend of his who he’d been eagerly telling me about, greg epperson.  greg is a world-renowned climbing photographer, who also does a ton of freelancing for patagonia, as well as others, and happens to be an incredible woodworker and artist in general.  such a thoughtful and kind guy.  he lives in a striking, minimalist house he designed and built himself, right on the edge of the park boundary.  it’s interior is pouring with light, is structured using clean, subtly-angled lines, and has no doors… only open flow of rooms and spaces.  his photos are innnnncredible.  take a look for yourself.  it’d be a dream come true to be capable enough to climb in some of those places, and get to have him photograph.  the only thing better than experiencing those moments would be experiencing them and also getting to capture and preserve one of those split-seconds so brilliantly.

anyway, we were climbing one day, and as i was describing the work steve & i are doing, greg got excited about the idea of coming out to the studio to see it and shoot photos.  so he shows up one afternoon, makes sure steve and i are wearing some nice bright patagonia clothing, and lets the shutter go for a few hours as we weld, plasma cut, and grind away.  (steve, of course, let’s me get all the attention and do most of the work).  a smiling greg shot about 750 photos, pared it down to about 100 that he sent patagonia, and passed along his two favorites to us.  sounds like he’s hoping to come by again sometime soon, but it was a pretty interesting experience, regardless of what comes of it!  and if a welding picture, or a picture of steve, showed up in the patagonia catalogue one of these days…. it sure wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world....

..photos by greg epperson..

aside from all the excitement in the studio, we’re slowly but surely working on some new pieces, which has – as always – been a damn amazing process, and i can’t wait to see where they go.

and geez… having two amazing visitors in the span of 9 days has been truly unbelievable.  it’s one thing to be out here experiencing what i feel like has been some of the most defining (if not the most defining) periods in my life.  in such a short amount of time, this place, and of course these people, have come to mean so…. so much to me.  to be able to share that with people who are such an important part of your life is just the best feeling ever.  i really have no words.

as usual there have been too many good moments to list them all….. smoky woodstove days and nights… epic dinners, talks, moments, absolutely everything with steve and ruth… desert sunrises and sunsets from bed, from the studio, from the top of ryan mountain… a couple nights of bbq ribs and shots of patron (ruth was the first to order) at pappy’s… the purchasing of hambam’s… the stirring of peanut brittle, and the over-cooking of lentil soup…. even an insanely epic multi-pitch climb up the longest route in the park as it snowed (yes, it snowed!!  heavily!!)…

but one of my favorites was the morning adam and i spent in wonder valley, an area here which i’ve become entirely captivated by.  for me it epitomizes in many ways what’s so powerful about the desert… and what only setting foot in that landscape could possibly convey.  it’s a section of the high desert, east of joshua tree, east of 29 palms (where the marine base is), out where you truly feel like the end of the world might lie.  back in ’38, the government enacted the small-tract homestead act, selling 5-acre plots of land to homesteaders, in order to encourage a boom in desert population and entice weekenders seeking refuge from the city sprawl.  it worked, and parcels of land sold by the thousands, especially after the war, with tiny one-room cabins springing up literally overnight on postage-stamp properties as far as the horizon could see.

but the mass movement was doomed from the start, as it was nearly impossible for the desert to sustain infrastructure, electricity, and water services with that type of capacity.  by ’76 the homesteading had stopped entirely, and houses were abandoned by the hundreds.  what remains is a windswept panorama that is already other-worldly – a flat barren expanse flanked by a horizon of deep purple foreboding mountains – and is now littered with remnants and ruins of one-room cabins across every line of vision.  but amidst all the debris, what seems like a small but resilient fringe culture has emerged and endured… embodying some combination of grit and diversity, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and pure human willpower.

few landscapes i’ve witnessed have so evocatively reflected the dimensions of human struggle against the natural landscape, the illusions and dreams of more than a generation of americans, and the raw power of nature when it has no sympathy.

it is impossible not to allow the stripped and barren landscape to alter one’s sense of self, and place in the world in a similar way.  never have i felt such a constant and palpable sense that i am human.  against that backdrop, play the concerns of this crazy time we are living in – the economic rollercoaster, the endless political insanity, the social conventions, even the altruistic instincts to be somebody who solves problems, fights injustice, does something… fucking anything…. to make an impact.  those things are all intimately a part of who i am and what i think about on a daily… on a momentary… basis.  but there are moments between moments here, where i realize that all of it…. all of it… falls away…. in greater perspective.  those are the moments that often move me to tears for nothing more than the beauty of this place, the beauty of our existence, and how i am overwhelmingly thankful for who i am, and for the people i love.