Journeys: Duchesne, Utah - Cabin New Year's Eve

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Duchesne, Utah - Cabin New Year's Eve

The sun sets on 2010 at the Duchesne, UT cabin - New Year's Eve

The year 2010 - I shared a boat with a random stranger in Costa Rica whose words of advice continue to resonate in my mind. I watched the sun rise over the ocean on a beach that was made for a postcard. I watched the sun melt the ice on the inside of my tent and felt springtime in the air after a frigid night in the Zion backcountry. I crossed two marathon finish lines - one while dodging lightning and another in personal record time. I held the most special person in my life on the top of a mountain. A waterfall I'd expect to find in the tropics reminded me of how many hidden treasures remain for me to see in this state. I stood on the highest peak in Utah after completing a climb that I was almost too afraid to try and floated peacefully down the Green River on a trip that will define the summer of 2010. A rainy night in a tent and a morning in Indian Creek with fall foliage too brilliant to be real. A full moon in the Colorado Rockies. Staring out over Cedar Mesa from the edge of Fish Creek Canyon.

Too many perfect memories to think that 2010 was anything but an amazing year.

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess