Skagway homecoming

Here we are, in Skagway. It felt so good to come down the valley, back to this place I once called home. We saw some old friends, who I last saw in 2004. We wandered around downtown and ate at the best restaurant in town (still quite good even though they changed names and owners last year). We stayed in the fancy hotel downtown since the others were full. I had never stepped foot in their doors before- a place reserved for tourists and employees, not us trailer trash locals! Now, as a visitor here, the Westmark seemed like a perfect basecamp.

All the while, I felt deeply into this place, this valley with its throngs of cruise ship tourists walking down the boardwalk sidewalks and taking photos of each other in front of the mountains and the Red Onion Saloon. I had some of the best summers of my life here. I had some hard times, too. I knew most of the people in town... I thought that I would move here someday. I wondered what a winter would be like. Then I fell in love and reigned in my nomad ways, settling into a different kind of lifestyle in Boulder, Colorado. 

Skagway remained in my heart and I knew I would return one day, although maybe not for a full season, and definitely not without Dave!

Now, nine years later, only 3 of my community are left, replaced by a new group of 20somethings- most of my friends having moved on to the real world of having families and homes and careers in the lower 48. Me, too. So much has changed, but the Skagway streets are still lined with most of the same shops, and the same cruise ships drop thousands of people off at the docks, just as they did before.

We head out tomorrow for a week long exploration of the Tormented Valley by the Skagway/Canada border- something I would never have had time to do while working here. I'm nervous, since I know no one who has ever been up into the valley on the route we are about to take.

I expect bears, mosquitoes, wind, rain, and unspeakable beauty. This may be our greatest adventure yet!

Belonging. 10 years of rivers!

So here we sit at Green River State Park and I realize the powerful urge I have to hop in the river and float through my favorite canyons. I remember the first time, as Dave and I left this shore, this incredible feeling of leaving everything I had ever known to venture into the canyon I had dreamed of for years. I remember the incredible freedom, and praying that I remembered everything.

Green River State Park launch site, April 2013

The same place in 2004, with Rex who joined us on many canoeing trips until her passing

I remember camping for our first night in the tamarisk, reaching camp just at dusk and setting up camp in the only clear space we could find, ducking and crawling into the thick tamarisk to find this secret opening.

Our first Green River campsite in 2004

I remember the incredible feeling of.... Aliveness. Of fear of the unknown. Of exhilaration. Of HOME. That day in 2004 was the first time I realized how much I BELONG on the river. I BELONG in these canyons. This river is a part of me, and I am a part of it.

I think of all the rivers I've floated since that first trip with Dave. I think of the hurricane we came upon in 2005 on this very river, here in the desert of Utah where the last thing I would ever expect was a hurricane! The headwinds were SO strong that day. We had to fight waves and wind until finally we gave up and camped across the river from Anvil Butte, on a sand bar protected from the wind. The next day as we packed up our gear, we watched a huge dust cloud billow up against the canyon walls upstream of us, headed our way. I looked up and the clouds were swirling around a blue eye right above us. The center of a hurricane! I had laughed at the 3 guys here at the put-in, where I stand right now in 2013, when they said that a hurricane was coming! I was not laughing now. Dave and I sat, huddled under a tarp with Oso and Rex, our canine companions, between us- marveling at the wind whipping around us and the freezing temperature that was 25 degrees warmer 5 minutes before.

Anvil Butte, 2005, the day before the hurricane

Something unexpected always happens on rivers. Always. In the 10 years since I stood here in this spot for the first time, I've experienced crazy wind, terrifying thunderstorms, an insane flash flood, hidden grottos and streams snaking their way through rarely visited side canyons. I've awakened to canyon wrens and ravens singing and frogs croaking all around us, huge clouds of mosquitoes, fish snapping at the debris swirling in eddies, double rainbows (oh my god!) arcing over the river brightening a dark, ominous sky, and countless peaceful silent picnics and naps under cottonwoods, and magic around every corner.

These last 10 years have been the best of my life, and it all started here, on the banks of the Green River, where my life became one with the water that I gaze upon in this moment. The gratitude is overwhelming. The gift the Green River gave me in 2004 is the greatest gift I could ever have: the birthing of a sense of HOME.

Just before sunset on the Green River in 2005