When you are removed from a thing long enough, you start to forget what it feels like. Traveling outside of Utah for nearly 5 months, the details of dry air, the burnt-orange rock, and the raggedness of it all was slipping into a fuzzed-up oblivion. The east will make you forget that these things even exist.A return west was necessary.
I had a harsh realization upon reaching the Wasatch mountains. I was soft. Utah made that abundantly clear, but with my disappointment, I received a renewed determination to toughen up. Sometimes we need a little chastisement to push us out of our comfort zones.
I'm not going to blame my softness on being back east. There are lots of tough outdoor folks here (Katie Levy and Erica Lineberry come to mind) who would balk if I claimed that excuse. I'll leave it up to other reasons, which of course are not valid and don't matter anyway.
No one is impressed with how big your excuses are.
Utah reminded me who I really was, where I came from. It brought back the grit in my fingernails, the struggle of ascents with rubble rolling under my shoes, the heat of high altitude sun on my skin.
I'm back east again and back find my heart torn between my true homeland and the western one I've adopted. What do you do when your heart is divided?
Looking forward to climbing with some new partners now that I've met you all. Not that I don't want to climb with my current partner!
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