Naked in Nature
A Coming of Age Adventure and Wild Awakening at the Grand Canyon
This month we are on an epic trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in celebration of my momentous 50th birthday. While we are even further off the grid than usual, I thought I’d share with you this post from last summer, so you can better understand why the GC is so meaningful to me. See you on the flipside!
Before the Map Was an App
The first time I spontaneously got naked in Nature, I was nineteen years old. My best friends and I were taking a road trip across the country between my freshman and sophomore years of college. We were choosing places to visit based on where we had places to crash.
This is 1994. There is no Internet or cell phones or GPS. I ordered a trip route off of Triple A, a desk sized wire-bound booklet of maps with your requested journey highlighted for you across multiple pages, depending how long the trip. Our journey started in New York and took us to West Virginia, Memphis, Oklahoma, and rapidly across the Texas panhandle where cops notoriously pulled people over for weed, which was all illegal back then. We went to New Mexico because our close friend was going to the now defunct College of Santa Fe on Saint Michael’s. From there we headed west toward California where we had a friend in La Jolla.
Searching for Something Sacred in the Desert
Natural Born Killers was a popular movie at the time and romanticized the idea of taking peyote in the desert with shamans. This is before Ayahuasca journeys were a popular tourist adventure. I was reading Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Way as we traversed Arizona.
We didn’t have peyote, but we had plenty of cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms which we micro-dosed (before that was a word) at the Petrified Forest National Park. Climbing over the ropes intended to keep tourists out we took to the desert like tarantulas roaming in search of something we could not describe, shoving our pockets with petrified wood. Later, we petrified ourselves when we saw warnings of bubonic plague, naively believing we surely contracted it on our sojourns.
But it was the Grand Canyon that truly blew my mind.
