Upon the Horizon

Something I’ve learned since I’ve come to Prescott College: Life doesn’t always wait for you to be ready when it decides to send you somewhere new. Its a strange moment--the one you feel coming upon you when there is a big decision on the horizon. And its something that has continued to creep up through my veins ever since I entered Prescott College.

Orientation-Winter 2010

The cold. It crept through the moist wet sand across the banks of the Colorado. It left an icy crust upon the lips of my sleeping bag--my breath condensed and frozen from the night. A faint drizzle tapped against the nylon sheeting of the shelter with rhythmic drumming, dripping beads of water in a tight sphere around it. My eyes were crusty. My hair frazzled. My body lined with weathered thermal underwear and umber dust. I pulled back the flap of the tent to see the bleak sky that cut through the walls of The Mighty Grand Canyon--grey stratus clouds sewing their way through the chiseled valleys and crumbling towers--a mosaic of orange and red and maroon and green on an off-white canvas of foam. There was the feeling once more, brought on by a silence that placated the difficulty and the grandeur of the scene before me. I felt like Amundsen or Clark or some other long-forgotten explorer discovering the way into some different and distant inner world.

And that is, of course, what I came to do--become an adventurer, a wilderness leader, a mountaineer with dreams of the Karakorum and the Himalaya. It was a desire sewn into the arteries around my heart, tangled around my love of natural experiences, self-discovery, and the sheer mathematical beauty of a mountain’s absolute size. I wasn’t wrong to be daunted that morning beside the Colorado. In the cavities between the canyon’s towers stood Coronado Butte--a stratified precipice painted red like the rest--a high point adjacent to our exit trail on Horseshoe Mesa. A thick sheet of dense, pure white snow gently fell in small and delicate layers throughout the course of the day, staring down at us as the clouds and the snowline dropped lower and lower and lower until reaching the bottom of the canyon floor. The next morning there would be six feet of it. And two days later, when we ascended the Mesa to hike out for re-supply, we would have to dig and tunnel and fight our way out of the icy limbo for eight and a half hours.

But I knew this already. I knew the difficulty was always going to come. I knew it the moment I opened up the Prescott College catalog and decided to come to this school. I knew it when I meant my fellow students and the faculty during the first few days of Orientation. I knew it when I peeked my crusty eyes out of the tent flap that morning. This was a place that would challenge my inner most beliefs in myself. It was a place that would form me and change me and mold me into whomever I chose to be. It would ask me to prove myself and find myself time and time again. And it always reminded me that I was at Prescott College not just to get an education, but to gain an understanding about what I want my future to become, and what role I want to play in it.

~Daniel Roca, 02.17.2012

Cumbersome Beauty

Three weeks are irrelevant. The time I spent on orientation took on a context greater than the month of September. It felt oddly like a lifetime, as if, during the time, I grew from infant to old man, and at the end flew up toward the sun. Suddenly, there was pavement. Traffic mumbled down the road. I was back, and it was difficult suddenly to comprehend what I had just done. Now, a week after returning to greater humanity, I feel prepared to explain my experience of Prescott College Wilderness Orientation.

We began in Prescott. All the orientation students sat in a big circle and were told to close their eyes. An inspiring speech was given as, unbeknownst to us, all of the orientation instructors and course directors changed into, in some cases horrifically undersized, cutoff denim shorts. Using flame shaped pieces of paper with our names and a cryptic code (CB2 in my case), we found our “destinies,” our orientation groups. These people we’d be learning the intimate secrets and gastric patterns of for the next twenty-one days.

The following day, we piled into Prescott College vans, one for each group, and were shuttled up a mountain on a very bumpy road. We built a trail all together in the morning, ate lunch in our groups afterward, and were off to a YMCA summer camp not too far from Prescott. Here, at Chauncey Ranch, we spent two nights. This is where we started to get to know each other. Our first hike was here. We had our first written reflection here and coordinated our own group rules. We sorted the food we’d purchased together back in Prescott and assigned group gear to each other. Our packs, at this point, were frightfully cumbersome.

On a fateful morning we loaded our packs into the bed of a pickup and climbed the stairs of the charter bus that was to take us to our temporary home in the wilderness. Except it was the wrong bus. “Stump’s group? You’re on the other bus.” This event really set the tone for our journey: hilarious and less-than-tragic missteps. Despite the miles of extra hiking and food made inedible with Dr. Bronner’s, the comic relief was like a friendly poltergeist that never left us.

Our first night we slept on a gorgeous red sandstone boulder at the edge of West Clear Creek, in the canyon so named. We jumped off into the deep, clear water and were like celebrating nymphs. Everyone smiled. It was good. On this first night, I had a long talk with the exquisitely big sister-like Iris Cushing, Shane Stump’s counterpart facilitating our journey. I was a bit overwhelmed and didn’t think I could sleep outside; I’d never slept in anything less substantial than a tent in my life. With a gentle voice and reassuring hand on my back, I was absolved of my fears and spent the night staring up into the brilliant star-filled sky the likes of which I rarely, if ever, had seen before.

The skies above our journey were equal in proportion to the rocks, water, and forest we hiked through. The skies were at times full of radiant, intense sunlight, crystal blue skies without a single cloud. They were malevolent grey curtains offering downpours and lightening prisons. They were intense sunrise and sunset, full of colors like autumn leaves and sherbet. They were the open universe, with shooting stars, constellations, and the great Milky Way looming at the furthest reaches of human vision.

Along our journey, we ate sweet sour canyon grapes. We climbed down waterfalls with ropes around waist. We drank water from puddles. We ate the greatest honeydew ever beset mankind. Sometimes we walked down national forest roads while the cows stared at us and followed, intrigued. Other times I wished I had a machete to make my way through such thick vegetation I had never imagined grew in the dry Southwest. We negotiated around cacti. We climbed 1600 feet in one day. Through much difficulty, and much doubt, we made it to our destination. However, when you’re hiking in a large horseshoe shaped path, not really traveling, just backpacking, there really is no destination. I think orientation, by its very circuitousness, exemplifies well the ethos of Prescott College: education is a journey.

-Estin Vogel, 09.29.2011