jaredspaulding.com Posts

March 31, 2023 / / Place

iFrames are not supported on this page. Explore the map above or click here to go to the ArcGIS Online hosted version. In December of 2010, I launched jaredspaulding.com. Memories…

June 4, 2020 / / Pandemic Dialogues

NOLS courses are hard. My jaw thrusts downward and outward while my hands cup the sides of my mouth. “Rrreeddd tent, close your vestibule” I yell from my tent door…

April 14, 2013 / / Climbs
May 29, 2023 / / Horses

It’s all the same, only the names will change. . .*  Under towering cumulus congestus a game of cat and mouse, horse and (want to be) rider, catch me if…

February 14, 2023 / / Climbing
January 25, 2023 / / Climbing

The sun spills into the small dining/sitting area as it rises above the distant mesa. The sky is void of clouds and blends seamlessly from grays to periwinkles and salmons…

December 25, 2022 / / Climbing

“I’m skeeerd” I say. A twinge of over the top whininess tries to mask the actual fear behind my humor. I don’t climb a lot of overhangs, so, in addition…

November 7, 2022 / / Family

My neighbors got a “new” truck last summer. The white, extended cab, Ram 2500 with an eight foot bed sits and idles its diesel engine on the street; there is…

October 23, 2022 / / Uncategorized

Home is where you find it and where you make it; that is what I try to tell myself. I sit in a curvy, plush Victorian-esque rocker, worn on the…

September 19, 2022 / / Uncategorized

I could hear Anna cussing even though I was twenty yards behind.  “There are two parties ahead of us.”  It was exasperated and whispered, but the words drifted down through…

July 31, 2022 / / 616

Years of outdoor education have helped build a habit of referencing things by cardinal directions and their ordinal “in-betweens”. “Use the entrance on the south door” I might say to…

June 30, 2022 / / The Engine of Survival

Editor’s Note: This piece evolved from some prompts I had in a writing class I took two years ago from author Katherine Standefer. Pieces of the current news coverage have…

May 31, 2022 / / Livin the dream

Editor’s Note:  I wrote and published this post in 2014.  It has always been one of my favorites and so much of what I have reflected on still resonates with…

April 16, 2022 / / Desert Notes

Thick, pungent smoke billowed from between the two pieces of wood. First, wispy and upward in strung out curls, then heavy, grey, and everywhere. The lungs, laboring from the arms’…

March 19, 2022 / / Family

Devil’s Slide rises almost 800 feet above my boyhood hamlet of Stark. As a child the deciduous forest that stretched northward across the railroad tracks from our house felt immense.…

February 20, 2022 / / Climbing

Any time my friends and I end up at Del Taco in Las Vegas at midnight, there has got to be some sort of story. “Well, what do you want…

January 31, 2022 / / Family

  Editor’s Note: On the table by the window here at 616 Washakie sits a sun faded copy of Daniel Doan’s book, Our Last Backpack. It was a gift to…