Rollin’ out after work for a weekend of Zion canyons with Phillip, who is currently 1.5 semesters into figuring out how to manage outdoors habits whilst being in school full time. He used to be my partner in crime, working at Second Nature and living out of the trucks. Life has grown more complicated, but he’s a reminder for me that there are reasons why I’m not rushing back to grad school. That will be next year. High on the list for next week.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Kaibab again, and getting a good sense of snow cover. April may be quite full, between that and KTR scouting. Problem is, I’d rather go ride other new stuff, like The Ribbon and 5 Miles of Hell, than dirt roads. I might compromise and hit up the first 50 or so miles, and hard part in the dark, and something else the other day. Plans, plans.

Computer annoyance also continues. After I killed half the keyboard on our laptop with beer a few weeks ago, M fixed it with a thrift store keyboard. That went out the door yesterday when the keyboard/mouse jack got ripped out by M’s hasty action. So, back to the original: repair. I could surf last night, just not type anything requiring numbers or the qwerty row. Which doesn’t work well at all. M’s previous solution, for logging into email accounts, was to cut and paste needed letters out of the yahoo frontspage. Tedious, but clever and effective. Adding insult to injury, this ancient computer of mine at work (and/or our schizoid network) keep getting slower and slower. It’s been rare this week when I have not had to reload each page at least once as it times out repeatedly.

The things we suffer from and to.

I hope to bring along the new digicam this weekend, so some of you can be enlightened about the wonderful world of canyons. Canyoneering takes all the best parts of hiking and climbing and combines them; you get to explore cool places with a technical dimension, but it is rarely particularly scary and requires only a modest level of skill, fitness, and experience to operate at close to the highest levels. It also puts you into some of the most amazing places on earth.

The pic above is in the Virgin river Narrows, the most famous slot canyon on earth. We’ll be journeying down a remote side canyon, dropping (on a rope) into the middle of the most sustained part of the Narrows. It should be good.