Blog

News From the Front

• November 2007
• Dogs Uncategorized

It’s high season in the Moab desert, and the locals and traveling climbers are going nuts. Larry, local slackliner extraordinare, rigged a beautiful highline across some desert towers up Sand Flats Road. triggering the usual slackline party scene.


Our Austrian friend Beat Kammerlander spent a month in Yosemite and Tuolomne, and made the second ascent of Ron Kauk’s daunting Tuolomne route, “Peace,” a monumental climbing achievement, in my opinion. Now he’s here in Indian Creek, one of his favorite places on earth.

And of course, this week has been BASE jumping mayhem.
Thanksgiving is the the unofficial “Turkey Boogie” in Moab, and BASE jumpers congregate here to throw themselves off the red cliffs and party down together.

Yesterday our friend from Yosemite, Sean Leary, stopped by. I always bump into Sean in all the right places, like on the Salathe Headwall, or on Freerider or something. He’s often in Moab, and has also started BASE jumping, so he was hoping to get someone to go out and do a jump. Dean and I were drinking coffee and wondering what to do with this cold, sunny Saturday, and that sounded good to us. We squeezed in the truck with Sean’s adorable Mexican hound Nexpa, and Fletch, and drove down Kane Creek Canyon, past the Tombstone and to a jump called Echo.

The landing is all flat and sandy, and when you shout out, your voice echoes around the walls. It’s pretty low, just over 300 feet, which is kind of intimidating. But when you think about landing in the big, soft, beachy sand, it seems very worth it.

We all scrambled up and made the jump, leaving Fletcher and Nexpa to hunt rabbits in the brush.

Fletcher just passed her 13th birthday (we have the same birthday, November 4th), and her arthritis is getting really serious. But when she gets together with Nexpa, she sprints around like a little puppy. We landed in the sand, first Sean, then me, then Dean, and Nexpa came darting up to greet us. It’s adorable how excited the dogs get when jumpers land. For them, it must be like the humans are suddenly dropping out of the sky from nowhere, and they are exhilarated every time. But though Nexpa came dashing up to greet us all, no Fletch…..

We drove up and down the dirt roads, calling, and then hiked all around the surrounding area, whistling, shouting and yelling. Sean tried to get Nexpa to find Fletcher, but she thought he was talking about rabbits. I’ve lost Fletch overnight two times in the eleven years we’ve been together, and both times I spent the entire night on the edge of hydration from uncontrollable crying. Now she’s thirteen and not that fast, and it just made no sense for her to be gone like this. Sean had the feeling she might have gone up Hunter Canyon, a small side canyon near the landing area. Dean and I couldn’t imagine Fletcher just hiking a mile up the road randomly, and then going up that trail to nowhere–she’s getting kind of slow nowadays, and often has to be very encouraged to go out on actual hikes, preferring to just poke around at her leisure in brushy, grassy areas. But Sean insisted and after many wild goose chases in different zones, Fletcher turned out to be ambling up and down the canyon trail, being somewhat monitored by a kind, concerned woman who was at the head of the canyon with her own dog.

Basically, as far as fear goes, BASE jumping can be a little intimidating at times. It can also be a little nervy free soloing or climbing in snow or in the mountains, or the first moments after injury when you know the pain is being masked by adrenaline, and something is definitely seriously hurt but you can’t quite tell what, and you should just be as calm as possible. But these things are nothing compared to a missing dog. Losing Fletcher is downright terrifying, and turns me into a panicked, weeping, helpless wreck. My nerves can’t take it more than once every year or two. This time she was only MIA for a few hours. We packed our rigs and rushed up to the Tombstone in hopes of a sunset jump, but the winds were uneven and we decided to walk back down, making it back to the parking lot in the dark. Fletcher was not invited.

The next morning, I woke up early and met up with Sean and Travis Roth, a good friend from Boulder whom I met this summer at the Mile Hi Drop Zone, and we all walked up the beautiful, winding canyon path to the top of the Tombstone.

The Tombstone is such a perfect rock. Perhaps the best part of BASE jumping for me, is having something nice to do with the Tombstone that brings me to it regularly. In the past, I contented myself with running the dirt road below its face, or close enough for viewing distance on the Amasa Back trail, finding a way to be near it every day. Free climbing the hard crack system up its face a few years ago was a marvelous experience, but not exactly a daily activity. BASE jumping, I can walk up and jump down all the time, and spending more time with the Tombstone in a new way makes me very happy.

We are all fairly new BASE and cliff jumpers, so felt a little extra excited about going up together without a “mentor”–an experienced jumper friend, basically, the BASE equivalent of adult supervision. But we all checked each other carefully and did everything just as we have been taught, and had a great jump together. I was extra nervous, because this would be my first running exit off a cliff.

It’s much much safer to run when you jump off a cliff, because then you will fly away further from the wall. If you just stand there and launch off, which is what I’ve been doing on my first cliff jumps, you will not get as far away from the wall when you throw your pilot chute, and if your parachute opens in the wrong direction (flying towards the cliff=bad), you will not have much distance or time to get it turned around. But it’s very intimidating to run off the edge of a cliff for the first time, thinking you might trip or jump off in an unstable body position. Sean did a spectacular, perfect running exit, and was a good act to follow.

I’m finally back into the good groove I had this summer in Boulder, with a perfect balance of jumping and climbing. In Boulder, that balance was split between skydiving and climbing on the Diamond and at the CATS rock gym. Here in Moab, it’s split between BASE jumping and climbing on desert sandstone and on my backyard wall. It took a while to get up to speed to be experiencing these multiple disciplines, but now it is unbelievably satisfying.

Dean is still committed to the vegan diet, after two months now. For Thanksgiving, we had broccoli and quinoa, and woke up feeling healthy and not overstuffed. He says he’s eating vegan only to keep his weight down and climb better….but for the first time in his life, he wakes up early and alert every day, and notices that he’s climbing harder than ever, even on powerful boulder problems that he’s been trying off and on for a decade. This has been my experience, exactly. And I do notice that he puts on his “Animal Liberation Human Liberation” t-shirt as soon as it comes out of the laundry, and often nearly wrecks the car swerving to avoid mice and squirrels in the road. It’s just not possible for a logical person to love a dog as much as we love Fletch, and then eat other animals…..