Dead Horse Point

 




 High above the Colorado River, Dead Horse Point (left picture) feels like the south rim of the Grand Canyon.  One difference is that on the edge of this mesa, one small step for man becomes one giant leap all the way to the river, two thousand feet below.  I walked several miles along the edge of eternity today and regretfully admit that acrophobia (irrational fear of height) is worse now than when I was younger.  

This goes against my preached philosophy that risk is less now because I have fewer years to lose.  I told myself to go closer to the edge because it’s the right thing to do.  My self did not comply.  Am I really so much animal that I cannot decide to change?  Perhaps by the end of this discourse you will see how I came to deal with dichotomy.

 

A penguin proud and pertly dressed has it all figured out.  No inner stress with him, no two ways about it.  

 

Old Man River, like a lot of folks, doesn’t think about it, but just keeps rolling along.

Delicate, fragile, stunning, just being, beauty without a brain, acting in all ways natural.

Can it be so hard to see, standing right in front, or is a saltbush blocking the view?

Are these the writings of intelligence, or are they like the arches?

Yes, I am listening.  I told you I’m listening.  Can it be there’s nothing to hear.

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Corona Arch

Not all great sermons are delivered in church, and not all great arches are contained in Arches National Park.  “Have you seen Corona Arch?” a man said in the Golden Steak Café.  Checking my research of arches I found no mention of it.  “A woman got all skittish on the slickrock where we had to traverse a perty steep sidehill.”

I found it less challenging than the Druid Arch Trail, and there I was alone.  After today’s scramble up a non-descript canyon about ten miles from Moab on Road 279, I can say that Corona Arch is just as magnificent as any in the national parks.  And I did say it.  “It’s a local favorite,” he said.

 

Shadow of the arch, and looking straight up at it.

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I imagine him like William Granstaff who came here in 1877, one of the first non-native inhabitants of the region.  There’s a deep canyon that feeds into the Colorado River off Road 128, and it’s named after him—Negro Bill Canyon—impolite as the name seems today.  Two miles up along clear water, a sandstone gorge is a sight unimaginable unless you’ve lived here fourteen days as I have.  

 

They call it Morning Glory Bridge.  At 243 feet long, it’s one of the longest. Set at the head of a canyon, I look up at its massively heavy rock and ask why?  How? 

Stones in Lovely Places

 

attracted to deliberate form

where intent is clear and pleasant

even if not understood

 

closer I walk to lovely form

looking for clues

an architect’s voice

meaning evades my mind

 

words constructed heightwise

hung with hooks and bait

they lure, but not for hurt

rocks of pleasure

drawing closer

 

 

a rocky way

solid as rock

I crave a lacking verb

regret a vulgar nit

 

stones appeal

in how they’re placed

just by watching

I’m walking closer

see the arches

see the beams

how they please

how unlike words misguided

revolting to a reader

the devil’s garden

from which they came

and where they go

Juniper

 

Most of the trees around here are juniper and most of the animals are people.  We share some common traits, one of which, unlike most trees, is that sexes are separate with individuals.  Female junipers grow berrylike cones that bear seeds.  Male cones look similar, but they make pollen, not seeds.  The juniper pictured above is female.  A large husky male is pictured below.  Actually, either sex can grow old, rustic, and shaggy.

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I walked to the Golden Steak Restaurant this Sunday morning under a gray and boiling sky.  Winds shifted around me, moody and undecided.  I had dressed in one of the three street dresses I’d brought and stood regarding myself in the mirror.  Something had been lost out of those quiet eyes and into their vision some deeper color come.  Something had been gained forever—something lost.

I sat at the counter, a third of it already occupied with local men.  A few tourists sat at the tables.  Two counters face each other across a walkway where a waitress moves between.  She’s like a train between boarding platforms, serving eggs and smiles as she passes by.  

Across the walkway from me sits a man in a brown leather vest and white beard with gray roots.  His face is furrowed like the plowed field of my Tennessee garden.  His big hands, like my father’s are rough and cracked.  I look in his face, perhaps to read at second hand the shapes of the roads that had led him to this place.  I cast a smile in his direction. 

I am not unaware of the image portrayed by a woman alone in a local bar or cafe.  It’s usually easy to see skepticism rise up in his conversation.  “Visiting from California,” she says.  Yeah, sure.  Such assumptions are part of the risk I take.  They give rise to strategies for avoidance.

We talk across the gap.  He asks about the long black feather sticking up from the book I’m reading.  “Hawk, I think.  Found it on the walk here.”

“Mind if I come around,” he says.  I restrain a puppy instinct to get all excited, and give just a small smile.  I move my purse from the space at my right.

He smells of leather and linseed oil.  Outside, the wind turns, undecided, marking its path with uplifted white seeds from cottonwood trees, puffy and reminiscent of snow in the winds of Frostbite Falls.

There is always this thin, wordless idea that maybe this might work.  I was fairly successful in keeping my mind from racing around him.  I was almost peaceful, and felt like saying, “I’ve been destroyed two or three times already.  You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?” 

“I’m goin’ up to the community church later,” he says, as if he doubts the Southern California woman could possibly understand.  I hadn’t preached Possibilism to him yet.  I’ll keep you posted.  Maybe.

 

Courthouse Wash

The Colorado River passes just north of Moab, sliding across the state line at about ten miles per hour with snowmelt from the Colorado Rockies.  Last winter, twice as much snow fell as usual, and June has been an extra-warm month so far.  The Colorado had little choice but to spill over its banks and impolitely flood the campgrounds along its shores with muddy water, brown and red as bean soup.  But even with its massive flow, the Colorado does not water the desert through which it passes.  Just a hundred feet from its shore, the desert prevails in all its dryness.

Feeding into the Colorado, a usually-dry wash flows from the north, just outside of Moab.  Edward Abby spent time here herding cattle back in the sixties and writes it in his book, Desert Solitaire.  He and two other cowboys started on horseback in Arches National Park and worked down the wash gathering cattle that had grazed there all summer, held in by the vertical walls of the canyon and its tributaries, driving them to Moab.  Cattle are excluded today, so I expected the grass and bushes to have grown dense and maybe difficult to get through.  There is no trail, but I figure that vegetation permitting, I can go anywhere a cow can.

The Colorado River backs up into Courthouse Wash during high water, but its level has dropped about six feet from the peak a few days ago, and I figured it might be low enough to free Courthouse Wash of backwater.

I drove to the place in Arches where Abbey and his friends started the cattle drive and left my bicycle there, locked onto a sign post.  Then I drove back to the Colorado River and started walking up Courthouse Wash.  Backup water from the Colorado was deep at the start, but I was able to get around it along the side.  After half a mile, I was nearly past it when I came to this lovely setting, and knew that a cow would have sloshed through the waist deep water where I was unwilling.  Discouraged, I returned to the car, drove back to the bike, and began from the upper end.

Tall grass and bushes surely did slow my progress, but never stopped it.  And now I was much too far upstream to encounter backwater.  See here the high water marks, not from Colorado backup, but from a raging flash flood that thundered through here some time past.

I came to the first big side canyon entering from the north and decided to explore it.  Abbey would have done this to see if any cattle had gone up there.  The canyon narrowed, walls closing in, but I walked easily on its sandy bottom.  Suddenly, it ended at a shear wall that no cow or cowboy could scale.

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Returning to Courthouse Wash, I followed it down past several wide curves until the day got hot.  I turned around and came back to the bike and car.

Running Away

 

Yesterday, I drove into the northern section of Canyonlands National Park, called Islands in the Sky.  It’s completely disconnected by any road or trail from the southern section, called The Needles, where you may recall my exultation at Druid Arch.  After visiting Mesa Arch at sunrise, I escaped the oncoming herd of visitors and drove to a trailhead where the sign reads, “Syncline Loop Trail, 8.4 miles, Primitive Trail, Difficult to follow, Scrambling required, Experienced hikers only.”  The map shows it as a near circular loop that drops off a mesa, which is rather like an island raised high into the sky, falls some fifteen hundred feet and after following a canyon, climbs back up again.  

From the mesa rim I gaze down on soaring birds as they ride the morning thermals.  On the way down I see white streaks staining the red sandstone cliffs below the holes where they nest.  Now they look down at me.  And as I near the dry wash, where cottonwood trees find water underground, soaring mosquitoes find me pleasant company.  Until I spray on deet.  

I find a pool of water in the mostly-dry canyon and green herbs along a pleasant trail.  We might call this oversized dandelion a weed back home, a pest in our lawns, but here it carries a symmetrical beauty. (Do you know that you can click on any picture to make it bigger?)

The canyon becomes a box with shear wall on three sides.  Pleasant walking becomes rock scrambling.  The cairns point up a steep fan of broken boulders, and I find a way somehow from cairn to cairn.  

Finally, the way flattens in another wash, and the sky speaks of a coming storm.  Far away, I hear the mutter of thunder.  Clouds pile up like whipped cream, like mashed potatoes, but I can’t see what’s coming from down here in the canyon.  I have never seen a flash flood, but some time I want to.  I am told that it looks like a loose pudding or thick soup, dense with mud, sand and rock.  But when the only way out is to keep hiking up this draw, I’d rather it not be today.

Only when I reach the rim on the mesa, can I see the wine-dark storm in its fullness.  An isolated storm boiling over the desert.  I see faint traces of lightning, but the distance is so great I cannot hear the thunder.  Lavender clouds bombard the earth with lightning and trailing curtains of rain.  Driving back to Moab, raindrops spatter the car like pellets.  Rain diminishes to a shower, to a sprinkle, to nothing.

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A few days ago, as I showed Landscape Arch with its skinny, unbelievable, 306-foot span.  I tried to decide which aspect of it to present, so much was there to show and tell and imagine.  As I looked up at the cliff beside it, I saw a small hole in the vertical sandstone wall, pictured here, zoomed in.  

After leaving Landscape Arch, I followed cairns (piles or small rocks that mark the “trail.”)  I slithered between rock fins, walked the foot-wide top of a fin, and climbed a scree of fallen boulders to arrive at Partition Arch on its other side.  Not a technical climb, but a scramble, not that distinctions matter to me; the easiest way is best.  I was rewarded with solitude and a view window on the desert below.  Well worth the effort and risk.