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Pulling into San Francisco, it was hard to know whether the anticipation we felt in our bellies was the good, butterfly sort or the bad, knotted-up and twisty variety. On the one hand, the city was exciting and new and beaming with culture and life for us to explore. And on the other – San Fran was Greer’s last stop with 23 feet. She would board a plane and fly back to Colorado. Allie and I would continue up the coast.

We somehow got the okay to post up for a week in the parking lot of the Sports Basement right on the Marina, and woke up every morning to fog and damp and a postcard shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. We explored the city on our bicycles with only minimal harassment from the city drivers for lolly-gagging through the streets. We visited the wharf and Haight Ashbury and ate in restaurants. We wore pants and thick socks and our heaviest fleeces – in the middle of summer.

We also took the chance to plan for our next big move up the coast toward Oregon to search for the surfers that live for the big waves and freezing water. We had a tip about a woman surfer in Newport that we wanted to check out, and also some vague descriptions of a whole plethora of vagabonds in Eugene.

And on our last day, we woke early and drove Greer to the airport, where she boarded a plane back to sunny Durango. And then there were two. To Oregon…

-Lisa

I had this dream the other night about buying a Volkswagen Westfalia. We’ve seen lots of Westys on this trip and I’ve slowly started to long for one of my own – I’m now in the throes of a most unexpected vehicular crush…

Read more at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/07/home-is-where-your-sock-drawer-is/

Despite an unexpected stay-over in a hot Oakhurst parking lot, we made it to Yosemite National Park.

Some friends we had met in King’s Canyon had set up camp in Tuolumne Meadows, and were smiling huge when we pulled up. They pointed to a neighboring site and told us that Ron Kauk was staying the summer there and had invited us over to share beers around the campfire that night. I wasn’t sure who Ron was, but I could gather from our party’s excited reaction that he was someone special.

We put on our woollies and sat and watched the sun set behind the rock. When the mountain cold started to settle in to our bones we headed to Ron’s campsite, where a healthy fire was burning and Ron sat alone looking out over his camp. Ron is a living legend of the climbing world, and has been climbing in Yosemite since the 1970s. He’s been involved in putting up routes all around the park and has been featured in multiple climbing movies.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this that night. In fact, Ron is a man of such great humility and generosity that I was shocked when I learned of all his accomplishments. He shared his story with no trace of ego, and listened to ours with deep respect.

We spent the next few days exploring Tuolumne Meadows and spent a blissful afternoon swimming in Tioga Lake. National Parks are perfect for people watching, and I think I paid just as much attention to the tourists as I did to the scenery.

On our last day in the park we spoke with Katie Lambert, an accomplished climber who has been calling Tuolumne Meadows home for five years. Katie is wise -she says she’s learned a lot from the rock. She told us about her writing, her climbing and the fall she’d just had on El Capitan. She’ll have an article in the next issue of Alpinist about how stitches mend more than our bodies.

It’s going to be a big change when we head to San Francisco – we’ve been livin’ in the woods for a while now.

It’s pretty astonishing how quickly things can go from bad to worse and back again when you’re traveling. You really are vulnerable out there on the black pavement, subject to bad weather, mechanical malfunction and that bizarre asphalt-zombie feeling you get behind your eyes…

Read more at http://www.wendmag.com/iwend/2010/07/27/misfortune-and-the-road-or-the-kindness-of-strangers/

After dipping our toes in the big blue ocean, we were off to King’s Canyon National Park.

We met up with Patrick Rizzo, a wholehearted nature lover who is currently working for the National Parks Service. He lives in King’s Canyon in a little cabin during his on-season in the summer and roams around adventuring in a blue VW van the rest of the year. Patrick loves the natural world down to his bones and he never stops expressing his reverence of trees, clouds, mountains and wild creatures. We hiked, swam, looked, listened, felt sad, felt glad, felt sleepy and hung out in big trees all over the Park.

In addition to being a naturalist,  Patrick is a pretty awesome downhill skateboarder. He picked it up as a kid growing up in Berkeley, and was just involved in the Sector 9 presented film “Second Nature,” a must-see for anyone who digs skateboarding, romping around in the outdoors or blue suits.

Next up – Yosemite.

There’s a feeling I used to have on the road sometimes, whether I was traveling an hour or ten, alone or with friends. Every time I got out of the car, after every gas station or rest stop, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I left something behind. I would compulsively check and recheck my belongings, haunted by some unaccountable loss…

Read more at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/07/23-feet-the-lost-belongings-travel-panic-organizing-a-simple-life/

Of all the beautiful places we were hoping to see, the promise of the Pacific Ocean was the most exciting.

We were all half-mad from the anticipation of it. Allie kept threatening to walk straight in and disappear. Around every curve I could see it, the sky teasing me, affecting a mirage of endless saline blue.

It wasn’t until my second day in California that I finally saw it. I’d taken a day down to Malibu while Allie and Greer stayed on in Ventura, eventually making their way to Santa Barbara. Our first mission in California was to collect ourselves and reorganize, heal a little bit from the scorch of the desert.

Especially after  surviving Las Vegas, the cool ocean air was delicious -so sweet I could taste it on my lips. The way California smells is incredibly intoxicating, salt and citrus and earth bottled up in ozone. We had to soak it up while it lasted – after Ventura we go inland to King’s Canyon, on the hunt for big trees and Patrick Rizzo, downhill skateboarder and National Park Service enthusiast.

Somehow, at the end of the first week of our project about simple living, we found ourselves headed to Las Vegas. We’d spent the last few nights in Utah’s Maple Canyon, talking to and climbing with Spencer McCroskey, proud dirt-bag and all-around good guy. Our next destination was Ventura, CA, and we had resigned ourselves to the fact that eleven hours of towing our Airstream through the desert was too long. And wouldn’t you know, there in the smack-dab middle of the route–Vegas…

Read more at http://www.wendmag.com/iwend/2010/07/19/simple-living-in-vegas/

Recently around a campfire, the conversation turned to the state of the world, as campfire conversation is bound to do. We six young and healthy friends argued, raised our voices and felt the blood rise in our cheeks. Our muscles were sore from a day spent climbing in a beautifully formed crag in Utah, and it felt good to sit and rest our bones….

Read more at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/07/23-feet-lisa-montierth-2/

Our first night in Maple Canyon found us tired and road-worn. Our Garmin GPS (or just Garmin, as we call her; i.e. “Be quiet Garmin.”) had taken us on the scenic route through acres of farmland and fields of goats, cattle, sheep and even one plot of about a hundred little llamas. After Moab, Central Utah seemed exotic, with its grassy lushness and pastoral beauty. We must have seemed pretty exotic as well, because the good people of the Beehive State stared at us wherever we went.

Anyway, we were in Maple Canyon to connect with Spencer McCroskey, a proud dirt-bag climber and, as luck would have it, excellent camp chef. Spencer graduated from Fort Lewis College like Allie and Greer, though we could never quite figure out how we knew him. Our closest guess was a sort of fraternal bond between he and Allie – they had both, at separate times, lived in the same house on historic 3^rd Ave.

Spencer lives in Las Vegas now and makes his money rigging lights. He escapes the city whenever he can to climb, which he was doing when we caught up with him. He came to Utah alone, but quickly ran into friends and camped with them. We spent some time with him in the Canyon, and around every corner was another group of his climbing buddies- a perfect example of the outdoor community’s bond that we are exploring in the film.

Maple Canyon is a unique place to climb, with towering walls made out of cobblestone-sized conglomerate. We tried it out ourselves, with varied success. I had never climbed before, and Spencer patiently taught me about knots, technique and the life-preserving physics of belaying. I watched Allie and Greer work up the wall, sticking to the surface like salamanders. When it was my turn on the rock I could hardly believe how challenging it was, and felt every inch of the mere five feet I gained.

The campfire that night found us all as friends, and we talked and ate and relaxed together. We’re heading to California next, but not without going through Vegas first – luckily Spencer gave us some tips on dirt-bagging in sin city.