Nightmares of being awoken at dawn kept me up all night, and by the time Mountain Man Ivan showed up, at 7 am no less, I was pretty exhausted. He was my teacher and I his follower; and when I asked where we were heading, he pointed west to the Rockies, and simply said, “Adventure.” My goal was for Ivan to share some of his knowledge in winter survival skills and his plan was to set forth on some early morning urban backpacking expedition. The night before, while I’d been out all night, Ivan had marched off and camped at some hill by Seven Eleven and an underpass. I thought this odd, this liaison of his love of the wild and his contempt for all concrete, but so it was.

Plumes of industrial exhale cloud the ascending sun, swirling truth and crap above the Colorado Springs landscape. Trudging below, our footsteps are echoed and chased by barks that mar the still solace of early morning. As the cement underfoot loosens to gravel, we approach some shoddy neighborhoods of gasping Chevys and frustrated drivers with numbing hands. The tranquility of an empty city takes on bizarre qualities of wilderness, what with our backpacks and hiking boots, and Ivan’s self-skinned coon cap and homemade jerky. Uneasy eyes follow our packs, shadowing our descent towards I-25. Soon the incessant rumbles of the highway arise, as the eastern glows grow and trash ballets afloat the spinning wheels’ winds. We dodge and cross the traffic, and, finding a hobo entrance slashed from the fencing, duck the barbs and confront a dejected creek of floating cartons and sunken shoes. Shanty shacks of tarpaper and tin pepper the hillside, under looming dunes and abandoned and indefinable constructs of cement and rust. Ivan drops his pack, sighing and stretching towards the swimming pool sky. I follow him amongst the cottonwoods, ‘til he cracks off a limb to his liking.

The Bow-Drill Kit:

1. Bow:

-Hard wood, like oak, slightly curved, foot and a half long
-Loop a rope from end to end, as in a Bow and arrow

2. Handhold:

-Use oak, so it doesn’t catch on fire, smoke, or burn you
-Grease with rendered fat, tree sap, or body grease

The following should be constructed of a medium hardness wood, checked by the fingernail test:

-A gentle pressing of the fingernail should yield a subtle indentation
-South facing wood equals more sun, and thus drier wood
-The older the wood, the dryer and softer it becomes

3. Spindle:

-About eight inches long, a little thicker than thumb
-Both ends are carved to a point, with the top end left a little rounder
-Place center in center of rope, and turn until it’s taught inside the Bow

4. Fire Board:

-Should be about 14 inches long and an inch thick, carved to a board shape

5. Fire Board and Handhold Sockets:

-Place pointed end of Spindle on desired area, with Bow parallel to ground
-Work Bow back and forth until Spindle drills the Socket, save resulting powder to place in tinder bundle to increase flammability

6. Fire Board Notch:

-Carve out triangular notch almost halfway into Socket

7. Build a rock fire wall to reflect heat, and shelter the fire from the wind

8. Sweep an area clean, down to the soil, for the firebase, and create tee-pee style infrastructure, with thicker sticks toward the outside

9. Create 2 softball-sized tinder bundles out of the dead, gray staves at the base of the yucca, the dried inner bark of cottonwood, milkweed down, or any other highly flammable fibers of maximum surface area. Place one bundle in center of tee-pee

10. Place Fireboard on ground, and use your foot to hold it in place while drilling. You can take off your shoes and socks to increase traction

11. Place a large, dry leaf under small strands of tinder, under notch in Fireboard

12. Place the Spindle in the socket, with the Handhold above, and work back and forth, quickly yet steadily, until smoke appears, and a spark drops though the notch, onto strand of tinder

13. Drop spark into large tinder bundle, and gently cover the spark and blow

14. Upon flames, toss tinder into tee-pee

As Ivan carves, I reminisce about past campfires, and ponder the magnitude of the bow-drill. Something from nothing, it seems. But what the hell is fire? So Prometheus stole it from the gods? Well, Ivan’s got a theory, too. The spindle, he says, is the male organ. It mates with the socket in the fireboard, and the resulting spark symbolizes life. The spark is guarded by the tinder bundle, which represents Mother Nature. It’s an interesting analogy, but can you imagine those primordial thoughts running through the mind of that first, original fire’s creator? Light, warmth, cooking...a familial and communal centerpiece! It must have marked man’s initial ascent, been a zeitgeist of all humanity’s history. And yet I’m clueless without my Bic.

As we wheeze our way upward, stalling on the sharp snow banks and frozen sands, a massive cement tower surfaces on the horizon, emerging from the dune’s peak of yucca and cacti. Atop the hill, and greeted with a vast vista of savannah-like desertion, we peak into a puzzling bowl of crystallized rainbow sands and steep sides of snow. It’s a long gone weathered world, amidst corroding elegies of archaic wood and rust, and jutting constructions of wanton iron and cinder. Mineral swirls seep into the sand, in a mess of forgotten boons and blundered colors scoured by the ages. Taking it in, I’m still struggling with this idea, whether the symmetry of the tower and Pike’s Peak beyond is real beauty, or just some fragmented coexistence of urban sprawl.

We drop our packs like Bedouins sighting palms, and shoe-ski down the slopes. Exploring aimlessly, poking about, we’re still clueless to its purpose, and yet just as mesmerized. Maybe microcosmic of the entire wasteland, the bowl emanates this odd, harsh beauty of contrasts and questions. Entirely paved by pollution, wasteland life and death seem to coexist on a bizarre balance of synergistic pollution and nature, industrial decay and the mulish verve of life... It’s the beauty of a blurred dichotomy.

Enough play time, we figure, and we struggle up the icy slants of the sanctuary. Hiking on, red-tailed hawks flash to and from view, reiterating the swells and shallows of rolling yellow dunes. My perspective wavers, and I see the area diatribe against its past, with trodden plants and surveyors’ sticks...mammoth piles of bulldozed dirt and struggling springs of mudded litter...horizons awash with industry and mountains...For a moment, I brew in contempt. Damn this in-between bullshit, this intermediary of wild urbanity. What dissonance! Slowly though, like an unveiling fog or a lilting sunrise, the silence and solitude sweep away the disdain, and instill a sense of wilderness in my perception. Like a metropolitan dawn, like Ivan’s downtown campground, I recognize the fleeting moments of urban sprawl splendor.

The sun says it’s eleven, as Ivan points out a South American Basket-weaver atop a spring-fed cottonwood. I raise my glance from my dusty rhythm and trodding boots, but through the branches, all I see is a neon cowboy atop a roof, tipping his ten-gallon hat to songbirds and customers. Yellow woodpeckers I can’t see delight Ivan, while I cross back to the Other Side, and explore the divisive highway. According to the billboards, it was a zoned lot we’d crossed, and is doomed with town house sites for sale. I guess that’s the true eulogy.

Again we exchange glances with hasty motorists, cross the four lanes, and discover a cemetery of empty tombstones. Maybe Pauper Cemetery is some ethereal sanctuary of John Doe vagabonds. Oh well, and we move on.

We traverse an expansive dog park of Saturday, brimming with bounding dogs and compliant owners. I try and say hi, but I’m still stuck in the awkward emergence from solitude. Taking lunch under an oak, Ivan complains about his lime disease, and I complain about hunger. It’s all the damn back-and-forth that’s obstructing my backcountry with-or-without ease; this urban sprawl, this metro-pastoralism, I realize, has stuck me somewhere between the mentalities of a backcountry hike and a frontcountry stroll. But Ivan doesn’t seem to notice, as he munches on his homemade, road-kill deer pemmican, talking about the primitive hunting styles of the throwing stick. Whenever entering a new area, he advises, carry a throwing stick because you just never know. We practice our aim, remembering to keep the body low and still, avoiding sudden movements. Don’t step forward like in baseball, just whip the stick with fluidity, using only the arm and back muscles. He demonstrates, and I repeat.

A cloak of clouds rising from the south plays games with the sun, and I pull on a sweater. The foothills are growing denser, as we begin bushwhacking the grabby shrubs that pull at my wool, leaving wispy strands and little spurts of blood. As the development dwindles, the base of the Rockies come into view and we quicken our pace. We hunker on, through the oncoming cold, and the fear of being the first to say “Let’s camp”. But soon we democratically submit to the shadows and crunchy snow that emit a chill that comes from below. And so we unload our packs and build a shelter.


Debris Hut

The entrance of the shelter should face towards the east to maximize sunlight, and minimize western storms and winds. Build it on a flat area.

1. Build an A frame, with the ridge pole an arm’s length taller than you, and a couple inches in diameter

-The ridge pole is supported by an A shape of two branches on one end, and a rock on the other

2. Alongside the ridgepole, on both sides, place sticks of equal height to the pole, as any excess length creates dead space

3. Create a lateral latticework across the sides to increase surface area

4. Use debris to cover the walls (pine needles, leaves, grass etc.)

-2.5 feet: 20 degrees
-3.5 feet: 0 degrees
-4.5 feet: -20 degrees

5. Stuff the driest and softest debris inside, stuffed full

6. A door can be fashioned out of a thick pile of debris, or by tying boughs together with grasses and creating a latticework of sticks and debris that becomes an opening and closing door

Our shelter built, the flames flying high, Ivan bears a goofy grin about how quickly he started the fire. Just like a lighter, he says. “It’s so fucking real. It’s like magic.” And I think about how that ostensibly contradictory statement sustains an epic amount of human history.

We gaze into the fire, chatting, while the crescent moon and evening star seem to do the same. Here and there, passing cars and fragmented conversations carry up and echo through the valley night, and yet I’m not phased like I was earlier. I can watch these urban resonations disappear now, dissolving into the wild. I play the harmonica, pretending I can wail...in all content with the enveloping ebony, the surfacing stars, and the smell and crackle of a pine woods fire. So fucking real, it’s like magic.