I donno, I was just thinkin’ less purple, more green. For spring, ya know? That, and I’m becoming unhinged towards my existing branding, the whole “brown and ambiguously-purple” thing. Purple is out, green is in. Next in line is hot pink, but I wanted to ease ya’ll into this thing slowly. Imperceptibly slowly. Perhaps so slowly that it will never actually happen, which is a recurring theme of mine, so much so that one might even call it a branding effort.
Last night while waxing my snowboard I sliced a good hunk of skin off my knuckle. While scraping down the base my hand slipped, and the back of my finger slid clean across the edge of the board. It was a pretty good gash, one that took its sweet time to stop bleeding, but everything seems to be fine and clotted now. I actually had to dig out a Band-Aid (also known as an adhesive medical strip) for this one, which is a rare thing for me. I don’t even keep Band-Aids in the house, but luckily my backpacking first-aid kit was near the surface and I managed to find a couple in there.
I had my backpacking gear strewn all about my living room, for as chance would have it, Kate and I are going backpacking down in Zion National Park the week after SXSW. Our plan is to take two days driving down, spending a night in Salt Lake City in exchange for a few cases of Full Sail brew, take a day to explore the main canyon of Zion, and then spend the rest of our time exploring the backcountry.
When I went backpacking in Zion back in 2002 with Wuda Wooch! we had so many people that we had to split into two groups. Our group explored the Right Fork Trail while the other group went up Coal Pits Wash, so this time ’round Kate and I plan on hitting up Coal Pits. ‘course, we might be at the mercy of weather conditions, water scarcity or other rough-and-tumble groups, so it’s best that we stay flexible in this regard. The Right Fork was certainly no slouch, and we spent days exploring all the intersecting canyons and streams in the area.
Coal Pits seems to offer more as far as getting up on the plateaus and enjoying sweeping vistas, but I’m pretty much cool with whatever. The Southwest as a whole is one of my favorite places on this gol’ danged planet, ever since I went there with my father for spring break when I was in fifth grade. Over the course of a week we toured Las Vegas, Death Valley, the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon Caverns, and Zion.
In all honestly I spent nearly every waking moment playing my Game Boy, and yet it all seems to have left an impression anyhow. I think my only picture from the Grand Canyon was of the asphalt in a parking lot, when I finally beat Metroid II and set my Game Boy on the ground so I could snap a picture of the end-game sequence.
While I expect most of my pictures from Austin to hold true to a similar degree of pathetic nerdery, here’s hoping that this time around I can return from the Southwest with some better pictures.
