MORNING WITH NO COFFEE. By Jim Crawford

There are four women that have been important to me in different ways -I shared some time with them while exploring and living in the intermountain west. They are as different as planets, and separated by time, but the places we visited connect them like string running through beads. These are some of the things I remember: waking up in a gray canyon on a cold winter morning with hangovers, no food, coffee a three mile walk away; sitting on white Navajo sandstone, warming in the sun after an intense hailstorm forced us to hide under a tiny ledge of rock; skiing under a cold moon and a brilliant black sky while the temperatures dropped below zero; camping as an endless spring snowstorm trapped us around our fire for days, staying warm by sharing hot chocolate with our only neighbor, a friendly guy who tried to convert us, while we tried to keep the snows from collapsing our small tent – when the snows returned yet another day we picked up the entire sopping mess and carried it on our backs, dripping and freezing, to town and a warm hotel; making a nest, warm and dry, on a ledge in a canyon, keeping company with the ghosts of the Anasazi that surrounded us;
wading for hours through the narrow slot of the Virgin River – dark vertical walls rising straight out of the water, thinking we would never get out; walking softly through a quiet brown forest of ponderosa pine to sit and stare at the silence pouring out of the grand canyon, sleeping near the brink with no one else around, then hiking down the hot dry trail, following the rocks backward in time past endless cliffs and lizards, to find freezing cold clear water bursting in a waterfall from the rocks; bicycling to lakes in summer and Sunday brunch on fall afternoons.

Mostly I like to think of each of them, sitting on a slab of broken, red sandstone, framed by a burning blue sky, dusty shorts, dustier boots, sunshine on their shoulders and in their hair.