and bam! i'm an eagle scout ...

chuck pointed at a super high rock and said "do you want to go up there?" and i thought he was kidding. that rock looked like it would require a carabiner, if not at least seven other things from one of those stores with the word "adventure" in the title.

but here we were at 123rd avenue west, and what else were we going to do? chuck was wearing a pair of chuck taylors, notorious for their lack of spikey soles. i'd left my water bottle in the car. our plan to cover 39 miles of the superior hiking trail was derailed last year -- like a lot of good ideas that are hatched at 3 a.m. on chuck's couch. anyway, we found a path and elevated to here -- something called ely's peak:










stay tuned for my photo show entitled: blurry bar shots and pictures of chuck taking pictures of stuff.


there were dozens of turkey buzzards, who seemed to be performing a danceline routine to technotronic's "pump up the jam."

we wandered further along, probably three miles or so, and then had to make a decision:

* do we turn back?
* come out on the other end of this path at skyline. spare ourselves the boredom of backtracking past the same old bear paw prints and the dozens of alien messages in the form of cairns? i mean i'd already used what i learned yesterday from the bristol stool chart to determine these here woods are filled with constipated animals.
* or do we freakin' bushwhack through this mess -- do exactly what you aren't supposed to do and jump path and head straight downward where hopefully we'll hit the munger trail or at least get close enough to it that i can carry chuck if he twists his ankle?

we went with the third option. chuck scoped it out in front of me, disappearing into twigs and trees and grass. finally i decided to follow him, but he was already out of sight. everytime i heard a crackle, i looked for a flash of black t'shirt, and it was usually just a bird. i yelled for him: nada.

i spent about 7 minutes imagining night fall, gnawing off my own thumb then staying hydrated by drinking leaffulls of my own saliva. then i wonder what if chuck fell off of something and how will they get the helicopters in here? not to mention the sociopaths and train robbers hiding in the hills.

"you've been watching too many tori spelling movies," chuck tells me when i find him four seconds later.

we continued our very unpractical drop and by the time we get to the bottom i was being given an auditition as the host body for a young tick. hello, summer!

then we ended up in this cavey tunnel thing that was super cool and dark and exactly where the satanists would spend their time painting anarchy signs on the rocks and pounding sugar free red bull -- if this tunnel was in rochester.






if chuck ever comes out with a poetry chapbook, i hope he uses this shot for the cover.

in the air ... from christa pista on Vimeo.

here is 19 seconds of us on ely's peak.