Little City of Rocks - Outside Gooding, Idaho.

When I was younger, many, many pounds lighter, and significantly more stupid than I am today, my oldest brother, Mark and I used to rock climb. I can distinctly remember the day that I decided I was done climbing. Julie and I had moved to southern Califonia and I had met up with a man about my same age in our church that had always wanted to learn to rock climb. We worked for a complete spring and summer gradually climbing harder and harder routes on taller and taller rocks and mountains. Our goal was to climb to the top of Tahquitz, a granite and quartzite moutainous outcropping in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California. Finally, we felt we were ready. We chose a fairly simple, yet exposed route up the 900' - 1,000' rock face; studied guide books and pictures and made the trip in the late fall, early winter of 1988.

At about 200' from the base of the rock, a huge granite flake peeled off the mountain with me on it. I pushed myself away from the falling rock peice, which was about the size of a small automobile, so that it wouldn't land on me and I dropped about 35', bouncing off a rock and pine needle covered ledge and slid over the edge to a 100' plus drop. Somehow I had the enough of my senses about me to grab into a deep crack in the rock wall and pulled myself up and onto the ledge i had just bounced off. I watched, horror struck, as the huge boulder that I was on top of only moments learlier continued on down the hill landing with litterally an earth shattering thud and then a crack as it split in two peices about 100' below where I was. When the adrenaline flowing through my body finally subsided, I felt a sting and a pain shoot from my right hip all the way up my spine and into my head. My ears were ringing (and would continue to do so for nearly a week,) and I couldn't lift my head. I laid there for what felt like forever assessing my body and trying to move various body parts until gradually I could move all of my body and I knew I hadn't damaged myself too badly. Laying there, I thought, I have a wife and a family to take care of. I couldn't do that crippled, paralyzed, or even worse, dead. That was when I quite climbing for good.

Anyway, I told you that long story so I could tell you about a place called Little City of Rocks between Gooding, Idaho and Fairfield, Idaho. Mette and I drove there and wandered through the rocks. The entire time I was walking around I kept thinking to myself, "I wish I had know about this when I was a climber." It was spectacularly beautiful. The pictures I have included do not do it justice. You really can't tell the size and sheer exposure of these rocks. When we were climbing actively, Mark and I discovered a incredible and very remote site to climb years ago, called the Menagerie outside of Sweethome, Oregon. It was a series of lava tubes that time and water eventually erroded the earth from away from to expose a handfull of incredibly beautiful climbable rock pillars. At the time, we thought it was the coolest place we had ever seen. The Little City of Rocks is the exact same geologic formation, only ten times larger with litterally a thousand or more possible climbing routes, rocks, and locations. If we had lived and grown up here, I probably would still be rock climbing.