Mosque on a Hill

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Mosque under Zalagh.jpg

[Apologies for the delay in services; I’ve been in the process of moving from Africa to the Rocky Mountains.]

 

As a group we hiked through olive groves and farm shacks up the mountain Zalagh, which stands over the ancient medina of Fes.

We reached the top, then started down in the afternoon. As the sun began to set we walked past rows of giant agave and olive trees, back down into the city.

The hills around us were darkened but the distant ridges to the east glowed pink and yellow. Stitching these two images together was a little mosque, from which began to wail the evening call to prayer as we passed.

Meknes Madrasa

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Bou Inania Meknes.jpg

I took a train to Meknes to meet a girl at a cafe overlooking an ancient city. Over coffee she explained that she had studied in Europe. Then, over pizza, she explained that she was the textbook definition of crazy.

I asked if she wanted to explore the old city with me.

We quickly got lost in winding alleys of clothes shops and vendors selling dates and raisins. Pursued by fake tour guides and dodging men leading sweaty mules, we arrived at a booth where a man asked if we wanted to go into the school.

What school? the girl asked.

Bou Inania Madrasa, he said. Built in the 14th Century.

We paid a dollar and went in to view empty corridors and darkened rooms, where over the centuries students must have sat learning classical Arabic to study the Quran. Sounds from the old city echoed in quietly. Dust muffled our footsteps as we climbed the stairs and made our way to the roof.

Looking up at the green tower of a nearby mosque and red roofs of the old city, I asked the girl if I could kiss her. Nervously, she said yes.

Afterward we left the school and the old city, found our way to the city walls and then went our separate ways.

Gulls in Essaouira

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Gulls in Essaouira.jpgTraveled through the Sahara and the Atlas mountains, took a bus along the plains and finally arrived at the walled city of Essaouira. It was raining.

In the morning I ate breakfast under the 18th Century Portuguese fortifications. In the afternoon I went to the port to buy fish. I stopped before the harbor and watched seagulls mob fishermen who sat on the ramparts sorting their morning catches.

Melilla

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Melilla Harbor.jpgVisa run to sunny Melilla, a curious Spanish city on the Moroccan coast; an inland island that doesn’t seem to know that Morocco exists.

Morocco wants the city back. It’s in their country, after all. But Spain won’t let it go.

After a night of clubbing and tapas, I spent the siesta on a rocky spit in the harbor, drinking beer from Barcelona. Nearby, fishermen listened to reggaeton hits and caught cuttlefish.

The wind disappeared and the sailboat in the distance had to be towed back to shore.

Climbing the Winds (Part 7)

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Mitchell Peak.jpg

The snow melted, the ice turned to trickling mountain streams, and I returned to Mitchell Peak—with my brother this time.

His feet were already blistered and the six mile hike to the base of the mountain didn’t help.

We took the peak in chunks, pausing every few hundred feet too look at clouds or the fossils in the rocks. His breath came in gasps. I offered to turn back but he said no.

The summit was a pile of boulders after a short scramble, and here were turned and saw the Cirque of the Towers, a climber’s mecca. Beyond, the rest of the Winds, many of which by now I had climbed.

Lizardhead meadow below was peaceful, accessible by a short drop of two thousand feet. We spent a few minutes at the top, then began the long hike back.

 

Read more of the Climbing the Winds saga:

Climbing the Winds (Prologue)

Climbing the Winds (Part 1)

Climbing the Winds (Part 2)

Climbing the Winds (Part 3)

Climbing the Winds (Part 4)

Climbing the Winds (Part 5)

Climbing the Winds (Part 6)

Climbing the Winds (Part 6)

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Squaretop.jpg

A few weeks later, summer 2015. Wake at dawn, pass treeline. Boulder through a vast canyon, pass unnamed lakes.

We finally make it to a narrow chute of pebbles and a tiny stream clogged with clumps of tough grass. My friend is younger, from Indiana. Never seen a mountain before, and now one stood before him.

It’s a simple task, climbing a mountain. All you have to do is keep going.

I started up, hands in leather gloves now finding nimble handholds in broken granite and soft glacial-silt earth. I looked neither up nor down. There is only the top and the bottom of a mountain, and everything else exists in the mind.

Reaching a windy shelf, I sat and waited for my friend. He arrived a few minutes later and looked down the thousand feet we had just ascended. Impossible, he said.

We pressed on across a flat plateau, cliffs on all sides, until we came to the flat square mile boulder field that was the summit of Squaretop Mountain. Three different piles of rocks vied for the status of summit and we clambered up each of them.

Then we headed back, crossed the plateau and came to the shelf with the cliff below us. My friend was afraid to go down. It still wasn’t possible.

I remembered the descent off Fremont Peak, when the painful climb up became a brisk trot down. If it can be ascended, it’s always easier to descend. I started down and a few minutes later we were at the bottom.

My friend smiled. His first mountain.

He left the Winds a few days later and so I was left to camp at the head of the Green River, waking at dawn to peer through the canyon up at the already woken mountain. Somehow, I thought, I had become good at this.

 

Read more of the Climbing the Winds saga:

Climbing the Winds (Prologue)

Climbing the Winds (Part 1)

Climbing the Winds (Part 2)

Climbing the Winds (Part 3)

Climbing the Winds (Part 4)

Climbing the Winds (Part 5)

The Boar’s Tusk (3 of 3)

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Boar's Tusk Shadow.jpg

Black buttes and low hanging pink clouds misted the horizon. Crows screamed and coyotes whined. The wind blew through bony sage thickets but missed the frost of yellow flowers in the lee of volcanic boulders.

I started back toward the road.

Suddenly the light went out. I walked in the dark, navigating by the tangle of thirsty creepers spiderwebbing the ground and the hulk of an abandoned bulldozer that cut through the gently rolling horizon beneath the stars.

The Boar’s Tusk (2 of 3)

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Boar's Tusk Colors.jpg

As I began to ascend, the black Boar’s Tusk suddenly changed color. Like an undersea mountain encrusted with coral, it wore reds, yellows, blues and greens from rock moss and a low stubble of determined sagebrush.

Then the black rock itself became the blue of the ocean floor as the sun stepped lower; crow feathers from the craggy summit glowed orange.

Scree spilled around me like a robes of indigo chain mail as I touched my hands to bricks of pitted basalt below a cleft in the tower. The wind cascaded through this and smelled of dried clay.

The Boar’s Tusk (1 of 3)

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Boar's Tusk.jpg

During my first month in Wyoming the snow hadn’t yet melted in the mountains, so I headed south into the Red Desert.

Long the hideout of western gunfighters and outlaws, it was now a void on the edges of oil-well civilization.

The desert was deeply marked by history. Petroglyphs and engravings were left on walls by ancient hands; fossils of prehistoric crustaceans littered dry creekbeds.

A tower of igneous rock emerged from the plain, having long ago shed its surrounding conical slopes. Oven time, these had taken the form of a dune field stretching off for miles downwind.

This tower itself, the core of a long dead volcano, beckoned across the sage and through the yelps of coyotes rising in the sunset.

Items Found in Abandoned Cabin

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Abandoned Cabid Detritus.jpg

Working in the forest of western Wyoming as the June snow thawed, I walked in circles for two hours only to find a cabin in an empty meadow.

I slowly opened the wooden door and looked in on a mixture of debris both manmade and natural; pine needles mixed with playing cards, medication mixed with fallen twigs.