I once fell thirty feet off the Red Slab in Rock Canyon. I say “thirty” because that’s where I stopped—but it began as a fifteen-foot drop. I was leading, and my last piece of gear hadn’t held as expected. What saved me was my belay partner and good friend down below—Stu—his steadiness, his eyes locked on me even as I fell headfirst toward him—and a rope designed to stretch just enough, to hold without snapping.

That rope didn’t just keep me from hitting the ground. It absorbed the force of a fall I couldn’t control. It gave—but it didn’t break.

I’ve thought a lot about ropes since then.

Mountain biking the other day, I rounded a tight bend on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail and nearly crashed into a hiker hidden by thick undergrowth. Instinct took over: I slammed my brakes, skidded off the path, and we stopped inches apart. “Just me out here,” he said. “Same here,” I replied. We exhaled and continued on.

It happened so fast my body reacted before my mind labeled “obstacle.” My heart raced, and I realized I’d judged him as a threat first—failing to see his humanity until after the near miss.

Why do we default to snap judgments? Evolution wired us to sort friend from foe, safety from danger. Our System 1 thinking—fast, automatic, bias‑prone—fires first. Only when we pause does System 2 step in, questioning: “Who is this person, really?”

The other day, I rode hard for a couple of hours, cutting through new spring growth of scrub oak and wild roses, mapping unfamiliar terrain. I returned home well before dusk. Yet as night fell, the stinging in my legs—remnants of those relentless thorns—kept my mind tethered to the day’s journey. I worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

I’ve always believed the best way to rest is to earn it, that sleep follows effort. And that day, I’d earned it—so I slept soundly. “Like a baby,” as they say, though that phrase often misses the mark.

But a few months ago, everything changed.

I dove headlong into sleep metrics—stages, gadgets, mysteries—all in search of “perfect” rest. In reality, I lay on my memory-foam mattress under dim spring darkness, phone aglow, wondering: “What will tomorrow’s sleep score be?” Obsessing over data did nothing to help me drift off.

People occasionally ask why I return to the canyon so often. My wife, with genuine curiosity. Friends, with a teasing edge. Even my kids, wondering what could possibly be up there that isn’t already seen, walked, and done. “What’s the draw?” they ask. And the irony, of course, is that the people asking are the very ones I return to, again and again. All for similar reasons.

Yet, I never seem to give the same answer twice. The truth is, I’m still learning what draws me in. It’s not just the scenery—though there’s plenty of that. It’s not even the peace and quiet, at least not entirely. The draw is layered. It builds over time, like something slow and faithful. We return to the things we love—not because they’re always beautiful, but because, over time, they’ve become so.

It’s not an easy question to answer—not because I don’t know, but because the knowing is layered. There’s the beauty, of course. The hush of pines. The bend in the trail where the river surprises you, again, even though it always bends there. Water where it was dry yesterday.

There’s a spot along the canyon trail where the river shoulders into a hard left bend—calm on the inside, turbulent on the outside, like it’s trying to make up for lost time. That outer bank takes a beating. Years ago—probably sometime between the Great Depression and Elvis—the fix was simple: stuff a few junked cars into the bank and call it erosion control.

And it worked. Sort of.

Today, you can still spot the tailfins of old Chevys and Packards poking out of the dirt like fossils of the American ego. Rusted, half-buried, but unmistakable. A reminder that nothing ever really disappears. We don’t throw things away—we just toss them somewhere else. And eventually, they show back up.

Nature doesn’t forget. Neither does the body. Or the soul.