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HIKING HEAVEN, HIKING HELL
#31 in the second online CAA series
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Lake City, CO; 12,437 miles.
June 30, 1987
Copyright 1987, Steven K. Roberts. All rights reserved.
The pace of motorized travel is jarring, confusing -- but also, in a
sense, liberating. We can clamber up a mountain without fear for the bikes'
security; we can zip through Nevada to linger in Utah. Though I expected this
high-speed relocation to Ohio to be essentially colorless, the opposite has
been the case...
NYE COUNTY, NEVADA:
First, there have been the moments. Out in the desolate, dusty wastelands
of south-central Nevada, where some "towns" on the map are but boarded-up gas
stations, we found ourselves getting excited by the litter-barrel signs and
occasional rest areas. There's not much else to live for in a changeless
landscape.
But on route 375 east of Warm Springs, after 50 miles of nothing (not even
another vehicle), we saw a speck in the road. Beyond that, far ahead, there
was yet another speck. I turned down the stereo and leaned forward, alert.
Both specks grew as we gradually slowed from 80 mph. The nearer one,
brown and white, became a calf. The farther one, blue and white, became a
truck. The three of us met and stopped in the road, the humans chuckling at
this exquisitely sparse traffic jam as the mini- bovine stood confused and
frightened, at last trotting off into the sagebrush. The trucker and I waved
and motored on our opposite ways -- the singular moment gone like a rare
planetary alignment. It was 40 miles before we saw another sign of life.
Yep, it's easy to get cosmic out here where man, not nature, is the
oddity.
ZION NATIONAL PARK, UTAH:
All of this planet's beauty, from the grandeur of Yosemite to the wild
eccentricity of Zion, is part of a billion-year extravaganza of entropy in
progress. As things settle down, they assume shapes that are dazzling and
puzzling, confusing and bemusing. "How did this HAPPEN?" I always ask in such
places, struggling to grasp the simplicity of the answer. The interplay of a
few physical principles seems a feeble explanation for magic.
That's why our panoply of -ologies ranges from geo to cosmo to theo.
It is impossible to be neutral about Utah, which perhaps explains the
exclamation mark on the license plates. The wonders unfold from moment to
moment like a succession of linked revelations, while the land only a few miles
away seems harsh and forbidding. The first time through, after a musical
Arches interlude, I pedaled sick and freezing through high desert... 110 miles
in one day... then watched Reagan get re-elected on a motel TV. Sicker and
cynical I pressed on, through the aptly named Sevier River Valley in which the
mindset matched the climate: cold. I fought my way southward, finally
relaxing my opinion of humanity when I encountered the warm hospitality of Dr.
Kent McDonald and his family in St. George. That was two and a half years ago.
We visited the McDonalds again during our eastbound zoom last week,
frolicking with his delightfully bright mini-Mormon offspring, swapping musical
favorites (try Kodaly's Sonata for solo cello sometime), and sharing the
pleasures of a chronic addiction that persists despite my knee pain, sore leg
muscles, torn ankle ligaments, cracked sternum, and deltoid bursitis:
CLAMBERING. I just can't resist the lure of topsy-turvy land.
When I'm bent and gray I'll confine my indulgence to simple hiking, I
suppose, but right now the intrigue of twisted passages and violent slopes is
too strong. When Kent spoke of a little-known place in Zion National Park
called "The Subway," I responded with the kind of enthusiasm that accompanies
rumors of a secret admirer: heart- pounding anticipation tinged with delicious
fear and the certainty of imminent adventure.
It was a cactus day -- an endless furnace of skin-ravaging sun when torpid
toads hide in shady places and water is worth its weight in C-notes. We
shouldered our daypacks, the three of us, and set out into a dusty scrub cedar
forest of ankle-rippers and deerflies. My rubber cane-tip left bulls-eyes in
the fine red sand.
A ravine, of sorts, marked the boundary between vertical walls of black
volcanic rock and Utah-red sandstone. Down, abruptly down we went, sliding in
grit, lowering bodies carefully from boulder to boulder, calling jokes in that
playful camaraderie of shared looniness until the incremental metering of
gravity brought us at last to the left fork of North Creek. Then three hours
passed...
Three hours of picking our way upstream, climbing rocks, wading, scooting
over logs, pausing to marvel at bright orange dragonflies or odd bits of flora
unseen in tamer climes. Three hours of hard work as the canyon walls slowly
closed in -- the cracked ruddy buttresses above us blazing in sunshine, drawing
the eye, reflecting the stratified history of the earth's formation in
mineral-streaked storyboards of ongoing drama.
Then... it changed. Wildly. We climbed a succession of dancing
staircases, deep red micro-steps bathed in a wash of sunlit water like
something from the celestial mythology of an ancient aquatic culture.
Ascending, awestruck, our patter silenced, we stepped higher and higher --
drawn into the mysteries of this place: a tunnel like an inverted skeleton
keyhole, a smooth hemispherical amphitheatre, a succession of linked pools as
perfectly defined as the jacuzzis of a spelunking Berrocal-fanatic who won the
Lotto. What planet IS this, anyway?
Onward we walked, slowly, until there were only pools and walls, cold with
the breath of earth yet sunlit through the lively filter of flickering overhead
leaves. Leaving the packs on the last dry spot, we swam from chamber to
chamber, shivercold, at last turning the final corner... where a roar,
industrial in its insistence, poured through a smooth portal of naked rock.
Inside, crashing into a round pool twelve feet across, a waterfall
exploded through a high crack -- bathing us in chill mist. I entered,
delighted, shouting over the aquathunder, splashing across the chamber to stand
under falling water that pounded like the fists of a dozen asynchronous
masseurs. Trancelike, I submitted.
Time slipped away. The water probed me, coldwarm, its force pushing my
shorts to my knees and quickening my blood. I grabbed a wall for support and
relaxed, every muscle fluid. Something about it seemed deeply familiar -- at
once immediate and impossibly remote, tiny and huge, outclassing the intellect
like a good meditation. I was nowhere, everywhere, blending with a land of mad
contrasts, merging with the water, incapable of thought beyond the present
visceral awareness of pure sensation. This massage, perfect yet devoid of
those sweetly distracting human overtones, was a cosmic slap -- shocking the
vignetting from my vision and restoring native wings long forgotten.
Thanks... I needed that.
Hours later, panting and sweaty from the sun-baked climb out of the red
canyon, the subway seemed a dream. But its effect lingered, lingers to this
moment, lingers beyond. A meta-hike this was; a pilgrimage to a primitive
place as much within me as within the earth. It was food for the spirit... a
massage of the psyche... a moment of connection with the unnamable something
that spawns some of those aforementioned -ologies...
Not to mention one world-class afternoon of clambering. The road is
sweet. Energized, I hit it again.
CALF CREEK (CENTRAL GARFIELD COUNTY, UTAH):
This is hard-core Abbey country. The Escalante River area is a violent,
convoluted land, a twisted marriage of desert and mountain with much infidelity
on both sides. Madness happens here; the land kills the unwary without
remorse, yet delights the eye with so many absurd contrasts that there never
develops a sense of figure-ground. This is far away from everywhere, hard to
get to, and NOT the way to cross Utah if you're in a hurry.
At Calf Creek, which feeds the Escalante, there is a campground with 12
sites and a high-pressure spigot of Giardia-free water. We claimed the last
spot, set up our porta-condo, and went for a short walk. A 5-mile round trip
trail led to the falls, but we had only a two hours until dark.
A few minutes along the tame path, carrying only my cane, I had that same
craving that besets one accustomed to huevos rancheros when confronted with
unadulterated grits. A ravine beckoned from the left, smothered in a chunky
salsa of twisted rock, rolled boulders, and cactus -- angling up a few hundred
feet to the base of stark white tortilla cliffs. Por que no? I veered off
with Maggie following, picking my way around the obstacles until they became so
closely packed that I began springing from each to the next, shoesounds sandy
on soft rock, echoes from the cliff touching my words with portent as I pointed
out the sights to my suntanned woman.
Cliff base. Drawn by the pheromones of naked rock, I felt my way to a
mighty crack and entered -- climbing higher, sweaty, rising into the body of
earth and sensing, somewhere ahead, the exultation of a peak. As the passion
rose, Maggie called to me... perhaps jealous.
"I don't want to go up there."
"OK. Why don't you go around the other way? I'll climb to the top, walk
along the edge, and find a way down to meet you... it'll be more of an
adventure."
Hesitantly, with a worried face and a glance upward, she agreed -- already
looking small against the massive impassive folds of untamed land. She nodded,
took a step away from me, then turned and said, "I love you."
"I love you too," I called softly, my voice carrying along the great
concave wall. For a moment our eyes locked. But my beard, dripping sweat,
tickled hot sandstone; Maggie waved and walked away. I looked up, had a brief
thought about madness, and climbed. And climbed.
The ravine grew treacherous, with steep slopes of loose rock, boulders
wedged precariously overhead by their corners, blind alleys of slick stone. I
slipped once, cursed, scratched a knee and hung panting to a scraggle of rasty
plant life... then pressed on. "I'm not coming down THIS way, that's for
sure," I muttered, inching my way up, up, much further than it looked from
below.
Thirsty, already regretting my foolishness in hiking empty- handed, I
reached the top -- or the illusion of same. Through wrinkles of
cactus/sage/sand/rock I climbed on, quickly now, until at last I was on
something approaching a level plain of rocky sage. Ahead of me, the sun was
turning colorful in preparation for the evening's sky show.
Then I turned around.
Everything looked the same. A maze of ravines and gulleys radiated from
my feet, the land so complex that there was hardly a clue to the location of
the cliff that had seemed so grand and imposing from below. No matter. I
wanted a different route down anyway. Thinking of Maggie, I set out for the
most obvious promontory -- a journey of some 15 minutes that was complicated by
unexpected obstacles of vertical stone, deep creases, and impenetrable thickets
of something hard and manzanita-like.
At the edge, dizzy, I looked down a few hundred feet over a boulder-strewn
slope, and there, far away, was tiny Maggie -- a speck of pink and brown like a
cool Baskin-Robbins sundae against a backdrop of designer desert colors. I
whistled the Morse MV, "dahdah didididah" and she looked up, returned the call,
and for a moment all was sweet: communication, the sight of my lady in this
wild land, bas-relief rock in the low-angle light of evening. "I'll head over
that way," I called, echoing. Squinting a half-diopter of correction, I could
just catch her wave.
What had appeared from below as a simple cliff-edge, however, was anything
but. Progress parallel to the distant thread of Calf Creek was an exhausting
process of climbing back up to level desert, picking a new crenelation to
explore, and struggling down through another series of obstacles to a promising
descent... only to find, after many minutes and another 10 cc's of sweat, that
a sheer bone-shattering drop blocked the way. The first time, it only made me
nervous.
The second time, it terrified me.
Sunset was nearing. My mouth was as dry as the harsh land underfoot. I
found a wide crease in the ground that HAD to lead all the way down and plunged
into it, slipping on slickrock, tossing the cane down and retrieving it,
descending parallel vertical walls with fingers and toes, crawling through
thorns. Water. I needed water. This had to go down. "Dahdah didididah!" I
whistled, stumbling too noisily to listen for a response. Deep crack, wiggling
through, dropping hard a few feet with the dim awareness that this could be a
trap. Sliding in sand, this HAS to do it, leaping a mini-abyss and approaching
the knee of a gulley.
I looked down with a moan at a vertical drop of some 30 feet. Oh no...
"Maggie!" I called, not sure what I'd say if she answered. "Maggie!" I
listened, probed with my ears; all was silence but for a faraway truck and the
distant goddamn laughter of carefree campers. So close...
Back up. Scared now, the light fading. The places I had descended with
the aid of gravity were places I would never consider climbing; I threw myself
at them and clung spiderlike to cracks and redstones, clawing, panting whimpers
dry and painful as the air chilled. My shirt stank. Topside again, deeply
aware of being in trouble. Now what? I called again, found my way to an
unfamiliar promontory, waved my shirt, called for Maggie, called for anyone,
cried -- for the first time in my life -- for help. No response. Just the same
goddamn laughter from distant people with plenty of water and nearby sleeping
bags.
Delirium hits fast. I staggered the desert, none of it familiar, the
sunset colors deep and beautiful like a female assasin in a James Bond movie.
Just me and my cane; no water, no ham radio, no flashlight, not even a way to
make a fire. Cold nights out here in high desert... Maggie would be frightened
by now, probably thinking about search parties and helicopters. I tried
another crevasse, ripping my skin uncaring, losing the rubber cane tip, running
clink clink stumble curse over rock only to teeter on another brink, turn,
struggle back up by feel and tricklight, thinking of narrow flat places where I
could sleep, thirst, die unseen in the desert like a sick animal -- an idiot
hiker without a water bottle.
High country again. Running now, gotta find a footprint, how the hell did
I get up here? Deer trails, a sunbleached antler. Nothing familiar; the
twisted rock leering at me, wanting my moisture. I licked my sweat to ease the
mouth, stabbed toes deeply with cactus needles, pushed on into twilight
ignoring pain. "Maggie!" Goddamn laughter down there, gotta get to it, gotta
find my woman, need a hug, need a gallon of water, need to stay alive.
"Foots!" I cried suddenly. "Foots!" In the sand was an impression of my
tattered Avocet cycling shoe, unmistakable, aiming at me. Tracking in a frenzy
like a hungry dog after a wounded rabbit, I ran tripping through the cactus,
crying "foots" in exhausted glee at each shoeprint. On slickrock I lost the
trail, but it had to be here somewhere; I sniffed around in the near dark and
picked a route, last chance, plunging into the chute, sliding, shouting, riding
a mini- landslide, jumping into blackness on the dubious advice of echoless
shouts. The cactus needles in my foot, the cuts, the throat -- none mattered,
for this one was going down, down, one bad jump and an awkward fall into rocks,
nothing broken, limping through sand, a tree branch in my face... the road!
Clinking the cane on sweet asphalt I racewalked in parched ecstasy to the
campsite, number 12. Maggie. Running now, dropping cane, sweaty hug,
trembling, a beer drained in seconds, more hugs, tears, stories. Under the
cold spigot I lay, inhaling sweetwater; the cliffs a dim sinister shape against
starlit sky; the thought of me still up there absurd, frightening.
And sleep, oh the sleep. Warm Maggie comforting, skin the opposite of
rock, moisture intoxicating in the sweet sweet night. So close...
-- Steve