 Off belay!
Whenever Mountain Gazette
has issued a plea for submissions
for subject-specific issues
over the years, I have always
mostly just stood back, beer in hand, and
waited to see what the cosmic tide brought
my way, to let the ebb and flow of the Big
Creative Picture work its inevitable magic.
Once that happens (and always does
it happen), and I start reading through
the usually large stack of manuscripts —
more than 100 stories were submitted
for consideration for this year’s Climbing
Issue — I start to sort of mentally sluice
and collate all of those stories in such a
way that the finished product is (hopefully)
less a sum of its collective editorial
parts than it is an organic entity.
 Change you can believe in
Those of you who are already fans of the Mountain Gazette will have surely noticed by now that the magazine you hold in your hands has undergone a significant change. Yes, we have experienced shrinkage (apropos of our annual Rivers Issue, I would say), and it’s my guess that many readers will react to that reality with some combination of perplexedness, incredulity and maybe even an uncontrollable desire for immediate self-medication. (Our advice, as always: Go for it!)
 The Big Theoretical Thaw
Sometimes, despite the sanitized nature of the beast, raw emotion can make its way through the dead ether of cyberspace and land directly with a resounding unambiguous thud into one’s normally emotion-neutral email inbox. In this case, a photo sent by photographer Mark Fox came with a concomitant growl and a sigh that took the form of an unmistakable cosmic attachment from my best buddy.
 Ski Bum Economics
After anti-Yuppie rants, mountain dating
guides, dog photos and queries about writing
The Lost Art of Getting Lost, if there is a favored
theme to Mountain Gazette submissions, it is
the lament of the urban arrival who for a lover, a career or no
damn good reason at all has forsaken the magic of the High
Country. It seems like every other week someone sends in an
essay detailing his or her own personal deal with the devil
— how
they followed the flash of the cash to the city and left
their soul twisting back up in the hills.
 Deep Winter
It seems like you never hear any good cabin fever stories anymore. You know, where someone got so isolation-tanked by the deep snow and hard winter that he or she burned down the shack to keep the walls from closing in, shaved the dog to knit a sweater or learned to recite all of Monty Python and the Holy Grail backwards just for something to do.
 Blue West
I cried a little tear when New Mexico and then Colorado turned blue on election night. It was a mix of relief and euphoria somewhat similar to what I felt when the Broncos finally won the Super Bowl — how until the impossible finally happens, it’s easier to believe it can’t.
 Take Me Home
My parents packed the picnic basket with fried chicken, strawberries and Texas toast, put me and my big brother in the back of the blue Volkswagen hatchback and took us to Red Rocks to see John Denver when I was seven or eight. There was an exploding sky of stars above the red stone amphitheatre, and in the valley behind the stage the city came alive in a lake of electric lights.
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