Tag Archives: utah

Canyons of Life and Time

Early Christians went into the desert to strip away the burdens and temptations of civilization and contemplate something greater. Nowadays even the most self-consciously devout Christians would eye someone doing that as if they had a screw loose. Lawrence of Arabia went into the desert to rally Arab tribesmen and smash the Ottoman Empire; now, he’d be called a white savior colonialist, and the enemy surveillance state would hunt him down. Edward Abbey went into the desert to get away from other humans, but in an era of AI, misanthrope feels like it’s fighting a war from the past. I go to a particular desert because I have come to love it, and I add more reasons as I go.

I am, apparently, on a four-year cycle of visits to the canyon country of southern Utah. This time my annual hiking crew of Bob, Rob, Amy, and Ed is with me, and some things have changed. A real estate rush is on in the region. St. George booms with new McMansions atop ridgelines, and the glamping opportunities around Bryce Canyon have grown exponentially. But head east beyond the park gateway towns and southern Utah starts to fall away into a dusty, harsh backcountry, where ramshackle homes cling to tentative oases of greenery alongside washes and ex-rivers, all dry in a season of drought. Mormon settlers nestled into these remote hamlets in the late nineteenth century, and some of their little outposts live on. It is a land of radial loneliness and fervent belief, and at times just a simple escape. These landscapes attract people differently, and perhaps inspire some unexpected responses.

Capitol Reef National Park sits at the origins of my fondness for canyon country. A few memories of a venture as a 14-year-old hang on: settling in a tent in a green field dotted with fruit trees, the towering red and white cliffs beyond; picking a route up switchbacks and along a canyon and plunging down to cool off my feet in the icy waters of the Fremont River. We day hike here to acclimate ourselves, past a grand natural bridge and up to commanding view over the valley of the Fremont. A quick dip into this landscape and the troubles start to drift away. Up on Boulder Mountain, the aspens herald the coming of fall and turn the heights golden, while ridges of colored rock undulate away into the east. There is even more to this region than I knew.

But the desert sets its own terms, and things do not go according to plan. Monsoon season should be over, but a freak Pacific hurricane has flash flood warnings looming even this far inland. Our planned time in the true backcountry is cut in half. We settle instead at Calf Creek Campground in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, in the same campsite I occupied four years ago. We stroll up Calf Creek and clamber up the rocks for happy hour and spend the better part of a night wondering just when our campfire will finally incinerate the teabag Ed has tossed upon one of the logs. Reset the pace, reset the expectations.

I am unbothered: something about these canyons makes them my happy place. It could be the awe-inspiring scale, towering cliffs funneling all life down narrow chutes and labyrinths across an otherwise impassable landscape. It could be the life-giving gifts of the rivers, ribbons of oasis that bring greenery and hope to a deadly climate. It could be the power of that water, blasting down with remarkable force and, over generations, carving its way through rock and time. It could be the sheer remoteness and isolation of these lands, a reminder that I really can disappear from all outside forces for a spell. Whatever it is, this land keeps a smile on my face, triggers surges of wonder even upon repeat viewing. I’ve been to many beautiful corners of this world, but this one demands returns in ways that many others do not.

Even when clipped in half, our hike, through the canyon of the Escalante River from its eponymous town to a highway bridge some ways downriver, is unlike any other. Just about every minute of it offers some vista that could be photographed. Giant canyon walls rise up most of the way, red or white or some shade of brown; sometimes they give the river space, while at others the waterway cuts right up against the towering cliffs. There are some obvious landmarks: an arch, a natural bridge, a few pictographs left by the Frémont people. In this dry year the Escalante is a muddy trickle above Death Hollow, but here Mamie Creek feeds in and gives it a burst of life. Flood evidence dots the route in the form of bent-over plants and accumulated debris and waterlines that show just how high the flow can get. Sometimes the trail over land is a dense thicket of tamarisk; at others, an open field of prickly plants. Further down the canyon widens into cottonwood savannas, airy parks split between sun and shade. Take a shortcut and it is a desert of sage scrub and terra cotta mud flats.

What is unavoidable is a walk in the river, sometimes for quick crossings and at others a long stroll down through the water. We seek out entries and exits on steep, sandy banks that crumble away beneath our feet, and we learn where the quicksand tends to appear: usually on the inner side of a tight curve, though unless there is rock underfoot, no one step is fully safe from muck. We follow dog and human prints as guides, but see on a handful of people deep in the canyon.

We camp for two nights on a large sand flat a little ways up Death Hollow from the Escalante. This even narrower canyon hosts rushing Mamie Creek, and there are hints as to its forbidding name: the floodwater evidence, ample poison ivy, the family of black widows spinning webs by our unofficial toilet area. But if I were nature, I too would try to protect the beauty of Death Hollow. Wading up the stream a few miles leads to even tighter spaces than on the Escalante, up past a graceful waterfall that turns loose a light shower into a pool below, edging along underwater ledges between cliffs and still deeps, picking paths up rapids, and, finally, the point of no return, a watery narrows of unclear depths that we choose not to swim.

The night sky in Death Hollow is as spectacular as I’ve ever seen. The canyon frames the Big Dipper perfectly, and the Milky Way makes a perpendicular cut across our gash in the rock. A few shooting stars burn past us. Vega glows straight overhead, while Polaris hides just behind the cliff. Later in the night, I think someone is shining a light in my tent, but it is merely the moon, finally rising over the rock walls, well short of full but bright enough to take a leak with no added light.

Off the trail the next day, a Zion-adjacent car campground is adequate, solitude sacrificed for a shower building and on-site restaurant. But it does give easy access to Eden. A stroll across the plateau along the East Rim of Zion Canyon takes us to Observation Point, a perch so commanding that it looks down on Angel’s Landing below. The crowd here is small, and we can marvel at our better view than that enjoyed by the masses down on the promontory below us. I trace my route up the West Rim four years ago, on to my lonely camp in cold and ice and the revelation of the glittering sunrise that followed the next morning, all the way up the red cliffs and white caps and through the green trees to the flatlands up top. This, I muse, is one of the coolest views a person will ever see, and I gaze down at the Shangri-La below and start the clock until my next return.

There is some validity to the concern that overtourism has come to Utah’s great national parks. Edward Abbey blasted the building of roads and upgraded campgrounds and other such amenities that ease access to canyon country. If he could see what tourism trends have done in the decades since, he’d roll over in his unmarked desert grave. They are busy and the roads can get packed, and the money is flowing in. But for my part, I think getting lost in canyons is a much more constructive use of people’s time than many of their other pursuits, and I make no special claim on any places to myself just because I had the good fortune to see them before they blew up. Conservation of natural treasures and their magic in the face of increased tourism is a solvable problem to manage, not an automatic crisis or signifier of decline. In fact, it allows people to recalibrate, to escape from the eternal progress machine they inhabit and commune with the grandeur that creates meaning. The more people we get to taste that, the better. If Zion now feels over-touristed to you, head to Grand Staircase-Escalante—or, for that matter, just walk up Zion Canyon instead of taking its shuttle. The American West is vast enough to hold all of us, which is why large parts of it are owned by all of us.

There are side perks to increased visitation, too: Escalante country has become a realm of low-key culinary achievement. The crown jewel is Hell’s Backbone Grill, a farm-to-table staple whose 2018 New Yorker feature first tripped my interest in this region. We have a night of great happiness on its patio. But there is also the Kiva Koffeehouse, an artsy outpost nestled into a cliff above the Highway 12 bridge over the Escalante. In the town of Escalante, Old Bull Kitchen serves elevated, Japanese-inspired fare. Even the Escalante Mercantile has lovely biscuit and croissant sandwiches for breakfast, surrounded by a most random collection of local food and art for sale. A rock slide across a highway keeps us from Springdale, Zion’s main gate, but it too now feeds its visitors well.

As we descend the Virgin River Gorge and leave red rock country, we know things are about to change. Perhaps nothing could be more discordant than beginning and ending a wilderness venture in Las Vegas. This city is the anti-wilderness, a world of artifice and flashy screens and money-chasing, a place to descend deep into bad habits instead of a realm of restoration. It is accessible to a fault, the democracy of mass tastes juxtaposed against the trail-seeking select who go far beyond its glitzy Strip. It would be easy to dismiss it with a haughty wave and move on.

And yet I appreciate Las Vegas more with each visit. Appreciation does not necessarily mean I like it. Look closely and there are a lot of people around who are broken or breaking. Vegas has also drifted away from the building drama of the poker or craps table into greater screen time, sadder and sadder as the same trashy slot machines that one would find in any random backwater casino now infect even the lobby of the Bellagio. But the food scene is good, and we poke about the Cosmopolitan’s speakeasies and gawk at the pastiche absurdity of the Venetian, a true postmodern architectural triumph. A lot of people are delighted and having fun, and it’s hard not to gawk at the sleek new sports stadiums and rising new towers, the American growth machine at its apex. Vegas races headlong into the future ahead of the rest of us, a source of both intrigue and warning, and a temptation to let it all loose, at least for a night. For now, I settle for a fun, Rob-curated exploration before we say our goodbyes over a hotel room nightcap.

It will be a bit before I return to canyon country, but the rhythms of life aren’t too far off from a hike down a canyon. We are bounded by certain walls, constrained by forces of nature that long predate us and set us on a general path. Sometimes we can climb out, sometimes we are stuck struggling through sagebrush and invasive greenery, through prickly things and across mud flats. The path can start to feel monotonous, and some turns in the canyon start to resemble previous ones. Others are new and reveal cozy campsites or clues from long-gone inhabitants. Sometimes fresh new steams dump in to give things new life. Sometimes it is a tight slot and a traveler can only shuffle ahead carefully, but sometimes a range of paths diverge, offer options and chances to share trails with others. There are flash floods, there are droughts, but usually the life force flows along easily enough. Even in these oases the water continues to flow, wash over layers shaped by time.

As we age we often become more ourselves, locked in our ways, more apt to stick with what we know and dismiss the rest—if we even think of it, and are not sitting at our slot machine thoughtlessly pressing the same button again and again. Becoming one with the flow down a desert stream asks us how to exercise the time we’ve been gifted, to figure out the best pace, which might just vary a little from what we’ve done before. For all my ups and downs of the past few years, I stop to appreciate one legitimate triumph: these days I have the free time to do the things I want to do, able to add regular fresh delight as I please. There is time to see what is around the next bend in the canyon.

The Powell Mindset

My latest reading adventure down a rabbit hole (a slot canyon?) took me to southern Utah. A recent New Yorker article on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and a re-read of my account to my trip to Zion this past spring led me to a blogger’s tale of a hike on the Hayduke Trail, a little-known hiking route named for an Edward Abbey character. The Hayduke is less a trail than a string of paths and backcountry suggestions brought together into a guidebook. It is a brutal 800-mile path that connects six national parks, one national monument, and a bevy of other designated public lands across southern Utah and northern Arizona, from Canyonlands to Bryce to the Grand Canyon to Zion. After 65 days on trails and rafts, this traveling party found the jaunt up to Angel’s Landing in Zion a lazy jog up an overcrowded molehill. I am in no way ready to go on a hike like this, but it’s fun to dream.

This southern Utah kick led me to pick up a book I’ve long wanted to read from an author who has been on my mind often this year: Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, a biography of John Wesley Powell. Powell is best known as the one-armed Civil War veteran who was the first man to sail down the Colorado River. His journey began at Green River in modern-day Wyoming and made its way down through countless canyons before going through the Grand, every day an adventure down rapids in uncharted territory. If Powell’s story ended there, he would be an explorer second only to Lewis and Clark in his importance to the story of the American West.

Powell, however, was much more than that, and over half of Stegner’s account is devoted to his life on dry land. He brought a nineteenth century encyclopedist’s  enthusiasm to his pursuits, with a fervent belief that he could collect enough information to build a better understanding of his world and thereby guide it toward a more sane society. His first ventures west were eclectic expeditions of family and students that just collected every specimen he could manage. He was the godfather of the U.S.Geological Survey, that meticulous attempt to understand the land and it bounties, and his efforts laid the foundation for the Bureau of Reclamation, which devoted itself to making much of the West as inhabitable as possible while preserving the rest. Powell’s pet interest in ethnography—the recording of details of the indigenous peoples of the West—was a staple later in his career, even when political winds in the west blew against him. His resistance to a notion that the West could be settled seamlessly made him his share of enemies.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian sets out to puncture the mythology of the American West. Over half of those supposedly hardy pioneers failed and moved back east or faced worse fates. And that was in the more fertile Midwest, before white settlement reached the 100 degree longitude line beyond which rainfall became far rarer. “[T]he romanticizing of the West…led to acute political and economic and agricultural blunders, to the sour failure of projects and lives, to the vast and avoidable waste of some resources and the monopolization of others,” Stegner writes. “There was too little factual corrective, too little allowance for swiftly changing times, and trouble ensued when people ignorant of the West and needing to know a lot about it mistook imagination for observation and art for life.”

In spite of his recognition of nature’s limits, Powell was no Malthusian convinced that humans were doomed in the face of nature. On the contrary, he was at his core a believer in science and progress: “The revelation of science is this: Every generation in life is a step in progress to a higher and fuller life; science has discovered hope,” Stegner quotes from an 1882 lecture by Powell on Darwin. Blind optimism on this order suffered significant setbacks beginning with the First World War, but both Powell and his twentieth-century interlocutor seem aware that political roadblocks and the vagaries of human nature do not undermine the logic behind the path toward understanding and better politics.

There is a middle ground between naïve hope in human progress and resignation to human limits. It recognizes that humans can adapt and even tame nature, but never in full. It sees in humans a capacity for works of both incredible construction and incredible destruction, of genius and idiocy. It seeks complete understanding, even when it recognizes the impossibility of achieving it. This is the Powell mindset, the Stegner mindset, and a mindset that is not hard to inhabit at the tail end of an arduous hike through canyon country, a simultaneous sense of awe at the nature that surrounds the hiker and a sense of conquest upon summiting peaks. (John Muir: “Double happy, however,is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach.”) Yes, it is somewhere in this realm that happiness lies.

Reverie by Rail

I took my first Amtrak adventure when I was fourteen, a largely miserable affair that should have led me to swear off trains for all eternity. My mother and I went west to visit some family friends who had decided to give themselves a little culture shock by moving from Madison, Wisconsin to Ogden, Utah. We made a national tour out of it, from Minneapolis to Chicago to Salt Lake, and then on out to Sacramento and up the West Coast before heading back to Minnesota. It included obnoxious people, five near-sleepless nights, and a newfound hatred for freight trains. And yet, in spite of it all, it won a convert.

The first leg was a fairly quick jaunt from Minneapolis down to Chicago, though even that start was inauspicious, with the train rolling in a few hours late to the dismal station in St. Paul, one that has thankfully been put to rest since. The route follows the Mississippi and visits Wisconsin Dells, and there are docents on board to enlighten riders in the glass-encased observation car. It went smoothly enough, and after a night with relatives in Chicago, we were ready for the westward leg of our adventure.

The next day we set out on the California Zephyr, plowing across the prairie and readying for our first night on the rails. Unenthused by my seat, I tried to relax and sleep in the observation car, a window-filled car where one can stretch out across several chairs in a feeble imitation of a bed. That night is etched in my mind thanks to a loud teenage girl holding a deep, meaningful cell phone conversation with some distant friend. “Hello? What? Hello? What?” she bellowed for several hours on end, desperately seeking service as we wove across Iowa and Nebraska.

I woke the next morning in the gloom of eastern Colorado, a desolate stretch of factory farms and cattle ranches. There was a chance to get out and wander a bit in Denver, where the sun poured down through a high-ceilinged station. The train then began its steady meander into the Rockies, and before long, it snaked in and out of tunnels and clung to the side of the Colorado River gorge, us and I-70 and the moon-happy river rafters all flowing along. I ate the best peach I’ve ever had in Grand Junction, Colorado, and in time we were closing in on the State of Deseret. We spent a week in the Beehive State, climbing mountains east of Ogden and venturing down to do some August desert hikes in Capitol Reef National Park.

The adventure really got going on the way west from Salt Lake. We’d planned to meet some friends from the Bay Area in Sacramento when the train arrived in the early afternoon, but the freight train-induced delays began somewhere in the dusty wastes of Nevada. We sat on the tracks in the town of Sparks for eons, but that did little to prepare us for an endless wait atop the Donner Pass just across the California border. To be fair, it was a beautiful spot to get stuck, but as the delays mounted and the obnoxious guy further down the car got progressively more drunk, I began to find a little sympathy for the Donner Party and their decision to sink their teeth into the more useless members of their party.

We finally came to Sacramento just before midnight, over nine hours past the scheduled arrival time, and with just forty-five minutes to make our connection north to Portland. But no, it couldn’t be that easy: there had been a tunnel fire somewhere up the route, and the train wouldn’t be going through. My mother said some words I’d never heard her say before, and we were bundled on to a bus headed for Eugene, Oregon. It was a miserable ride made even more miserable by the need to stop in all the small towns along the Amtrak route north into Oregon, many of which are not along a convenient major highway. Still, it was a sight to awake from my fitful night’s sleep to Mount Shasta looming over us in the morning sunlight, and the coach rolled on through Klamath Falls and past Crater Lake through the endless forests, and once we finally got back on the train to Portland, I managed to catch a Yankees-Mariners game on a travel radio. (Remember those things?)

The last leg of the trip, on the Empire Builder back to St. Paul, was a blur; I have only vague memories of the Columbia River gorge, Glacier, and Havre, Montana. We mercifully slept through North Dakota before bringing our odyssey to an end. One would think I would have learned my lesson after that one. Yet as time passed the absurdity of the story became an object of laughs rather than misery, and when I was going to school in DC, an idea wormed its way into my head:  Amtrak is the perfect way to cart a lot of cargo across the country without a car or excessive airplane baggage fees, isn’t it?

That bright idea would take a little fine-tuning, as my freshman year roommate can attest. At the end of the year, I was somehow compelled to try to pack my entire life into two monstrously heavy boxes for the ride back to Minneapolis. The terrified taxi driver helped me get them out of the trunk, but the Union Station porters refused to even touch them, so I somehow managed to heft the two of them—well over two hundred pounds in total—on to a decidedly inadequate cart and get them to the counter, where a sympathetic ticket agent waited patiently through one of the less dignified moments of my life, full of sweat and panic and miserable pleas. My two large boxes, battered by their adventure from one end of Union Station to the other and hopelessly over the weight limit, were summarily broken down into ten Amtrak baggage boxes. I spent another unexpected night in DC and went out on the train the next day.

Years later, I’m still using those same Amtrak boxes to cart my junk around when I move. And once I got it down, the train ride between DC and Minneapolis became a delight. Amtrak’s schedulers wisely time sleep for the Indiana and Ohio bits of the trip. Head east, and one wakes to the mists of the Ohio River and the steel mills of Pittsburgh; head west, and the lights of the Steel City are the last thing one sees before nodding off. The Maryland-West Virginia leg is especially pretty as one heads west, snaking along the Potomac and through historic Harpers Ferry before coming to picturesque Cumberland, Maryland for sunset. The western route always dumped me in Chicago early in the morning, and sometimes I’d meet up with family or old friends during my layover; other times, I’d just wander the canyons between the skyscrapers, maybe foray down to Buckingham Fountain, and, in one memorable instance, pass out on a stone bench in a garden next to the Art Institute. One other memorable journey had me on an alternate route out east that wound through the hills of West Virginia, a frighteningly slow race between the train and Hurricane Irene to DC. My boxes and I all made it ahead of the storm, and my roommate had some hurricanes and dark-and-stormys waiting for me as we bunkered down at the start of my senior year.

Amtrak’s greatest romance comes in its people, who all come together in a place where time matters little. We’re all stuck together, we have nowhere to be, and talk flows freely. Yes, there’s the occasional clod, but they’re cause for commiseration for the rest of us, free to roll our eyes and laugh at the shrieking self-righteous homeschooler or the Mexicans who fail to understand that the coach is meant for sleeping after midnight. I paid the price for the dining car dinner once every trip, and it never disappointed. My best seatmates were a British couple on holiday in the U.S., and we talked for hours on matters great and small as we climbed into the Appalachians. There was also the personal trainer for former New York Giant and Philadelphia Eagle Steve Smith, who rearranged his medicine balls to let me into a seat and joined me in watching some old Duluth East hockey DVDs, marveling at the spectacle.

The observation car brings out even more conversation. I once sat with a Canadian guy on a month-long train journey with his son, and a couple traveling back along routes they’d visited as kids, with vague memories of the parks along the way. One lady shared her love for Jane Jacobs, and an eccentric grandmother gushed about some flower festival that I—the horror!—had never heard of. There are often Amish, using the lone long-distance form of travel available to them, always showing a delicate mix of reserve and curiosity when confronted by us moderns. I had a number of drinks bought for me—a debt I’ll have to pay forward someday—and whiled away many nights with people I’d never seen before and will never see again before settling in my seat, scrawling a few meditative lines in a notebook (interspersed with stream-of-consciousness curses directed at anyone in the car who wouldn’t shut up) before the train’s steady rumble lulled me to sleep. For days after each ride, I feel that gentle rocking when I settle in to bed at night.

It was only fitting that Georgetown’s senior ball took place at Union Station, giving us a chance to waltz about its grandiose halls, dressed in the opulent costumes its riders might have worn in a bygone era. Or maybe it was all just a dream after all? A few days later I was on the train home one last time, slamming beers with a jolly man from South Bend and penning one last reverie by rail. Amtrak has its share of ills, as recent crashes and funding crises show all too well. But its allure lingers, that escape from time into a shared journey past so many of this country’s marvels, and the timelessness should keep the dream going for years to come. Anyone else ready to climb aboard?