Spring in the Utah desert has to be one of the most beautiful, restorative places you could ever hope to find yourself. The dry sun and earth feels especially purgative after the long, cold winter.

There are many adventures to be had out here, especially as a climber. But what type of climber are you? This question almost needs to be answered first, or else you could lose your mind in this scorched labyrinth of rock. This is an ever-evolving question for me. I grew up as a stalwart traditional climber and I practiced my craft in places like the Gunks, Yosemite and Cannon. Maybe the climbing was occasionally scary, but it was rarely ever hard—which ultimately made trad climbing a non-serious thing for me. It was cool to get into rad, exposed positions, but what I most sought were climbs that gave me the vantage to look deep within.

I found that by pursuing my passion for free climbing at my absolute physical limit through all the discipline that that pursuit entails. Ultimately sport climbing drew me in. Ironically, I most wish I was best at the thing I’m probably worst at: bouldering.

This has been a year of intergalactic change for me, and it’s not surprising that orbiting into new, neighboring galaxies would also shift the focus of my climbing. I am now more motivated to climb new things than I am just to climb hard. Part of that, no doubt, is that I’m aware of how far my form has fallen in the past five months, and I am terrified because I know how much work it’ll take me just to get back to where I was last fall.

“You’re always trying to be as good as you once were,” Jen remarked as we sat beneath a familiar boulder in Joe’s Valley.

But part of my changing focus is undoubtedly that the Climbing Life spins in cycles, revolving and clanging like a prayer wheel. It seems inevitable that we are constantly returning to the styles of ascent we once knew, only with new eyes and more imagination. More experience. For me, the type of climbing I practice can be more a matter of what I need, and less necessarily about what I want to do.

Right now I feel like I’m starting all over, in climbing and life both. I feel a mix of anguish and optimism as I begin to search for the same old questions that I’ve already spent another life answering. But mostly, I feel fortunate to have as many opportunities to better see what’s within myself as there are rocks on this earth.

The Climbing Life spins again.