Grand Staircase-Escalante and Coyote Gulch

Some weeks, the zigs meet the zags and all is well. Goals get met, progress is made, meals are eaten with friends and nights are spent around warm fires with cold drinks. A deeps sense of well being settles in.  Other weeks, you knock yourself unconscious and walk around with a brain like a grumpy bowl of jello, trying to remember where you left that thing that you’re still holding in your right hand. On weeks like that you’ll no doubt be tasked with meal-planning a backpacking trip for nine while preparing for your first medical school interview. On those weeks, the best that you can hope for is to forget your charming facial abrasion at the interview and to climb into the van headed for Southern Utah in more-or-less one piece.

Thankfully, for the author’s sanity at least, Southern Utah has plenty of room to accommodate the addled thoughts of a brain-injured outdoor professional. Sliding South along the I-15 corridor from Salt Lake, the world’s avenues widen and the distant synclines that define the horizon hold ever more sky between their treeless slopes.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, tucked away by an exiting Bill Clinton in 1996 (cheers, Bubba), hides its treasures below its sweeping horizons. When we parked our van at the Red Well trailhead, at the end of a washboarded dirt road cutting a line of dirt out of the town of Escalante, there was little to be seen.  Standing at the end of that road, you can get entirely the wrong impression of what you’re getting yourself into. The toasted sagebrush, crunchy cyptogamic soil, and tumbleweed carpeting the valley don’t betray its secrets. Follow the path of the rains, though, and the landscape turns from a world of floor to one of walls.

With erosion as our guide, we tumbled down over the slickrock sandstone to small riverbeds. The greatest surprise of this landscape is its water. Hidden well below the tops of its walls are small forests of cottonwood trees, whose very presence deep in the desert seems like a fantasy. In the cool mornings of the early fall, their yellow leaves dapple the light and remind you of the coming cold, even during the heat of noon.

In the depths of a stone hallways, a landscape can no longer be called such. Though the sun rises at 7:30, it doesn’t strike the canyon floor until almost 11:00, and shadow again finds the floor at 3:00 in the afternoon. With no distant horizon or sun to mar the time, sandstone hallways are a consuming path.  There is no getting lost down there, provided you want to go the way that the water flows.

There is something about the softness of the sandstone and the benches of grass that couch the bends in the stream that assure you: mankind has been here a long, long time. Though the rock is too soft to bear marks of those here before the West was won, just standing in bare feet on the warm rock next to the improbable water makes you feel rooted to the place. It’s a world of paths, nooks, and crannies, a world safe for people.

Our group was motley, undergraduate aside from Rodney and I. Away from their studies for a week, who knows what the students thought. Mostly, I find the mind of of younger folks impenetrable, despite having been there. But, sometimes you catch a glimpse in a student’s eye– when they get a stupid look on their face that you recognize from your own. They get it, even if just a little bit. They get to take sore legs and a bigger mind back to the library. They sensed, for a moment, the infinite variety of experience and the freedom to seek it out. That, goddamnit, is what this whole business is about.

Winter must have been the hard time for those who lived here. With the snows falling in the high country and the water locked up in ice, it would have been a grim chill until the advent of fire. Perhaps the tiny deer knew how to make it through the cold– this knowledge may not be recovered. A week was not enough to begin to know this place, but it was a good reminder; there’s no place like someplace you’ve never been.

For us, winter is not the hard time. We pray for snow, and wait for ice to touch the valley floor. Tonight, the first real storm will reach the Cascades. Hunting season is open.

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