It was time to leave the city.
The city can be a wonderful place. It has lots of interesting things to do, but eventually all those things begin to seem the same. They are all city things. At that point, the city becomes not such a wonderful place. It still has lots of things to do, but... time to leave.
In this case, the city was Salt Lake City, and it was springtime. Salt Lake sits in a desert valley with mountains on all sides (well, almost all sides). We were having a very wet spring, which is not bad for a city built in a desert, but it meant that, for my purposes, the mountains were out. One ski resort was open on the Fourth of July, and skiing means leaving a city to go to a smaller city. This was not what I had in mind. And wandering around on foot doesn't work very well when there's that much snow.
Fortunately, in Salt Lake we are blessed with an alternative to the mountains - the desert. "Desert" in the previous sentence does not mean the kind of desert that Salt Lake sits in. Rather, it means the desert in southern Utah - the slickrock desert, the red rocks country. We (my wife Melinda, my daughter Katie, and yours truly) left Salt Lake on a morning of off-and-on rain. By the time we passed Price, the rain was much more "on" than "off".
The drive from Price to Green River is a much worse desert than either Salt Lake or the red rock country. It is hotter than either, and, I believe, also drier. The terrain is mostly dried mud with occasional mud hills, occasional bushes, and very few trees. It is a very desolate stretch of country.
Normally, a traveler drives through this desolation with the windows all the way up and the air conditioner at maximum, praying that the car doesn't overheat and thinking, "I'm sure glad I'm not out there on foot in that heat with no shade." On this occasion, we were driving with the windows all the way up (to keep the rain out), the air off, and thinking, "I'm sure glad I'm not out there on foot in that rain without even a decent tree to hide under. I'm sure glad I'm on the road, because that mud looks slicker than a water slide."
The rain quit by the time we hit Green River. From there to Hanksville, the main thing we noticed was all the flowers that the spring rains had produced. We noticed that they seemed especially plentiful right beside the road. I think this was because the water ran off of the road to the plants on the edge, and so they got more water than the plants further away. It seemed rather bizarre that a road should be able to actually improve the scenery around it.
At Hanksville, we turned west, into a harsher desert. (You can tell when deserts are really harsh. If they don't have anything growing, you're in a bad one. Slickrock, where there is no soil, is an exception to this rule). But even in this desert, the rains had produced a thin cover of green - no flowers, but some green.
Pretty soon, the desert gave way to Capitol Reef National Park. This park has a campground in a river bottom, historic orchards, deer and skunks that wander through the campground, and a gorgeous slickrock rim above it all. Unfortunately, on this trip all we did was drive through it.
Then we got to Boulder Mountain. This place surprises a lot of people, who think of southern Utah as all desert. Part of the Aquarius Plateau, Boulder Mountain takes the road up to 9200 feet in a pine and aspen forest. There were patches of snow, lovely meadows and streams, and thick stands of trees. I wasn't surprised that the mountain was there, but I was surprised at how beautiful it was. No, "beautiful" doesn't do it justice. It was better than that. It was so lovely, it was pleading with me to stop the car, get out, go for a walk for a while, in the hope that maybe in a hundred years or so I'd be ready to get back in the car and leave. Or maybe a hundred years wouldn't be long enough. Unfortunately, though, we were heading elsewhere, and didn't take the time to stop.
From Boulder, we drove to Escalante. This 29-mile stretch is absolutely the best, most scenic, most must-see paved desert road in the country, and probably the best in the world. The stretch in the middle should be driven at 5 miles an hour by anyone taking it for the first time. It's not just that the road is curvy and has a dropoff on each side. The problem is that the scenery is so impressive, it's almost impossible to keep your eyes on the road at all. (Veteran drivers of this stretch can probably do it at 10 MPH.) It's a terrible road if you are in a hurry. Not only is it a twisting, narrow road that demands careful driving, but every inch begs you to stop and marvel for an extended period of time.
All this driving finally led us to our destination, the Escalante State Park, just west of the town of Escalante. This is a pleasant enough campground, on the edge of a small reservoir, with a petrified forest just up the hill.
Now, I am a Christian, and when I go out into the wild, I go to see God. (Great art doesn't just happen, and there is more great art per square foot in nature than in the Louvre. Great engineering doesn't just happen, either, and there is more great engineering per square foot in nature than at NASA.)
I do not go out into the wild to admire the great architecture and beautiful paint of the buildings of a state park campground. I do not go out into the wild to be crowded together with a bunch of other people in a small little campground (see earlier remarks on skiing).
I do not go out into the wild to listen to rock or country music from other people's boom boxes.
I most especially do not go out into the wild to listen to opera from the next campsite at an hour when I want to still be asleep.
So I left Katie in Melinda's care, and headed back east toward Boulder, back into the middle of the slickrock, by myself.
So I listened to some rock on the way. So I'm a hypocrite.
Heading east from Escalante, the road goes across a rangeland with a few trees for several miles, then drops off of the Escalante rim down into the canyon of the Escalante river. Just before it drops down, there is a dirt road heading south. I took that for about three miles, then found a place to park. Just a bit to the east was the long, steep sandstone of the Escalante rim - perfect for what I had in mind.
I don't particularly "hike". I tend to more "wander". I prefer an area that I can go where I please, move in any particular direction I feel like, go kind of "over that-a-way", amble around, and enjoy myself. For these purposes, a trail is not really very useful.
Unfortunately, there's this little matter of ecology that intrudes here. In the mountains, you have to worry about damage to plants and erosion. In the desert, you also have to worry about cryptogammic soil.
Slickrock is the perfect answer. You don't have to worry about erosion (all right, maybe I erode it a microscopic amount. I don't care. Well, all right, I care a little, but the damage is next to nothing.) You don't have to worry about damaging plant life - there isn't any. You don't have to worry about cryptogammic soil - there's no soil.
I also tend to do my wandering without a map. Now, kids, don't try this at home. More to the point, don't try it in the desert; it can be quite fatal. If you can't find your way back to your car, and people looking for you can't find you, you will die. So what I was doing was fairly dangerous.
On the other hand, the Escalante rim is reasonably straight. At the top of it was a dirt road, also reasonably straight, that paralleled the rim. As long as I could keep track of which way was uphill, I could find the top of the rim, and then, presumably, the road. Even if I couldn't find my car, I could still find the main highway as long as I walked the right direction along the dirt road. So I didn't feel like I was taking too big of a risk here. (The one real risk I was taking was injury. I normally carry an Ace bandage in my pack. In this instance, I had forgotten it, and an injury could have been quite lethal.)
To get from my car to the slickrock, I had to cross some (relatively) flat stuff first. Leaving the car, I went around a tiny hill. At this point I took a very careful look around, so that I would know where I was in relation to the car if I ever made it back to that point. Then I followed a small wash toward the rim. (Walking in a water-course is another way of not damaging cryptogammic soil. In this case, the water does the damage for you, leaving nothing for you to destroy.)
I saw some footprints in the wash. It looked like only one pair, but I couldn't be sure.
After I hit the slickrock and had been wandering for a while, it hit me - there were no beer cans. Not one. The only signs of man were the footprints in the wash. On the slickrock, it was like the human race had never existed. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
When I was driving away, I saw a small marker on the side of road (the side toward the rim). It indicated a BLM wilderness study area. This area sure seemed to meet all the requirements of wilderness. I saw tire tracks where I parked, footprints in the wash, two airplanes in the sky and no other signs of man (or woman). It was absolutely unspoiled.
As I write this, the Utah wilderness bill is before Congress. It's a really strange bill, with weird provisions like "hard release", which means that if an area wasn't in this bill, it can never again be considered as a wilderness area. By the time you read this, the battle may be over, but I really hope the bill dies.
But even if the bill passes, this wilderness study area encouraged me. This area was a wilderness study area because, in one hundred years of trying, the human race has not found any profitable way to use the land. If given another hundred years to try, I don't think they'll do any better. It's too far off the beaten path to be a good place to hold a beer party, as the total absence of cans indicated. It even slopes the wrong direction to be a good place for a solar energy installation. I think - hope - that this area, and a number of areas like it, will stay wilderness whether the government officially recognises them as such or not.
All of a sudden, I noticed the bugs. There were several annoying insects buzzing around me, and I hadn't noticed any earlier. Looking around, I saw that I had walked past a crack in the ground. I had seen the crack, but hadn't noticed that there was water in the bottom. I'll have to remember that, I thought. Though I had plenty of water at the time, that little detail could save my life some time.
A little bit later, I saw a route water takes - when there is water - across the slickrock. It looked like there was a hole at one point, and I suspected that I might find water there too. I did. I also found more slickrock on the way (surprise), more terrain to wander across in different directions, more things to look at...
Eventually I pointed my feet back up toward the road. I found where I had entered the slickrock, found my tracks in the wash, followed them toward the road, and finally came to a place where I wasn't sure where to go. Looking around, I quickly realized that I was exactly where I had first looked around on my way to the slickrock, and that therefore my car was just beyond the little mound in front of me.
But I didn't remember the flat covered with grass and sagebrush on my left as being so green. I didn't remember the rock formation behind me as being so beautiful. I wanted to stay there, admiring the rock, soaking up the beauty. I wanted to stay another hour, another week, a whole lifetime, to stay right there, just enjoying the wonder of the loveliness of that beautiful place.
But I was already late, compared to when I told Melinda I'd be back. She understands what happens when I go out like this and wouldn't be worried. But day-to-day life was calling me, demanding my presence. I went slowly, reluctantly, taking my time.
HTML originally done by Stephen R. Johns for his Back Country Trip Reports page.