axis mundi.

I've spent a good portion of the last few days shooting video for my place of work, Backcountry Edge.  These clips are basically short duration demonstrations of various tents, backpacks, sleeping bags and other outdoor gear or, as I prefer to think of it, filming these bits is a cross between playtime and learning, for me, and, eventually, for someone trying to get a more multi-dimensional view of a given item than a flat, lifeless product page on a retail website can provide.

It's fun, really, and serves as a nice physical escape from the office which is especially convenient when the weather decides to take a significant turn for the better, as it has this week.

But, this go round, the entire process has made me oddly restless.  Putting up a tent and expounding on its finer points has me wanting to be in that very tent somewhere a bit more exotic than a mile away from my desk.  Blowing up a sleeping pad, I find that I want to spend the entire night on the pad, preferably under a Western sky full of stars, stars, endless stars.  And the sleeping bags, the backpacks, the trekking poles, the you-go-ahead-and-name-its, they've all got me wanting to not just talk about their functional aspects but to put them to good and practical use somewhere far away from an all-too-handy and invasive cell signal.

All of which adds to my current longing for mountains and reminds me of a paragraph from Gretel Ehrlich's Questions of Heaven:

"Are mountains really mountains?  Are mountains a form of enlightenment?  Are rivers a mountain running?  Can we walk through them?  Why do mountains walk through us?"

I don't know the answers and, like all my favorite questions, they may not even have one or, at least, JUST one.  What fun is a question, anyway, if it's too easily answered?  Not as fun as one that isn't, this I know.

Today the mountains are walking through me and yet remain all too distant.  I miss them immensely.   I want to go to them.  To BE with them.  Not to race through them and head home, but to race to them and make them home.

I don't even need the gear.  Gear without the mountains is just trappings.  Mountains without the gear are still the connection points between earth and sky that pull me like so many magnets.

I'll get there...and when I do, I won't be back.

yeah, what walt said.

It's the third week of January and that means I've got a plane to catch.

The Salt Palace, Salt Lake City's charmless convention center, as it does twice each year, is again playing host to the outdoor industry as its manufacturers tout the latest and greatest assortment of the latest and greatest in backpacking, climbing, skiing, paddling, running and general outdoor adventuring gear to the retailers who will decide whether the consumer gets in on the action by placing orders to stock shelves six months from now.

There'll be plenty of cool stuff to see, that's for sure. Better be since my livelihood as a head buyer/merchandiser for an outdoor retailer depends on it.  And so I'll have yet another chance to hear the practiced spiels and give my eyes the chance to confirm or refute the validity of those spiels.

Make no mistake about it, I dig gear.  I'm genuinely interested by what "they've" thunk up next and often do believe that some brand new or at least better-than-what-came-before doodad just might make your next outing that much better than the one before.

Funny then that some of my favorite moments at OR (the industry nickname for these Outdoor Retailer trade shows) are the hours spent running in the nearby Wasatch each morning before the show, hours spent far away from the bright lights of the show floor and the rah-rah-rah of those selling and those buying (or not) what's being sold.

While running with friends this past weekend, I grinned at the telling of a whispered-down-the-lane story of someone running Western States several years ago in fresh (at the time) gear only to be passed by an old timer in jeans shorts and a recycled water jug tied to his wrist.  Romanticized and exaggerated?  Maybe, maybe not.  True or not, it's still a great reminder of how we're capable of making even the simplest of acts overly complicated.

There's plenty of stuff you COULD take running.  Plenty.  Or you could leave that stuff behind.

Just being out and running on a cold, beautiful January morning with a couple of like-minded bodies (like-bodied minds?) was fantastic.  Who was wearing what didn't matter because...we'll, because it doesn't.  I'd have parted ways with my fancy schmancy running shoes and the full-of-information reading on my GPS long before giving up the shared movement, the conversation, the time spent together on the trail.

Nothing complicated about that.

Driving home and watching the sky complete its transition from starlight to daylight, I was reminded of a passage from Walt Whitman that I couldn't fully recite on the spot but that I was quick to track down as soon as I got home:

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer; 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; 

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; 

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the

lecture-room, 

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

As gear goes, I've got a soft spot for the "proofs, the figures...the charts and diagrams" but not as soft a spot as I do for wandering off by myself and drinking in that moist night air.

Looking forward to enjoying a little of each over the next couple of days.

fortune cookies and pre-race evidence.

Nice theory but, at least as far as tomorrow goes, don't expect me to be guiding any sleds.

Have I mentioned how much I love these shoes?  We'll see how they treat me over the course of 31.1 miles.  I'm not worried.

Darn Tough seamless-toe mesh socks (thanks for the hook-up, Justin) and Inov-8 debris gaiters.

Gloves? Really?  I'm playing the Boy Scout and these are the best running gloves I've seen (I can wear them in cool-to-cold weather without sweating and swearing in them).  That said, I bet they get carried to the car and stay there until I carry them back into the house tomorrow evening.  The hat and Garmin, however, are a must, especially if this undisciplined runner is going to have any chance of sticking to a pace.

Ultimate Direction bottles (thanks, Ben) and Roctane GU (godsend).

Nanas, sauce, granola and a protein bar that I hope will be palatable...Piper tried to eat it straight through the wrapper, so I'm taking that as a good sign.

That's more like it.