May 7, 2026. Zero wind for sleeping last night. Slept well, woke at 7am feeling like myself again.
Yesterday at 5pm Shannon and I set out to reach the water that lies 950 feet below. We rode bikes a mile to a canyon she'd discovered earlier. What followed was a hike and extended rock scramble that I have no adequate language for. The scale of the spaces down there simply doesn't translate.
About 75% of the way down, the rocks became steep and high. We found a blue rope that somebody had anchored into a ledge to allow passage over a particularly tall dropoff. We went down it, though I felt uneasy trusting my life to a small metal pin a stranger had placed in rock. Below that, we thought we were home free. We were wrong. We found ourselves on a two-foot ledge that appeared to lead toward the path down. At one point a massive boulder bowed out from the wall, creating a particularly precarious situation to get around it. I thought it would be fine. When I attempted it, something shifted fast. It was way, way up there. I had a backpack on. I felt a sudden, acute sense of danger and disorientation from the height, hugged the rock, and slowly slinked back to where I'd come from. Fear, arriving without warning, and then lingering.
Going back up the blue rope turned out to be much harder than either of us had anticipated. A slip meant certain death. As soon as you step onto it, you are trusting your life to that rope. You must pull your full body weight up with your arms to get onto the overhead ledge. I watched myself encounter the feeling that I did not want to do this, followed immediately by the recognition that it was the only option. No other way out. No one who could get to us if something happened. I don't recall the last time I faced something so clearly binary: do this successfully, or die. The only thing separating me from death in that moment was my hands on the rope.
We made it. Lived to tell about it. That's one where photos, video, or words can't possibly tell the whole story.
When we got back to our bikes, mine wouldn't move. Battery fully charged, turned on, throttle producing nothing. I'd ridden it there an hour earlier. I had to walk it the mile back to the van.
Two reckonings with mortality in 24 hours. This landscape is the kind of thing the overused word epic was designed for. I find my words constantly failing at the scale here. I imagine it looked identical 2000 years ago, and I wonder how many people have ever seen this view. Not many. We've been here three days and haven't seen another vehicle on this road.
No wind in the forecast until Saturday. I'll take it.