Common Denominator

The trouble with having a blog is a sudden desire to take basic elements like your decision to go to Africa with shoes that suddenly feel too small, how to fix the squeak of your van with a wooden spatula, the death of your grandmother, the unexpected appearance of antivenin five months after you needed it, and an utter sense of self-imposed displacement equal only to the sleep-deprived elation of a new project, and put it together in a pithy way as some sort of logical explanation of life.

Instead, I think I might just talk about the rodents. They were the least expected. On Monday I gave my first talk about Namibia at Colorado College. Somewhere between addressing the conservation work and the climbing, I talked about snuggling rodents. It was not planned.

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Left, Right in the Road

It was tourist season in Jackson—an easy excuse for poor driving, over-consumption of sweets, and regrettable decisions on wildlife art. I drove through town thankful I was leaving the mayhem while people honked up and down the street. The van was loud, but it was a van, and it was having issues, and so I didn’t question the road noise until I took a sharp right turn and felt air woosh across my neck. The view in the rearview mirror looked suspicious. I pulled over. The back door—a 8X6 foot panel, in this case-- had swung wide open, with all of my disorganized trappings of life perched in the exposed shelf. Based on quick math, and my recall of the last time I had opened the back, it had been splayed wide for five miles, at an average of 35 MPH....

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Vertical Homesteading

Home In Namibia, Photo by Peter Doucette

--In collaboration with Petzl, check out the good things, and the good people who make that company one of the best--

Quick test: What’s the first word that comes to mind when I say the following four places: New Hampshire, Namibia. Spain. Wyoming.

Did anyone else answer home? I’ve been in Wyoming for five weeks now, before that it was Europe for three, Namibia for five, and New Hampshire for 3.5 months before that. I pay a mortgage in Colorado, but I’m homesteading everywhere else.

Visitation implies a temporary sampling of an area. Homesteading implies making an effort at living in an area. I think I’m doing the latter—through climbing.

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Namibia Video 2: Southern Crossing in Action

A video short from Chris Alstin at www.alstrinfilms.com

Namibia Video 2: Southern Crossing from Majka Burhardt on Vimeo.

Waypoint Namibia: Big Walls, Desert Mirages, and Perseverance in the Darmaland and Beyond. *

Majka Burhardt on Southern Crossing, 5.11+, V. Photo by Peter Doucette.

On June 1st, Peter Doucette, Kate Rutherford and I completed Southern Crossing: a 1300-foot 5.11+, grade 5 rock climbing first ascent on the Brandberg, Namibia’s highest peak. But that’s only part of the story. There’s also a 2,000+ year-old painted giraffe, 108-degree temperatures, eight days at 15km/hour over washboard roads, scorpions, laser sharp granite cracks, crumbling granite faces, and 1.7 meter-long cobra tracks.

Forty-two days ago, I went to Namibia expecting to climb, explore, and push my understanding of how curiosity, ambition, and adventure work vis a vis culture. I knew all of these components would come into play during the month long trip, I just didn’t know the formulation. In the north, where we’d originally planned to climb the most, our best Kate Rutherford, Peter Doucette, and Majka Burhardt. Photo by Chris Alstrin.moments came from sitting in the shade of an Acacia tree with a group of Himba women painted in red ochre and butterfat. They spoke Himba, Afrikaans, and Portuguese; we spoke English and Spanish. Hand gestures and figures drawn in the sand eventually told the story of dirt-track roads, established trails, and unexplored mountains. Further south, on the Brandberg, we scraped through the dirt, bushes, and bird refuse that guarded our prospective line for three days to get to what we hoped would be a way up. Each day, we looked for a way for this country, the “easy Africa,” to give us portals to a higher stance, a greater understanding, or a smooth road. We eventually found all of them.

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