Maps: who needs them?

The Maps came today! There are 144 postcard sized maps meant to be affixed to the handlebars of your bike. They filled Oakley and me with simultaneous joy and dread. 144 maps? That’s a lot. 

One of my many bad habits seems to be getting my family lost. I have a reputation for being “sure” I know where we are going. It is always just a little bit further or just around the bend. I make promises and swear on my life that I know where we are going. Many times I am right, but the truth is, I should be dead many times over.

These days, when we set off on expeditions into the wilderness everybody in my family grabs the maps from my hands and makes sure they know the way independently. I find this very annoying. Where is the adventure in that? I like heading off into the wilds with a general sense of where we are going but nothing too specific. I like winging it. Nobody else seems to appreciate this quality in me.

In 2007 I took my family back to Prescott, Arizona, to visit my college town and show them the sites. Finn was 12, Jonah 10, Raven 6 and Oakley 4. I was excited to lead them up Granite Mountain and show them the beautiful gnarled trees on the top and the fields of grasses that I recalled had herds of javelinas running through. I assured them we didn’t need to take the well-worn path to the top–boring!–but rather we could quickly ascend by boulder-hopping up a rock gully that went up the backside of the mountain. I had done it thousands of times while I was in school and it was so much shorter and so much more fun than the path. 

For some inexplicable reason, my family let their guard down, and they blindly began the ascent. The travel was gentle enough at first and we all enjoyed the scramble for the first 20 minutes. It wasn’t long before the hay-bale sized boulders became refrigerator-sized and the chasms between them became deep. Twain and I began taking turns hopping from one to the other and tossing the smaller of the children across. Twain soon became wary.  “Are you sure about this?” he questioned. “Yes,” I curtly replied as I caught Oakley in my arms after another toss. “We are almost there.” We continued on.  

An hour later the boulders had become dumpster-sized and the space between them had grown to 6 to 10 feet in places. We had passed the point where descending was a safe option. Twain became silent. The kids became anxious. “Shouldn’t we be there by now?” asked Finn. “I don’t feel comfortable,” proclaimed Raven. A telltale warmth began to creep up the back of my neck as I realized that perhaps I had made a mistake.  It had been 14 years since I’d been here. Memory fades.

One hour turned into five. We finished our water and had no more snacks. We were in the high desert of Arizona in April, and the sun was beginning to set. The evening air began to blow cold and I realized with horror, that we might be stuck here, halfway up the mountain, if we didn’t find a path off before dark. It would be too cold. Last night had been well below freezing and we had shivered in our sleeping bags at the base of the mountain. Today we were only wearing shorts and t-shirts.

Reluctantly, I admitted to Twain that I must have remembered wrong. I was scared. He was scared. We would fight about it later, but now we needed an emergency plan. He had a lighter and we planned to put the kids up against a big boulder and make a fire against it. The fire may provide enough warmth and it it might also make a big enough light that someone might see us. 

One last problem. I hesitate to mention this, but I had known full well that the top of the mountain was closed because of nesting peregrines. Plus, the forest was exceedingly dry. If someone saw our fire, I knew that they would come to rescue us because we were breaking the law. I had studied environmental science and wilderness leadership at Prescott College in this very town and now I was looking at an emergency rescue of my children, an arrest for trespassing and breaking an environmental ban, and I could very well burn the whole mountain down while I was at it. 

As the last rays of sun disappeared from the sky, we found the top, and the well-worn path down. We were hungry, thirsty and freezing and been hiking for 10 hours instead of my projected 2, but we would live to our next adventure. 

What an exciting tale right? No damage done, just some endorphins fired and an adventure completed. My family doesn’t feel the same way. They now refer to Granite Mountain as “Mount Doom” and use it as evidence that I can’t be trusted with maps or directions.

So, maps. Not my forte. Now I have 144 of them.