oft belay!

mi familia

...de la dia de mi muerte abuela.

Gila wilderness/gila river/turkey creek hot springs & and chiricahua peak

a mexican a polsky and two gringas in the forest! the adventures of kristoff, adrian, marie and grace.

1st we make fire



wake up in a pile.




follow the gila river, up turkey creek, over a mountain, to the hot springs..



umm..



as we contemplate our whereabouts.



make peace with the sycamores,



make peace with the mountains,



the springs...



the small dead plant




proof it snows in arizona, even southern arizona.



spring in a crystal ball.




gonzo!



las montanas de chiricahua

what goes on in my room

alaska!

czech out the pictures on my flickr site herE

I just took a ten day excursion in alaska. I met my best friend marie zubinski in anchorage and we took off from there.. the first night we were very tired so we decided to do some city life before taking off to go backpacking. We saw Saul Williams was given a spoken word performance at the university, so we left the Spenard Hostel and walked over. The walk ended up being four miles so by the time we got there it was sold out. We begged and pleaded, bullshitting about how we flew all the way from arizona just to see this show. apparently the ticket guy bought our hilariously exaggerated story and he snuck us in on the top level for free! Then we headed down town for a drink and a sandwich and upon our drink, both felt completely exhausted and decided to ask the two men behind us to hitch us a ride back to our hostel. marie said, "i have really good feeling about the two of them" a young man and his father. So I'm shy and sat at the bar while marie went to talk to them. She asked for a ride, offered some duckets, and after chit chatting for a while they mentioned that they were leaving alaska tomorrow and needed to get rid of the old junker they had been driving around and offered it to us..... yeah, for free. title and all. maybe they stole it. but what matters is we were never pulled over, and later that week we sold it for $550. ha. ha. ha.

the next day we hit the road, all full of jokes and catching up and excitement and astonishment at our first night in dirty anchor. we headed east to valdez, where we were going to take a ferry to cordova, which is a town that has no road going to it. along the way we stopped in a grocery and there were two little boys giving away little puppies. we decided to temporarily adopt one and pass him on in valdez. this was murphy dome! named after the road marie lived on in fairbanks this summer. he stayed with us that night, just outside of valdez where we camped on a river shore. but damn, he stank! like skunk! like he had been eating poop all his life. i made marie keep him in her sleeping bag cos i just couldn't handle it. which is funny, because i always make fun of marie's superhuman sense of smell. her love for murphy permitted a brief acceptance of rotten dog odor. we made it into valdez the next day, and handed murphy off at a laundromat where we stopped to dry our soaked bags and tent. of course thus far it had rained the whole time. a lady and her husband on their anniversary trip stopped for gas and the woman fell in love with murphy, batted her eyelashes and the husband rolled his eyes and said, "happy anniversary." a good home for murphy! then we found out the ferry schedule online was wrong-- the next ferry leaving for cordova was thursday! it being monday, we decided to take a short backpacking trip out of valdez after we walked the docks asking everybody for a ride on their boat to cordova. most everyone was either out there winterizing their boats or had just come back from somewhere to stay for a while. so we took a night out on a trail and decided to regroup the next morning. valdez got claustrophobic real fast, after visiting all the sites we could, hiking around a glacier, we hit the road back to anchor where we planned on selling the car and getting plane tickets to cordova. this worked out thanks to the almighty craigslist, in fact, we handed the rig over in the airport parking lot and went inside and paid in cash. we got searched in security and I was apalled to see that my four-inch knife was not detected by the man poking around in my carry-on bag-- not by him nor his fancy wands. ridiculous. after loading the plane with my weapon we tooks pictures out the window of the st. elias-wrangell range. intoxicating! the flight was short, about thirty minutes.

Cordova was a dream come true. everyone-- so nice. we hitched a ride into town from the airport after getting a meal of hallibut fish and chips and alaskan amber. this was my first hitch hike ride! then we hiked a mile out of town to the trailhead we had researched and headed out into the mountains for a long ridge route. It was a twelve mile round trip, three days. The first two miles were straight up and eventually leveled out near the top of Mt. Eyak, which was where we camped out next to Crater Lake. It was like walking on the moon. i love alpine environments. the next day we followed the rock carins up and down across many other peaks until sunset. this section was stunning! we were in a cloud the whole time so didn't have any panoramic views but the fall colors and surreal, fairy-like setting was intensified by the clouds all around us. man we were soaked and cold. i started to get worried we wouldn't find the free NPS shelter that had been built on the ridge line at this point... and when we finally came over a hill and saw it in the distance I hooted and hollered and did a little squaredance yelling "hey jack!" We later realized that neither of us had any idea who jack was or why i decided to refer to him. the shelter was perfect, dry, a little one room cabin with a front porch and a couple chocolates and candles left from the previous visitor. we lit the candles and also found a book on Chugach legends. we read to eachother a bit of history on the chugach people, the russian invasion, and various mildly frightening chugach stories including " the woman who married a dog" and "the man who fed his wife her family's livers". mmmm, good stories. we fell asleep tired, warm, dry and so happy.

The next day we had to hike all the way from the shelter back to town, so got up with the sun and headed out. luckily we got the sunshine all day and could see everthing we had missed the day before. it was a burly hike and by the time we got down Mt. Eyak I was ready to fall over from the weight of my pack. we found showers at the local gym and asked around about where to get some copper river salmon for dinner-- the best salmon in the world! adnwe were right next to the copper river delta! after a string of attempts at the two open restaurants, some beers, chocolate mousse, and coffee we heard about a "rough little joint" on the edge of town that doubles as a bar and a restaurant. there we could get fresh local salmon. so we hitched a ride out there with an ominous "be careful in there, ladies" from our driver. the palce was harmless. we had a very kind waitress and really got a kick out of the noisy crowd. everyone, drunk, havin a ball. we didnt drink to save money and had the best meal after such a long day. salmon like i've never tasted it before, salads, potatoes, and a plate of warm apple pie. sitting next to us a lady pipes up, "where you girls from?" we told her arizona and immediately she knew we were lying. she recognized our accents. so marie told her chicago and i told her ohio and she got real kick out of us with our huge packs and delight in cordova. talkative, abrasive and takin charge, dolores decided that as soon as we finished eating shed take us over to the art museuem. she had a key and let us in to see the studio where local artists gather and their gallery of work. there were two artists i thought were pretty interesting. dolores was hilarious. she called up father tom who preaches at the local catholic church and told him she was dropping us off there to stay for the night. father tom had a couple different rooms where he let people stay and gladly welcomed us. he was also hilarious! he's in his seventies, and the decade before had suddenly decided to climb all the fourteener;s in colorado. we showed me his plaque to prove it to me! he was such a warm, funny, and kind man. we drank tea and laughed about our stories thus far, our love of cordova and mountaineering and just had a jolly old time. the next day we went to catch our ferry we had reserved seats on, and found it had been cancelled because of a storm. so father tom took us under his wing and we packed some food and headed out to the million dollar bridge, child's glacier, sherman glacier, and the copper river delta. it was really nice of him to do. the sights were nuts. child's glacier is twenty stories tall! and i got to step on my first glacier! sherman glacier, always a spot in my heart for you. then he headed back into town for dinner with father tom and a squaredance! we danced for hours, met dolores there, who offered us a ride to the airport the next morning, she entertained us at her house for a while and showed us a PBS program that her husband had been a part of. we stayed at father tom's again that night and flew out the next afternoon after breakfast at dolores' house and a trip to the salvation army to get some clean, dry, non-smelling clothes. then we bummed around in anchorage, taking silly pictures. marie went to another squaredance that night and i went to the university to see the manhattan short film festival. then we met back up, got a rowdy taxi driver who tried to steal locks of our hair and went to the airport for our flight back to phoenix! all in all, a compeltely fulfilling adventure with my best friend....

things that live in the dark

a year ago my friend adam katzman anonymously asked artists he knew to submit to a project called "things that live in the dark". ther was a promise of a public show being put up somewhere around town, and that we would be informed. this was all commiqued via mysterious notes placed in our mailboxes. so i found out it was adam doing the project and it has been curated in a storm drain, which you have to enter under a bridge and crawl into, about 100 yards. i posted pictures on my flickr site: here

ain't got nowhere to be but free

When we die but are still living, we forget to think about things like "art." What is happening before us consumes us. Our stillness is so deep in the moment that transfixed us that our senses are sharpened to our immediate surroundings lest it occur again and we are dulled to much else beyond that ten foot radius. The sharp focus on things near to us allows for the space to open in which we may for the first time not believe what we see. When we are stuck inside a moment, it stays with us for days and days and may even seep into our dreams. In this state, how can we know hallucination from reality. How can we know that the man driving the truck approaching our street is not, in fact, the same man that threw us down on the sidewalk if he looks exactly like him? Where is the line between hallucination and reality, because if our minds can create an image of someone who moved us in a profound way then we might also be creating the images of people around us. Perception is unstable in this way and not to be trusted. Collective perceptions are weak because each individual in that system is capable of hallucinating what they sense, and thus through the power of social consciousness or mass hypnotism or marketing or suggestion or blind faith a group can sense the same things and come to a solid conclusion about what they perceive around them. Reality is so flawed in conception I cannot argue for it or defend it. There is no way to commit to any solid grasp on what we perceive because there are limits to our powers of perceptions. They are easily manipulated by drug use, meditation/visualization, dreaming, hypnosis, and even excessive media exposure. The traumatized mind is a great example of how our perceptions can become reflections of our fantasy life. Commonly a victim of trauma will have vivid nightmares, or dissociate during waking life and relive their experience. Duress can even manipulate our perceptions of reality. So what is reality and how can we know it?

Mystery is beautiful. It is the fruit at the end of the branch, just above grasp. It taunts us playfully before tormenting us with its implicit unattainableness. Not knowing is a state we must accept in the information era, we must balance our appetite for knowledge with a satisfaction with what we already have. Our thirst for knowledge is excessive and leads to psychic overdrive, burn out, and deterioration of instinct. Instinct is one of the last standing natural wisdoms we have, something that gives us the gift of fear when we need to leave a situation or puts us in a room with someone we could love. Its the animal reflex thats still retained within us, protecting us from danger. My instinct is constantly telling me to slow down and be still.

So I will let myself slip into the realm of being okay with not knowing what will come next. My hyperarousal is temporary and I am not able to attain what is real about being alive. I will just be alive and know that that is real.