Road Trips
Sunday, October 30th, 2011: 2011 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Regions, Road Trips.
Day 6: Bullfrog Creek to Escalante
Highlights: Hike into the Grand Gulch of Halls Creek, monumental slot canyons
The night before, I’d found a campsite after sunset, right along the Burr Trail where it crests a narrow point overlooking Bullfrog Creek. Definitely one of the more spectacular campsites I’ve had, and no traffic during the night on this remote road.
I was in completely new territory now. The new morning, I slowly explored north and took the first significant turnoff to get to something that looked interesting on the map. It turned out to be another monumental canyon at the south end of the Waterpocket Fold, and I hiked down into it, another steep trail dropping hundreds of feet, this time into a lush, broad valley.
I continued on the trail toward what was supposed to be Brimhall Arch, apparently a natural arch somewhere back in those tilted sandstone cliffs. The trail entered a dark slot canyon that became darker and colder as I went, zigging and zagging, with an interesting combination of forest and desert vegetation. I got to a “pouroff”, a sheer cliff like a stairstep to the higher part of the canyon, and there was an amazing rock ladder that had been built, apparently so you could climb the cliff. The cliff was over 20′ tall, and the ladder went up about 12′ of it, literally a carefully balanced tower of small rocks. There I was again, facing danger alone. But it was so cool, I couldn’t pass it up. Some very careful climbing, a reach for an overhanging limb and some intuitive bouldering at the top, and I was up. I figured on the way back down, I could rely more on the tree limbs.
Unfortunately, within a short distance I ran into an impassable barrier: a flooded slot canyon with sheer walls. I never even got to see the arch.
Somehow I made it down the cliff and out into the valley again. I ran into a younger couple heading for the arch, warned them about the cliff and the flooded place, and had an idyllic lunch under golden cottonwoods before climbing out of the Gulch.
Another long drive back to the Burr Trail, then driving at risky speed in order to somewhat mitigate the washboarded gravel. With my truck rattling for dear life, I was passed by four big diesel trucks in succession, all towing full-size stock trailers loaded with cattle, all driving much faster than me, apparently racing to get their stock to the Bullfrog Ferry to ferry them to market across the Colorado River in Arizona. It was a somewhat surprising evocation of history, since the Burr Trail was originally created by a rancher at Boulder, UT, to get his stock from the high Aquarius Plateau down to the ferry and hence to Arizona markets. I wondered if these guys had driven their full trailers down the famous switchbacks, on which trailers are strongly discouraged, for good reason, as I found out later, going up.
Up the famous switchbacks, a long drive over high, juniper-covered plateaus, and then down the outrageously scenic Long Canyon, stopping at one point to admire a statuesque cottonwood, only to find a beautiful, sanctuary-like slot canyon lined with soft sand right off the highway. Here, I encountered lots of tourists, even late in the season. Living where I live, I’m spoiled by the absence of yuppies, and it depresses me to encounter them and their stylish consumer goods. It seemed that my trip might be going in the wrong direction. But there was no turning back.
That evening, driving down Highway 12 from Boulder to Escalante, on an incredibly dramatic, narrow high bench overlooking deep canyons on either side, I pulled off the highway to snap a quick picture, and immediately behind me, three big black luxury SUVs also pulled off, and out jumped a couple dozen young Japanese men, all wearing black leather jackets. At first I thought I was caught in the middle of a movie shoot about drug gangs, but they were all smiling and just wanted their own quick snapshots!
Monday, October 31st, 2011: 2011 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Regions, Road Trips.
Day 7: Escalante to Page
Highlights: Psychedelic rock!
To me, it seems that Capitol Reef marks a divide between extreme southeast Utah and south-central Utah. The southeastern area I’ve spent the most time in, the Henry Mountains, the Manti-LaSalle forest, and Cedar Mesa, is much less populated and much less traveled; although it’s closer to where I live, it’s farther from the big cities. When you cross west into the Escalante area you get into the crowds, because this area is much more accessible from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Phoenix. I thought the Burr Trail was pretty remote, but even in this cold weather there were crowds at every trailhead. Escalante, although a very small town, is totally tourist-oriented. I had to stay the night there – camping is just too regulated in this area for my tastes, and I needed a restaurant meal after almost a week of canned food.
The next day, I planned to head south through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on one of the long backroads, hoping to find a good hike or two and maybe a campsite. The road I took turned out to be another bone-rattler, and every trailhead seemed to have multiple fancy SUVs already parked there. Finally I stopped at the Lick Wash trailhead, where there were a couple of dusty trucks parked. I loaded my pack for a day hike, and as I approached the trail, I met a guy coming out. Unlike the other fashionable yuppie hikers I’d seen on this trip, he was dressed like me – worn-out jeans, a baggy old t-shirt, and a cheap floppy hat. He was also about my age, and motioned that he lives “right over there” and hikes this trail at least once a month “to see what the trees are doing”. My kind of guy!
A mile or so down the trail in the canyon, I met an attractive, fashionably-dressed, 30-something couple heading out with an off-leash pit bull. The dog came up to meet me first, growling. I waited patiently for it to sniff me, but the girl ran up and threw down on the dog violently, rolling it onto its back and clamping its jaws with her hand. She looked up at me, smiling. “This is the first chance I’ve had to do this,” she explained proudly. I love dogs, but dog people are another thing entirely, there are so many different kinds!
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011: 2011 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Regions, Road Trips.
Day 8: Page to Silver City
Highlights: Moonscape
The night before, I had finally come out of the backcountry, me and my truck rattled to a pulp by washboard roads, looking for a campsite somewhere along the highway at the south end of the Escalante country.
I kept driving a few miles and trying turnouts, each leading to worse and worse washboard, until I finally came to the last turnoff before the Colorado River and Page.
It was a bizarre moonscape unlike anything I’d seen before, and the sun was rapidly setting. I drove up and over the rolling clay hills as night fell, and nowhere could I find a place to pull off and camp. Finally I came to a side road down a narrow canyon, and shortly encountered a flat wash where I could pull off, but it looked to be a put-in to Lake Powell, and it was a depressing place to camp. So I drove back to the highway and continued to Page, where I found another cheap motel on the “Street of the Little Motels.”
Then in the morning, before starting for home, I came back to the Smoky Mountain Road below Mustard Point and took these pictures.
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011: 2011 Trips, Road Trips.
More than twenty years ago, after losing my home in the Loma Prieta earthquake, I began regularly observing the winter and summer solstices, as my personal, private holidays.
The solstices were important events for some, but not all, traditional societies. Highly organized agricultural societies seem to have based their planting schedules on observations of the solar cycle, but nomadic hunters and foragers may have had less need for such predictive measurements. And of course, in equatorial regions the solar cycles have very different significance.
Almost all of my solstice observations have been dedicated retreats in a special, remote place, usually in the mountains where I can observe the sunrise and sunset from a high place. From experience, I learned that the character of the summer and winter solstices is very different. The summer solstice is a time of thanks for abundance, whereas the winter solstice is the very cusp of the seasonal cycle, a critical time when we want and need the days to change from shorter to longer, to re-start the cycle of food production in our habitat. The longest night is an opportunity to share in this great change, an opportunity for a difficult but rewarding vigil. But in addition, both solstices provide formal punctuations for my year, regular times when I can ritually sum up and review the year’s experiences and get a sense of where I’m at in my life.
Most of my winter solstice experiences have included such a vigil, in seclusion, but a few have been thwarted due to pressing circumstances. This year, financial constraints and family obligations forced me to attempt a solstice observation while visiting family in the Midwest. There are no mountains here, most winter days are overcast, and there’s virtually no public land outside the cities.
Unable to come up with a better plan, I borrowed a car and drove from the city to the small town where I grew up. I knew from other recent visits that there wasn’t anything left there for me, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
I drove through the gutted downtown, where historic buildings had collapsed or been demolished and replaced with vacant lots. I turned onto Main Street, where ancient shade trees had recently been cut down so the street could be widened, facilitating through traffic. Now you can see from one end to the other, and the town might as well not be there.
I made my way out into the countryside, toward the farms which my Carson ancestors had settled more than 130 years ago. The sky was a uniform mass of clouds; you couldn’t even tell in which direction the sun might’ve risen. Along the highway, old farmhouses had been replaced by new trophy homes surrounded by landscaped grounds and artificial lakes. I came to a tree-lined bend in the river and found that it had been short-cut by a flood-control channel where muddy water rushed between stark banks.
In fact, a few years ago I had visited the mastermind behind the flood-control project, my high school biology teacher. I listened in bewilderment and later witnessed the terrible devastation where giant machines had cleansed 15 miles of river of its shoals and fallen trees, degrading it from natural habitat to man-made drain.
It’s common in the midwest for riparian corridors to retain the last of the ancient forest that covered this land before the European invasion. The trees prevent streambank erosion, and riverside bottomlands flood regularly and often escaped clearing for farmland.
After my senior year of high school, I had lived on the farm beside the river, and my friends and I had discovered a tiny island in the river, hidden back in the woods, which we had claimed as our own, crossing over the shallow channel on a fallen log, building a lean-to and stocking it with canned food. Later, on visits home from college, I would go back there to see how the island was doing. Sometimes the river was in full flood, the forest was deep in muddy water and the island gone from sight.
I stopped the car on the shoulder of the gravel road and made my way through the mud of the recently flooded woods, avoiding thorn scrub and vines and stepping over logs and around standing water until I came to the poor damaged river. It was still running high and muddy. I smelled rotting wood and saw piles of logs left by the cutting and dredging machines. I felt myself drawn further into the dark woods, and then I saw flashes of emerald green. The smell of rotting wood was also the smell of life starting over.
Sunday, May 13th, 2012: 2012 Trips, Road Trips.
On my way to the Mojave Desert for a birthday powwow with friends, I spent a night in the Wigwam Motel on historic but dilapidated Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona. From a restaurant window on Holbrook’s main drag, I watched a parade of broken men limping to and from a liquor store.
Over the years, my remote, spectacular wilderness retreat in the Mojave has bonded me with two biologist friends who also love the place. The three of us arrived late Wednesday afternoon and hiked up to the spring where one of them had placed a motion-sensor camera six months earlier. Then we returned to camp and cooked dinner as the waxing moon rose in the east.
On Thursday, I tried to follow my friends on a long hike searching for an “old Indian trail,” but became dehydrated and exhausted after trudging twelve miles under the desert sun. So on Friday I went looking for shade, walking up the gulch to the decaying shade house, built by miners a century earlier, where I had lived during my “year in the wilderness” long ago. First I found some old sheet metal and hauled it over gaps in the roof, anchoring it with heavy stones, then I spent the rest of the long, hot day lying in my Yucatan hammock:Â reading, listening to birds, soaking up the infinite peace of the desert. Bliss!
More friends arrived Friday evening, and we were all entranced by the “supermoon” which rose later and bigger each night.
After five days camping in the desert, I rejoined civilization, flying from Las Vegas over Death Valley, the glittering snowfields of the southern Sierra Nevada, and the waterfalls of Yosemite. As we approached San Francisco, my seatmate, an ex-stripper wearing layers of unhealthy-looking makeup, asked me if I’d seen the bird poop on the mountain tops. She said her father had told her about it and seemed truly surprised when I assured her it was snow.
I spent a few days hiking and catching up on more good conversation with old friends before attending a business meeting in Palo Alto. Before moving to New Mexico, I had lived beside the Pacific for eight years, and a walk beside the Bay in San Francisco’s Presidio left me missing the ocean. So the next day, a friend drove me over to Pescadero for a walk on the beach. It turned out to be high tide, so there wasn’t much beach to walk on, but we were treated to basking sea lions and crashing surf.
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