The Potrero is well bolted

Then it was over. The number of tents on Homero's ranch was shrinking quickly as people left to resume their lives. The sun was setting along a low range of mountains on the other side of the desert. Climbers walked around, massaging their pumped forearms and laughing at story after story. Homero himself appeared a few times to chat with his guests.

There seemed to be a general contentment in the aftermath of the holiday. The local merchants welcome the extra cash flow. The climbers walked away with memories of playing on an amazing jungle gym, but also with a sense of ownership and protection of the valley: Nearly everybody in the camps turned out to clean up trash along the road, leaving the Potrero cleaner than they found it.

As Homero's, Hidalgo, and the Potrero itself become more popular — now there's a guidebook to the valley — further development geared toward American dollars is inevitable. But on the eve of the millennium, we lived like kings in the dirt, because the dirt was fit for kings. This perfect valley had given us a foreign experience, remoteness and accessibility, primitiveness and creature comforts, and of course some memorable wall-scaling. We climbed, we ate, we drank — we were even allowed to forget about Y2K for a while.

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