Chapter 31: Hiking Heaven, Hiking Hell
© 1987 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
The Wilds of Utah (2,437 miles)
June 30, 1987
The pace of motorized travel is jarring, confusing—but also, in a
sense, liberating. We can clamber up a mountain without fear for the
bikes’ security; we can zip through Nevada to linger in Utah. Though I
expected this high-speed relocation to Ohio to be essentially
colorless, the opposite has been the case...
Nye County, Nevada
First, there have been the moments. Out in the desolate, dusty
wastelands of south-central Nevada, where some “towns” on the map are
but boarded-up gas stations, we found ourselves getting excited by the
litter-barrel signs and occasional rest areas. There’s not much else to
live for in a changeless landscape.
But on route 375 east of Warm Springs, after 50 miles of nothing (not
even another vehicle), we saw a speck in the road. Beyond that, far
ahead, there was yet another speck. I turned down the stereo and leaned
forward, alert.
Both specks grew as we gradually slowed from 80 mph. The nearer one,
brown and white, became a calf. The farther one, blue and white, became
a truck. The three of us met and stopped in the road, the humans
chuckling at this exquisitely sparse traffic jam as the mini-bovine
stood confused and frightened, at last trotting off into the sagebrush.
The trucker and I waved and motored on our opposite ways—the singular
moment gone like a rare planetary alignment. It was 40 miles before we
saw another sign of life.
Yep, it’s easy to get cosmic out here where man, not nature, is the
oddity.
Zion National Park, Utah
All of this planet’s beauty, from the grandeur of Yosemite to the wild
eccentricity of Zion, is part of a billion-year extravaganza of entropy
in progress. As things settle down, they assume shapes that are
dazzling and puzzling, confusing and bemusing. “How did this happen?” I always ask in such
places, struggling to grasp the simplicity of the answer. The interplay
of a few basic physical principles seems a feeble explanation for magic.
That’s why our panoply of -ologies ranges from geo to cosmo to theo.
It is impossible to be neutral about Utah, which perhaps explains the
exclamation mark on the license plates. The wonders unfold from moment
to moment like a succession of linked revelations, while the land only
a few miles away seems harsh and forbidding. The first time through,
after a musical Arches interlude, I pedaled sick and freezing through
high desert... 110 miles in one day... then watched Reagan get
re-elected on a motel TV. Sicker and cynical I pressed on, through the
aptly named Sevier River Valley in which the mindset matched the
climate: cold. I fought my way southward, finally relaxing my opinion
of humanity when I encountered the warm hospitality of Dr. Kent
McDonald and his family in St. George. That was two and a half years
ago.
We visited the McDonalds again during our eastbound zoom last week,
frolicking with his delightfully bright mini-Mormon offspring, swapping
musical favorites (try Kodaly’s Sonata
for Solo Cello sometime), and sharing the pleasures of a chronic
addiction that persists despite my knee pain, sore leg muscles, torn
ankle ligaments, cracked sternum, and deltoid bursitis: clambering. I just can’t resist the
lure of topsy-turvy land.
When I’m bent and gray I’ll confine my indulgence to simple hiking, I
suppose, but right now the intrigue of twisted passages and violent
slopes is too strong. When Kent spoke of a little-known place in Zion
National Park called “The Subway,” I responded with the kind of
enthusiasm that accompanies rumors of a secret admirer: heart-pounding
anticipation tinged with delicious fear and the certainty of imminent
adventure.
It was a cactus day—an endless furnace of skin-ravaging sun when torpid
toads hide in shady places and water is worth its weight in C-notes. We
shouldered our daypacks, the three of us, and set out into a dusty
scrub cedar forest of ankle-rippers and deerflies. My rubber cane-tip
left bulls-eyes in the fine red sand.
A ravine, of sorts, marked the boundary between vertical walls of black
volcanic rock and Utah-red sandstone. Down, abruptly down we went,
sliding in grit, lowering bodies carefully from boulder to boulder,
calling jokes in that playful camaraderie of shared looniness until the
incremental metering of gravity brought us at last to the left fork of
North Creek. Then three hours passed...
Three hours of picking our way upstream, climbing rocks, wading,
scooting over logs, pausing to marvel at bright orange dragonflies or
odd bits of flora unseen in tamer climes. Three hours of hard work as
the canyon walls slowly closed in—the cracked ruddy buttresses above us
blazing in sunshine, drawing the eye, reflecting the stratified history
of the earth’s formation in mineral-streaked storyboards of ongoing
drama.
Then... it changed. Wildly. We climbed a succession of dancing
staircases, deep red micro-steps bathed in a wash of sunlit water like
something from the celestial mythology of an ancient aquatic culture.
Ascending, awestruck, our patter silenced, we stepped higher and
higher—drawn into the mysteries of this place: a tunnel like an
inverted skeleton keyhole, a smooth hemispherical amphitheatre, a
succession of linked pools as perfectly defined as the jacuzzis of a
spelunking Berrocal-fanatic who won the Lotto. What planet IS this,
anyway?
Onward we walked, slowly, until there were only pools and walls, cold
with the breath of earth yet sunlit through the lively filter of
flickering overhead leaves. Leaving the packs on the last dry spot, we
swam from chamber to chamber, shivercold, at last turning the final
corner... where a roar, industrial in its insistence, poured through a
smooth portal of naked rock.
Inside, crashing into a round pool twelve feet across, a waterfall
exploded through a high crack—bathing us in chill mist. I entered,
delighted, shouting over the aquathunder, splashing across the chamber
to stand under falling water that pounded like the fists of a dozen
asynchronous masseurs. Trancelike, I submitted.
Time slipped away. The water probed me, coldwarm, its force pushing my
shorts to my knees and quickening my blood. I grabbed a wall for
support and relaxed, every muscle fluid. Something about it seemed
deeply familiar—at once immediate and impossibly remote, tiny and huge,
outclassing the intellect like a good meditation. I was nowhere,
everywhere, blending with a land of mad contrasts, merging with the
water, incapable of thought beyond the present visceral awareness of
pure sensation. This massage, perfect yet devoid of those sweetly
distracting human overtones, was a cosmic slap—shocking the vignetting
from my vision and restoring native wings long forgotten.
Hours later, panting and sweaty from the sun-baked climb out of the red
canyon, the subway seemed a dream. But its effect lingered, lingers to
this moment, lingers beyond. A meta-hike this was; a pilgrimage to a
primitive place as much within me as within the earth. It was food for
the spirit... a massage of the psyche... a moment of connection with
the unnamable something that spawns some of those aforementioned
-ologies...
Not to mention one world-class afternoon of clambering. The road is
sweet. Energized, I hit it again.
Calf Creek (Central Garfield County), Utah
This is hard-core Abbey country. The Escalante River area is a violent,
convoluted land, a twisted marriage of desert and mountain with much
infidelity on both sides. Madness happens here; the land kills the
unwary without remorse, yet delights the eye with so many absurd
contrasts that there never develops a sense of figure-ground. This is
far away from everywhere, hard to get to, and not the way to cross Utah
if you’re in a hurry.
At Calf Creek, which feeds the Escalante, there is a campground with 12
sites and a high-pressure spigot of Giardia-free water. We claimed the
last spot, set up our porta-condo, and went for a short walk. A 5-mile
round trip trail led to the falls, but we had only a two hours until
dark.
A few minutes along the tame path, carrying only my cane, I had that
same craving that besets one accustomed to huevos rancheros when
confronted with unadulterated grits. A ravine beckoned from the left,
smothered in a chunky salsa of twisted rock, rolled boulders, and
cactus—angling up a few hundred feet to the base of stark white
tortilla cliffs. Por que no? I veered off with Maggie following,
picking my way around the obstacles until they became so closely packed
that I began springing from each to the next, shoesounds sandy on soft
rock, echoes from the cliff touching my words with portent as I pointed
out the sights to my suntanned woman.
Cliff base. Drawn by the pheromones of naked rock, I felt my way to a
mighty crack and entered—climbing higher, sweaty, rising into the body
of earth and sensing, somewhere ahead, the exultation of a peak. As the
passion rose, Maggie called to me... perhaps jealous.
“I don’t want to go up there.”
“OK. Why don’t you go around the other way? I’ll climb to the top, walk
along the edge, and find a way down to meet you... it’ll be more of an adventure.”
Hesitantly, with a worried face and a glance upward, she agreed—already
looking small against the massive impassive folds of untamed land. She
nodded, took a step away from me, then turned and said, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” I called softly, my voice carrying along the great
concave wall. For a moment our eyes locked. But my beard, dripping
sweat, tickled hot sandstone; Maggie waved and walked away. I looked
up, had a brief thought about madness, and climbed. And climbed.
The ravine grew treacherous, with steep slopes of loose rock, boulders
wedged precariously overhead by their corners, blind alleys of slick
stone. I slipped once, cursed, scratched a knee and hung panting to a
scraggle of rasty plant life... then pressed on. “I’m not coming down this way, that’s for sure,” I
muttered, inching my way up, up, much further than it looked from below.
Thirsty, already regretting my foolishness in hiking empty-handed, I
reached the top—or the illusion of same. Through wrinkles of
cactus/sage/sand/rock I climbed on, quickly now, until at last I was on
something approaching a level plain of rocky sage. Ahead of me, the sun
was turning colorful in preparation for the evening’s sky show.
Then I turned around.
Everything looked the same. A maze of ravines and gullies radiated from
my feet, the land so complex that there was hardly a clue to the
location of the cliff that had seemed so grand and imposing from below.
No matter. I wanted a different route down anyway. Thinking of Maggie,
I set out for the most obvious promontory—a journey of some 15 minutes
that was complicated by unexpected obstacles of vertical stone, deep
creases, and impenetrable thickets of something hard and
manzanita-like.
At the edge, dizzy, I looked down a few hundred feet over a
boulder-strewn slope, and there, far away, was tiny Maggie—a speck of
pink and brown like a cool Baskin-Robbins sundae against a backdrop of
designer desert colors. I whistled the Morse MV, “dahdah didididah” and
she looked up, returned the call, and for a moment all was sweet:
communication, the sight of my lady in this wild land, bas-relief rock
in the low-angle light of evening. “I’ll head over that way,” I called,
echoing. Squinting a half-diopter of correction, I could just catch her
wave.
What had appeared from below as a simple cliff-edge, however, was
anything but. Progress parallel to the distant thread of Calf Creek was
an exhausting process of climbing back up to level desert, picking a
new crenelation to explore, and struggling down through another series
of obstacles to a promising descent... only to find, after many minutes
and another 10 cc’s of sweat, that a sheer bone-shattering drop blocked
the way. The first time, it only made me nervous.
The second time, it terrified me.
Sunset was nearing. My mouth was as dry as the harsh land underfoot. I
found a wide crease in the ground that HAD to lead all the way down and
plunged into it, slipping on slickrock, tossing the cane down and
retrieving it, descending parallel vertical walls with fingers and
toes, crawling through thorns. Water. I needed water. This had to go
down. “Dahdah didididah!” I whistled, stumbling too noisily to listen
for a response. Deep crack, wiggling through, dropping hard a few feet
with the dim awareness that this could be a trap. Sliding in sand, this
HAS to do it, leaping a mini-abyss and approaching the knee of a gully.
I looked down with a moan at a vertical drop of some 30 feet. Oh no...
“Maggie!” I called, not sure what I’d say if she answered. “Maggie!” I
listened, probed with my ears; all was silence but for a faraway truck
and the distant goddamn laughter of carefree campers. So close...
Back up. Scared now, the light fading. The places I had descended with
the aid of gravity were places I would never consider climbing; I threw
myself at them and clung spiderlike to cracks and redstones, clawing,
panting whimpers dry and painful as the air chilled. My shirt stank.
Topside again, deeply aware of being in trouble. Now what? I called
again, found my way to an unfamiliar promontory, waved my shirt, called
for Maggie, called for anyone, cried—for the first time in my life—for
help. No response. Just the same goddamn laughter from distant people
with plenty of water and nearby sleeping bags.
Delirium hits fast. I staggered the desert, none of it familiar, the
sunset colors deep and beautiful like a female assassin in a James Bond
movie. Just me and my cane; no water, no ham radio, no flashlight, not
even a way to make a fire. Cold nights out here in high desert...
Maggie would be frightened by now, probably thinking about search
parties and helicopters. I tried another crevasse, ripping my skin
uncaring, losing the rubber cane tip, running clink clink stumble curse
over rock only to teeter on another brink, turn, struggle back up by
feel and tricklight, thinking of narrow flat places where I could
sleep, thirst, die unseen in the desert like a sick animal—an idiot
hiker without a waterbottle.
High country again. Running now, gotta find a footprint, how the hell
did I get up here? Deer trails, a sunbleached antler. Nothing familiar;
the twisted rock leering at me, wanting my moisture. I licked my sweat
to ease the mouth, stabbed toes deeply with cactus needles, pushed on
into twilight ignoring pain. “Maggie!” Goddamn laughter down there,
gotta get to it, gotta find my woman, need a hug, need a gallon of
water, need to stay alive.
“Foots!” I cried suddenly. “Foots!” In the sand was an impression of my
tattered Avocet cycling shoe, unmistakable, aiming at me. Tracking in a
frenzy like a hungry dog after a wounded rabbit, I ran tripping through
the cactus, crying “foots” in exhausted glee at each shoeprint. On
slickrock I lost the trail, but it had to be here somewhere; I sniffed
around in the near dark and picked a route, last chance, plunging into
the chute, sliding, shouting, riding a mini-landslide, jumping into
blackness on the dubious advice of echoless shouts. The cactus needles
in my foot, the cuts, the throat—none mattered, for this one was going
down, down, one bad jump and an awkward fall into rocks, nothing
broken, limping through sand, a tree branch in my face... the road! God!
Clinking the cane on sweet asphalt I racewalked in parched ecstasy to
the campsite, number 12. Maggie. Running now, dropping cane, sweaty
hug, trembling, a beer drained in seconds, more hugs, tears, stories.
Under the cold spigot I lay, inhaling sweetwater; the cliffs a dim
sinister shape against starlit sky; the thought of me still up there
absurd, frightening.
And sleep, oh the sleep. Warm Maggie comforting, skin the opposite of
rock, moisture intoxicating in the sweet sweet night. So close...