The last summer job in college had ended. Only now I wasn’t in college anymore. The world was wide open. I showed up in Portland to see a woman who I had met in Yosemite and ended up staying two months.
I needed to work. The money I had made making beds at the Yosemite Valley Lodge had disappeared quickly in a three-week blur through The Sierra Eastside, Salt Lake City, The Wind River Range and Spearfish.
I got hired at a climbing gym to work as a janitor. Then the owner ghosted me and I never heard from him again.
I went for an interview at a house-cleaning service. The boss asked me to describe step by step how I would go about cleaning a bathroom.
“You know, wipe it down and stuff.”
The boss asked me to name specific brands in my answer. I was dumbfounded. I never heard from them again, either.
The point of all this was to save some money for a trip to El Potrero Chico. I was enthralled by the freedom of having no plans, and I wanted to go everywhere and see everything. My first season in Yosemite had taught me to move fast through bigger terrain, and I was wildly intrigued by the idea that there were walls of that same scale that were bolted.
I had a ski job at Alta lined up, and it made perfect sense to make a quick dash down to Mexico and back before sliding into the safe, snowy white cocoon of guaranteed food and housing in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
Finally Amazon invited me to take a mouth swab drug test, the type that is only really useful in determining if you are on drugs at that very moment. They also invited me to come to a group interview. At the group interview they told us we were all hired.
So each morning for the next month, I would rise at 2:22 AM, start my car at 2:30, hit the McDonalds drive thru at 2:51 and eat a cheeseburger for breakfast, 2:58 eat half an edible, and at 3:00 am I would clock in for my shift as a package handler in the Amazon warehouse in NW Portland.
My job was as a part of the “Pick and Sort” stage, the last of three, four hour long stages that composed the two daily 12 hour cycles of receival and re-distribution that occurred 24-hours a day, 7-days, a week, 365-days a year.
My first night I arrived and our group of new workers was told “How excited we are to have you here.” We were then given fluorescent yellow vests and shown a video on best means to avoid getting hit by a truck or forklift.
Pick and Sort involved finding forty-pound sacks full of packages on shelves and loading them on to carts. Once carts were filled they were to be wheeled to an arbitrary location marked with chalk on the floor of the warehouse, sometimes up to a quarter mile away. In the daytime I climbed Basalt sport routes in the Columbia River Gorge, trying to get strong for the trip.
On my last night at the warehouse, I moved about with renewed energy. The dust had settled, and now it was time to move. I had worked out that, as a solo traveler, the cheapest way for me to get there and back was to take a bus. I drove to Utah, stashed my car in a friend's garage, and bought a round trip ticket on the Greyhound from Salt Lake City, Utah to Monterrey, Mexico for $144.
Over-eager, I arrived early for my bus out of Salt Lake but of course the bus was late. People were sprawled all over the station. Some stood with their hands in their pockets, zoning out. Others laid on the floor, they had been there all night.
The bus groaned over the hill to Evanston, it was three days after Thanksgiving. Flecks of snow swirled about. Morose men stood by the curb at the Pilot Truck Stop and watched the bus pull in, shivering. The driver came over the intercom and announced that if he caught anyone drinking or doing drugs, he would not hesitate to throw us out on the side of the highway. A couple people were actually surreptitiously sipping flasks as he said it. As we passed Little America, on Interstate 80 in Wyoming, I thought about how truly terrible it would be to get thrown out at Little America.
We stopped again at Rock Springs and then really started moving. Rawlins, and then the great arcing pass over the top of Medicine Bow, and Laramie, WY as the afternoon sun grew long and red. There were about 15 of us on the bus and we were all getting used to each other, settling back and telling our stories.
One man was a tugboat operator out of Galveston Bay, in Houston, and grew up speaking French on the Texas coast. He was coming all the way from Portland. Another couple in their late teens was heading back home to Minneapolis after spending the season in California. They offered me cigarettes at every single stop.
Somebody asked me what the rope clipped to the outside of my pack was for.
“Rock Climbing.” As it left my mouth it felt silly. Childish even. Amongst these people, spending a life chasing the frivolous high of climbing rocks felt insane. People looked at me blankly until someone changed the subject.
There was a sense of camaraderie and kinsmanship on the bus that didn’t exist on an airplane. Airplanes are sterile and servile. Everyone wears headphones and stares straight ahead. On the bus there was a sense that everyone was in this together. We were all bonded by the fact that, for one reason or another, we didn’t have it together enough to be on an airplane. The bus hooked gently right at Cheyenne and floated into Colorado.
It was starting to get late and almost everyone was dozing off, trying to get a little sleep before Denver, where we would have to change over. The front right tire blew up somewhere in Loveland, Colorado and the bus teetered crazily for a moment at 80 miles per hour before the driver was able to get it under control and pull off.
Everybody was awake now. We shuffled dutifully off the bus and nearly everyone lit cigarettes. A few people shook the driver’s hand.
We were told it would be two hours, and that we would have to stay a certain distance away from the shoulder, because of regulations. It was 9 o'clock at night and 20 degrees outside.
A man who had been quiet so far revealed he had just been released from prison 72 hours earlier.
“What were you in for?”
“Attempted murder. I beat the shit out of somebody with one of those little, foot-long, Louisville Slugger souvenir baseball bats.”
At last a truck came and put a new tire on the bus. We got to Denver at almost midnight and everyone had missed their bus. I was re-routed and had to stay awake for a few hours to catch the bus to Dallas. I went outside and sat on my pack in sleek, glassy downtown Denver.
The bus for Dallas came at 2:45 a.m. and I staggered aboard and passed out. Hazy images of brick walls and floodlights are all that came to me each time I stirred at the stops Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Trinidad. The bus tip-toed south through the night. When I awoke the sun was up and we were in Texas. It was my first time in Texas.
Dalhart passed, and then it was Dumas. I stood outside, smelling the exhaust fumes and blinking slowly in the dawn. The tugboat man from Houston was still on the bus. When he saw me he laughed.
“Where you going man?”
“Monterrey.”
He looked at me sideways. His eyes were bloodshot. “Damn!” he barked. He rubbed his scruffy face.
Most of the day I looked out the window, fascinated. White fields of cotton stretched to the horizon. In Amarillo I shuffled through a quiet beige downtown to stretch my legs. In Lubbock I stayed on the bus and put my coat over my eyes. Lubbock was even more beige than Amarillo.
When I wasn’t looking out the window I oscillated between fretting nervously-about the border crossing, finding climbing partners, and getting fired up to actually go climbing after all this weary travel.
It took the whole day across central Texas. Eventually the cotton fields ended and we wound through hillier scrubland. We reached Wichita Falls at dusk, then Dallas a couple hours after dark.
I had a couple hours to wait in Dallas. The Denver station had been dirtier but the Greyhound Station in Dallas had an air of serious menace. Seedy looking characters lounged in plastic chairs, looking at their hands. Taxi drivers were outside on the curb, smoking behind newspapers. Thirty-minutes after I got there someone had a heart attack on the other side of the station. I found out they had been laying in the doorway of the restroom for several minutes before anyone bothered to check on them. Where I was, people would briefly glance upwards with disinterest at the muffled commotion. Paramedics arrived, wheeled the person out, and it was over, quiet again, just the low drone of fluorescent lights humming along.
The bus came. I was taking this one all the way to Monterrey, Mexico. Like the night before in Denver, I staggered aboard the bus and passed out. This time I stirred at the brick walls and floodlights of Waco, Austin, and San Antonio, Texas.
In Laredo the sun was coming out and I could smell the Rio Grande river. It was the end of America. People were red-faced and sweaty. Texas was so big I had seen the sun come up twice and was still in Texas. A few people got on or off, and within minutes we were rumbling over the bridge into Mexico. I was the only American on the bus.
I paid 500 Mexican Pesos and was let in to Mexico. Upon beginning to ride through Nuevo Laredo, I was immediately glad to have not driven my own car. Militarized police units cruised the streets and there were a fair share of burned out buildings. A Subaru with Massachusetts plates would’ve been the most conspicuous vehicle in the desert between the border and Monterrey. I felt camouflaged in the safety of the bus.
We got rolling and soon we were flying through foothills of cacti. Two-hours later in Monterrey I stretched my legs on the pavement, feeling like I had come ashore after some great sea voyage. There was dust and hot wind and litter. It took only a few seconds to catch the Mina bus from the boulevard in front of the terminal, rattle out to Hidalgo, jump off, and start hiking through the little town built around a cement plant and a cemetery towards the towering cliffs of limestone and yucca. After 52 hours, I had arrived.
I needed to work. The money I had made making beds at the Yosemite Valley Lodge had disappeared quickly in a three-week blur through The Sierra Eastside, Salt Lake City, The Wind River Range and Spearfish.
I got hired at a climbing gym to work as a janitor. Then the owner ghosted me and I never heard from him again.
I went for an interview at a house-cleaning service. The boss asked me to describe step by step how I would go about cleaning a bathroom.
“You know, wipe it down and stuff.”
The boss asked me to name specific brands in my answer. I was dumbfounded. I never heard from them again, either.
The point of all this was to save some money for a trip to El Potrero Chico. I was enthralled by the freedom of having no plans, and I wanted to go everywhere and see everything. My first season in Yosemite had taught me to move fast through bigger terrain, and I was wildly intrigued by the idea that there were walls of that same scale that were bolted.
I had a ski job at Alta lined up, and it made perfect sense to make a quick dash down to Mexico and back before sliding into the safe, snowy white cocoon of guaranteed food and housing in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
Finally Amazon invited me to take a mouth swab drug test, the type that is only really useful in determining if you are on drugs at that very moment. They also invited me to come to a group interview. At the group interview they told us we were all hired.
So each morning for the next month, I would rise at 2:22 AM, start my car at 2:30, hit the McDonalds drive thru at 2:51 and eat a cheeseburger for breakfast, 2:58 eat half an edible, and at 3:00 am I would clock in for my shift as a package handler in the Amazon warehouse in NW Portland.
My job was as a part of the “Pick and Sort” stage, the last of three, four hour long stages that composed the two daily 12 hour cycles of receival and re-distribution that occurred 24-hours a day, 7-days, a week, 365-days a year.
My first night I arrived and our group of new workers was told “How excited we are to have you here.” We were then given fluorescent yellow vests and shown a video on best means to avoid getting hit by a truck or forklift.
Pick and Sort involved finding forty-pound sacks full of packages on shelves and loading them on to carts. Once carts were filled they were to be wheeled to an arbitrary location marked with chalk on the floor of the warehouse, sometimes up to a quarter mile away. In the daytime I climbed Basalt sport routes in the Columbia River Gorge, trying to get strong for the trip.
On my last night at the warehouse, I moved about with renewed energy. The dust had settled, and now it was time to move. I had worked out that, as a solo traveler, the cheapest way for me to get there and back was to take a bus. I drove to Utah, stashed my car in a friend's garage, and bought a round trip ticket on the Greyhound from Salt Lake City, Utah to Monterrey, Mexico for $144.
Over-eager, I arrived early for my bus out of Salt Lake but of course the bus was late. People were sprawled all over the station. Some stood with their hands in their pockets, zoning out. Others laid on the floor, they had been there all night.
The bus groaned over the hill to Evanston, it was three days after Thanksgiving. Flecks of snow swirled about. Morose men stood by the curb at the Pilot Truck Stop and watched the bus pull in, shivering. The driver came over the intercom and announced that if he caught anyone drinking or doing drugs, he would not hesitate to throw us out on the side of the highway. A couple people were actually surreptitiously sipping flasks as he said it. As we passed Little America, on Interstate 80 in Wyoming, I thought about how truly terrible it would be to get thrown out at Little America.
We stopped again at Rock Springs and then really started moving. Rawlins, and then the great arcing pass over the top of Medicine Bow, and Laramie, WY as the afternoon sun grew long and red. There were about 15 of us on the bus and we were all getting used to each other, settling back and telling our stories.
One man was a tugboat operator out of Galveston Bay, in Houston, and grew up speaking French on the Texas coast. He was coming all the way from Portland. Another couple in their late teens was heading back home to Minneapolis after spending the season in California. They offered me cigarettes at every single stop.
Somebody asked me what the rope clipped to the outside of my pack was for.
“Rock Climbing.” As it left my mouth it felt silly. Childish even. Amongst these people, spending a life chasing the frivolous high of climbing rocks felt insane. People looked at me blankly until someone changed the subject.
There was a sense of camaraderie and kinsmanship on the bus that didn’t exist on an airplane. Airplanes are sterile and servile. Everyone wears headphones and stares straight ahead. On the bus there was a sense that everyone was in this together. We were all bonded by the fact that, for one reason or another, we didn’t have it together enough to be on an airplane. The bus hooked gently right at Cheyenne and floated into Colorado.
It was starting to get late and almost everyone was dozing off, trying to get a little sleep before Denver, where we would have to change over. The front right tire blew up somewhere in Loveland, Colorado and the bus teetered crazily for a moment at 80 miles per hour before the driver was able to get it under control and pull off.
Everybody was awake now. We shuffled dutifully off the bus and nearly everyone lit cigarettes. A few people shook the driver’s hand.
We were told it would be two hours, and that we would have to stay a certain distance away from the shoulder, because of regulations. It was 9 o'clock at night and 20 degrees outside.
A man who had been quiet so far revealed he had just been released from prison 72 hours earlier.
“What were you in for?”
“Attempted murder. I beat the shit out of somebody with one of those little, foot-long, Louisville Slugger souvenir baseball bats.”
At last a truck came and put a new tire on the bus. We got to Denver at almost midnight and everyone had missed their bus. I was re-routed and had to stay awake for a few hours to catch the bus to Dallas. I went outside and sat on my pack in sleek, glassy downtown Denver.
The bus for Dallas came at 2:45 a.m. and I staggered aboard and passed out. Hazy images of brick walls and floodlights are all that came to me each time I stirred at the stops Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Trinidad. The bus tip-toed south through the night. When I awoke the sun was up and we were in Texas. It was my first time in Texas.
Dalhart passed, and then it was Dumas. I stood outside, smelling the exhaust fumes and blinking slowly in the dawn. The tugboat man from Houston was still on the bus. When he saw me he laughed.
“Where you going man?”
“Monterrey.”
He looked at me sideways. His eyes were bloodshot. “Damn!” he barked. He rubbed his scruffy face.
Most of the day I looked out the window, fascinated. White fields of cotton stretched to the horizon. In Amarillo I shuffled through a quiet beige downtown to stretch my legs. In Lubbock I stayed on the bus and put my coat over my eyes. Lubbock was even more beige than Amarillo.
When I wasn’t looking out the window I oscillated between fretting nervously-about the border crossing, finding climbing partners, and getting fired up to actually go climbing after all this weary travel.
It took the whole day across central Texas. Eventually the cotton fields ended and we wound through hillier scrubland. We reached Wichita Falls at dusk, then Dallas a couple hours after dark.
I had a couple hours to wait in Dallas. The Denver station had been dirtier but the Greyhound Station in Dallas had an air of serious menace. Seedy looking characters lounged in plastic chairs, looking at their hands. Taxi drivers were outside on the curb, smoking behind newspapers. Thirty-minutes after I got there someone had a heart attack on the other side of the station. I found out they had been laying in the doorway of the restroom for several minutes before anyone bothered to check on them. Where I was, people would briefly glance upwards with disinterest at the muffled commotion. Paramedics arrived, wheeled the person out, and it was over, quiet again, just the low drone of fluorescent lights humming along.
The bus came. I was taking this one all the way to Monterrey, Mexico. Like the night before in Denver, I staggered aboard the bus and passed out. This time I stirred at the brick walls and floodlights of Waco, Austin, and San Antonio, Texas.
In Laredo the sun was coming out and I could smell the Rio Grande river. It was the end of America. People were red-faced and sweaty. Texas was so big I had seen the sun come up twice and was still in Texas. A few people got on or off, and within minutes we were rumbling over the bridge into Mexico. I was the only American on the bus.
I paid 500 Mexican Pesos and was let in to Mexico. Upon beginning to ride through Nuevo Laredo, I was immediately glad to have not driven my own car. Militarized police units cruised the streets and there were a fair share of burned out buildings. A Subaru with Massachusetts plates would’ve been the most conspicuous vehicle in the desert between the border and Monterrey. I felt camouflaged in the safety of the bus.
We got rolling and soon we were flying through foothills of cacti. Two-hours later in Monterrey I stretched my legs on the pavement, feeling like I had come ashore after some great sea voyage. There was dust and hot wind and litter. It took only a few seconds to catch the Mina bus from the boulevard in front of the terminal, rattle out to Hidalgo, jump off, and start hiking through the little town built around a cement plant and a cemetery towards the towering cliffs of limestone and yucca. After 52 hours, I had arrived.
Entrance into El Potrero Chico. You are greeted by limestone walls with some of the longest bolted sport climbs in the world.
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The author on pitch 16 of Time Wave Zero (5.12a)
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A rare sight - snow at El Potrero Chico.
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I had a good climbing trip. There was no shortage of partners. When I arrived at Homero’s, it was the middle of the day and not a soul was around. I pitched my tent, went over to the Mota Wall, and just started meeting people.
Later that first day at the Margarita truck, everyone swapped climbing stories. A local pointed me in the direction of some actual mota, or better known as “bud” in English.
I had met a loose web of people who I would climb with for the next ten days.
On my second day I roped up for Yankee Clipper with a French-Canadian man in his 50’s. I met another dirtbag who was crashing with one of the locals for free in exchange for doing some work on his property. When he wasn’t busy building a fence or digging holes in the yard, we would climb.
A lot of the routes in El Potrero Chico are long, and those were the climbs I was the most interested in doing. It would only take minutes to be a few hundred feet up the wall amongst the birds catching updrafts, feeling the sun on my skin and gazing into the green valleys beyond. I was having a wonderful time, and marveled at how life could unfold when one committed oneself to having an adventure.
I climbed my brains out, leading some of my hardest ever sport climbs. Having done most of my climbing on slick granite in Yosemite and in the Northeast, I was amazed how grippy the rock was. We did the route Spaceboyz and had to negotiate with a poisonous centipede on the crux pitch. It even snowed, the first time in 20 years.
One night I helped push a local family’s car home. They had gotten stuck in the snow.
A couple days later we climbed Timewave Zero, at 23 pitches one of the longest routes in the canyon, cold wind whipped around on the summit of El Toro. Both my climbing shoes had holes in the toes from the razor-sharp limestone. Like my shoes, my trip was coming to an end. There was no lightning-bolt epiphany, just the dull weight of how far I had come and how far I had to go. Still, it was one of the most beautiful views I had ever seen.
Pretty soon there was nowhere to go but all the way back.
I caught the Mina bus into Monterrey and pretty soon I was speeding back over the land. In Nuevo Laredo the bus crawled through border traffic. It was the middle of the day and it seemed like everyone in town was going to America. After two hours we crossed the bridge and filed out to go through customs.
There was a stark difference between Mexican customs and American customs.
At Mexican customs everyone is relaxed, pleasantries are exchanged, and there is no suspicion. Officials glance at baggage in a desultory way. Everyone ultimately passes through with little hassle. At American customs you are no longer a free citizen, but rather the subject of some sort of prison transfer from one side to the other.
We walked through a long fenced-in tunnel to an outdoor area where people’s entire suitcases were being shaken down, their belongings ripped open and strewn about. After this, each person was subject to intense questioning by a customs official. Many Mexicans regularly cross the border to shop, work, or go to school, yet there was an incredible amount of distrust and paranoia. After all this, we walked through another, different, long fenced-in tunnel back to the bus, which was now parked in a different location. In total it took about four hours to cross the border.
I was ravenous by now and devoured the absolute worst gas station pizza of my life at a Love’s Truck Stop in Encinal, Texas. A little later in San Antonio I was able to get a proper meal and hiked around downtown in the night. I was tired to my core. The kind of fatigue that sleep can’t fix, but a tiredness of your soul. A tiredness where the only remedy is to be quiet and still for a long time.
I sat on a bench and toyed with the idea of saying “fuck it” and just staying in San Antonio forever.
I staggered back to the bus, got on, and once again, passed out immediately. We arrived in Dallas at 4 AM. Ghostly silver skyscrapers loomed. The Dallas greyhound station was as bright and subdued as ever. People were fast asleep under the white zombie lights. To my amazement, I was still hungry, and I went to the McDonald’s across the street. It was full of homeless folks, drug dealers, and pimps. I was propositioned while I stood waiting for my food. I politely declined, then heard a murmur.
“I’m gonna bash your fuckin’ head in with a rock, stab you in the neck with a knife.”
My potential assailant had his head down on the table. He looked sickly and frail. They called my order and I went back into the bus station. There were no seats so I laid down on the floor and fell asleep.
Then it was time to go to Denver. I staggered aboard the bus and passed out. All of Central Texas went by again that day. On the trip down I had been glued to the window, I wanted to see everything. Now, I no longer cared. Every last wisp of my being wanted to be in that room with a bed and shower at Alta. I just had to make it.
I read the Grapes of Wrath to pass the time.
The sun slipped away somewhere in the panhandle and before I knew it I was being jarred awake in Boise City, Oklahoma. I got out of the bus and stood around in the dark just because I had never been in Oklahoma before. The strange eastern Colorado towns of Campo, Lamar, and La Junta only existed in my dreams, and then there was again Denver, and it was the middle of the night. Somehow every major change on the whole trip had taken place in the dead of the night.
I don’t remember a single thing about getting from Denver to Salt Lake City. All of a sudden I was just there, standing on the sidewalk in downtown Salt Lake. My plans had worked out. I was scheduled to move into a nice cozy room at the Goldminer’s Daughter that very afternoon, I had just had to get to my car.
But first, a beer.
I sat in a park and drank a tallboy of Modelo. People in suits were going to their office jobs. It had only been two and a half weeks, but I felt like I had aged significantly.
I finished my beer and scuffed right along, trying to find the way.