Wild Iris, WY, No. 1

Post vacation blues and pondering why we need time away

Jun 24, 2025

It’s mid-June and already Brian and I are home from both of our planned vacations. Two trips this year to make up for last year. This year we flew to England mid-May to visit friends who had moved Across the Pond. We had two climbing days while we were there, and decided to only go bouldering so we didn’t have to travel with a lot of gear and pay exorbitant fees. All we brought were shoes and chalk because we could “hire,” as the English say, a bouldering pad for a day.

Climbing on hard gritstone, similar to what we find at Coopers Rock State Park in WV, was “loov-leh” and humbling. Also, the UK was in the midst of a significant drought, so every day was dry and sunny and mid-60s Fahrenheit. Stanage, outside of Sheffield, held a special shine for Brian who has been reading about and looking at pictures of the iconic boulders there since he was a young climber. I was stymied by Stanage since I haven’t been bouldering much in the past year. I think I topped out a V0. But on our second day out at Almscliff, local to where we were staying in Yorkshire (Yawk-sheh), I felt more myself and topped out a few boulders, including the classic of the area, Morell’s Wall.

We were home for about 10 days and then headed out again, this time, on a total climbing road trip to Wyoming.

For a summer time road trip, I’ve decided that Wild Iris in Wyoming is the best sport-climbing area to go to. Though we encountered every kind of weather there except extreme heat and humidity, we brought proper attire, so even when it was cold or rainy, we still went out to the crag and didn’t suffer over-much. Or, the discomfort was made bearable by the sheer beauty of the place. Wild Iris, just outside of Lander, has to be the prettiest place we have ever climbed in the US, and we’ve been around a fair bit.

We camped in town part of the time at an RV park— not ideal, but we could pull into a grassy tent site and sleep in our truck. We ignored the ugly, gravel parking lot for the RVs. The perks of staying there were 1) the bathrooms, 2) showers, and 3) laundry— creature comforts for sure when you’re living in your vehicle. 4) There’s a lounging area indoors, which we definitely utilized on the rainy evenings.

The first few days the weather was unpredictable and rain kept popping up in the forecast, and we didn’t want to be caught in that at a higher elevation. Once the weather settled down and got warmer, we moved up to the Aspen Glade campground. The only “creature comfort” up there was the pit toilet and toilet paper. We had to bring our own water and everything else we wanted or needed.The perks of this rustic campground was 1) the trail leading to the climbing areas started right there, and, 2) man, it smelled so good— wind and pine trees and sun and dirt and grass and rocks— the smell of the mountains. 3) It was also the start of wild flower season up there, and the meadow we hiked across every day was bursting with color by the time we left to drive home. 4) There was never not an insanely beautiful view— okay, except when you used the pit toilet.

Which brings me to the point of this essay: why do we need time away?

I pondered this question while we were gone and have continued to reflect on it now that we’re now home and plugged back into so-called Real Life. I’ve read somewhere in my deep dive into play that we as Westerners, and definitely as Americans, don’t know how to be at leisure. Even the word leisure brings with it a negative connotation. It might make you think “lazy,” or, it might make you think “elitist.” Leisure, we think, is only for people who can afford it. In his book Leisure the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper writes, “the original conception of leisure, as it arose in the civilised world of Greece, has, however, become unrecognizable in the world of planned diligence and ‘total labour’...” More than a healthy conception of leisure, what we understand is “one does not work to live; one lives to work”. This shows in our work-a-day lives— we have trouble being happy or feeling successful unless we are useful and productive, unless we are making a healthy paycheck, unless we are busy at the very least— but it might be more starkly seen in how we take time off, how we practice leisure. Our American concept of the perfect get-away often means being busy and occupied, or it’s boring. God-forbid we are bored. So we even over-program our time off.

The way Brian and I have structured our work lives and our play lives is both very typically American, and somewhat atypical. Climbing has always been the scaffolding of our work time and our time off. Rarely do we go on vacation and not climb. I’ve always wanted climbing to be more restful and rejuvenating than it is. The truth is that we’d come home from a climbing trip needing a vacation from our vacation. We’d come home tired. Our oldest son recently reminded us that our vacations were more like work than our regular at-home lives were. In a way, we don’t really know how to be at leisure either.

However, a climbing road trip does get some of its virtue from the still parts, the leisurely parts, as much as it does from the activity. While it is work some of the time— including regular conflict resolution, and cooking and doing dishes, taking out the trash, because a family doesn’t get a break from these things when they’re on a road trip—the fact is, if we don’t do the work of getting ourselves away from home to another place that is a little bit remote, a place where we have to lug water and food and sleep for the most part outside, a place where we maybe aren’t super comfortable and a little unsettled, we don’t get the opportunity for the spaces in between, those moments of leisure which include bearing witness to the beauty of the “wilderness,” the beauty of creation. To be able to sit back slackjawed and soak it in, receive it. To be bored with our eyes open. A climbing day isn’t all hustle and bustle. It isn’t all climbing. To climb well, you have to rest well, and in those moments of down time, you get to look around. We just need to be better at the resting parts.

The answer to “the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest,” Annie Dillard writes, “must be… that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” Beauty exists so that we humans will witness it and rejoice. Of course, Annie Dillard wrote these lines in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which she worked on at her home in a suburban development in Virginia. She didn’t have to go far to see what she witnessed and testified about in those pages. And I agree that there is value to finding beauty where you are, in your every day, ordinary life. We need to take a minute to open our eyes and see what is right in front of us.

So yes, the climbing part of our trips sometimes feels like work, but it has taught us another way to experience the world that includes our whole bodies and minds. You get to know a place when you pay close attention to the ways your body experiences the landscape. You get to know how you fit into that place at a specific time with specific light and weather. You learn how to be completely in the present moment.

It took Brian and I a whole week at Wild Iris to figure out which areas the sun was blazing at certain times and therefore, the areas where we should go and the routes we should try if we wanted to avoid said blazing sun. We had to learn that just because it looked like a gigantic thunderhead was speeding up behind us, ready to dump some sort of perdition onto our heads, didn’t mean it was. It could mean that it was miles and miles away, actually dumping perdition on the next ridge over. We had to learn how to climb using pockets and slippery foot holds, how that changed how we held and balanced the weight of our bodies.

Paying such close attention drills a place into you, and we come home holding a part of the place in our bodies and minds that the pictures we took have no way to document.

“Leisure,” Josef Pieper goes on to say, “is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” Annie Dillard calls it innocence: “Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time…. the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once receptiveness and total concentration.”

So this is my argument for vacation, for traveling away from home, or even for taking time off and staying home— a “staycation.” Going on vacation can put you in the path of new and glorious things that might remind you of the goodness of the world and God, something you might miss in Real Life. It doesn’t necessarily require a lot of money, or going far away, but it does require the desire to stop being busy and productive. It requires stillness. It requires being okay with boredom so you can wait and see what comes.