Get Out: Awake by the Lake

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Saturday was overcast and 60 degrees. But after some BB pistol target practice, my friend David and I departed for Phelps Lake to make a video for his blog (thesnaz.com) about the first dive of the season from the jumping rock.

We had been hunting mushrooms (and shooting BBs) in too-dry terrain and decided to do something exciting. When diving, you throw yourself off a cliff, upside down, only to be jolted into a chilly, heightened state, climb back up the rock, relax for a while, and do it again.

On our hike out to the rock, we ran into a bearded man with a stringer of six beautiful lake trout, another man who was not very memorable and a girl that was wearing a Hobie wetsuit. She looked like a heartthrob from the 60s version of Flipper, or Free-Willie, or Animal Planet or something. And she had beat me to the first swim of the season.

We decided the girl’s name was Persephone, and she was returning to some idyllic cabin with her dad and her uncle where they would prepare their fish that evening. We figured they were the ghosts of the Rockefellers - the family who sacrificed their one-in-a-million property so that the public could have a world-class path to a jumpin’ rock. +

About halfway to the rock, dirt and grit filled my shoe, grinding into a blister inflicted by ski-boot rub a week prior - skinning through snow piles, pine needles and rocks along the shore of Leigh Lake during a failed attempt on Mt. Moran.
I took off my shoes, welcoming the soft pain of needles pricking my bare feet. When we reached the rock, the water looked very cold, dark and blustery. It was 50 degrees – we measured with a meat thermometer. David missed my first jump, so I went again. A little stiff from the cold, I screwed up and only got one arm down that time. The third time I stuck it.

On the way back, a couple of barefoot detours around lightning-felled trees reminded me of shoeless jaunts through the woods of eastern Tennessee, mulling the words of Henry David Thoreau – “simplify, simplify.”.

My ear attuned to the woods is, now, a bit calcified by ever-present cynicism and my modern, chemical life that causes it. But diving, each dive, each dose of courage, erased those thoughts.  JHW

If you want to dive from high places, start small. Rocks along the Snake River near the Hoback Canyon are perfect – 10 feet or so – to get over your initial heebee-jeebies. But I’m not going to tell you how to get to the Phelps Lake rock. Finding it is part of the fun.

COURTESY DAVID GONZALES/thesnaz.com
Jumping off a Phelps Lake boulder; find it yourself.

PERMALINK:
Get Out: Awake by the Lake | Planet JH News Article: Sports & Recreation

Leave a Comment