I'm back from a month away, which was spent in two VERY different modes, and it's the first one of those that I want to share with you here: my 8-day backpacking trip along the Colorado Trail.

I took my friends out to the Western Slope of Colorado, returning to the area I last left behind in December 2020 after resigning from the job that I’d moved out there for just before the pandemic hit in a globally massive way.

It’s going to take me a while to untangle and peruse through all the feelings this brought up.

After Capitol Reef today and Kanab before that, and the glorious afternoon hike along Calf Creek in Escalante, I’ve been soaking up the awe-inspiring geology for a while now. I’ll be sad to leave it behind, but there’s part of me that’s looking forward to heading home to see how the next phase goes.

A very satisfying sensory day, indeed. Not least of which was the shower and moisturizing lotion I applied back at my little Kanab studio on my last night here.

Between this and Monument Valley, the Navajo Tribal Parks are where it’s at: best managed, best crowd control, clearest visitor policies, and best decision making that puts the preserved land first.

“You’re allowed to go out and be you rather than something fixed. The world is changing, and we’re all part of remaking it… and we don’t have to follow the paths and patterns that we once had to follow.”

Words won’t adequately capture the breathlessness of hiking down and up Bryce Canyon in the thin mountain air, with snow flurries drifting out of the gray clouds in the bright blue sky, with the warm sun and cold wind that I remember fondly from my time living in Colorado

I’ve officially turned Eastward and bid the Pacific Ocean farewell. I’m happy to be leaving the city behind for the next week and heading out to the desert and mountains again. I’m feeling sad to shift phases of this trip to one that’s promising fewer friends to see. And I’m excited to be on my own in nature again.

It felt really needed and welcome to spend a day pretty much totally at restorative rest. I’m about to head back into an urban space for a few days, and I’ve been on two significant hiking days in the past week, and and I’ve been on the road for almost a month and a half at this point.

And, most importantly, I don’t have to justify my desire for rest to myself.

I love the sublime. The philosophical, literary kind of sublime. Where you feel insignificantly tiny in the face of natural forces immensely greater than yourself. Where you’re awed and overwhelmed and emotionally moved and maybe a little terrified, too.

Yosemite does all of that with its trees and rocks and waterfalls and generally spectacular landscape.