Desert Rains

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I finally got the chance to throw up some photos. Flickr is being weird about organizing them so unfortunately they are just thrown up on the main page; the new ones start with IMG_0407.

I also put up some videos!

I am currently sitting in Springdale, Utah—the entrance to Zion National Park. Directly behind the screen of this laptop sits the West Temple, a rusty red and ashen white sandstone cliff 3,800 vertical feet in height. This is the view from the backyard—not bad. The house belongs to the park’s Fire Ecologist, Katie. We met her while illegally camping in the Springdale City Park, which doubles as the town’s dog park, and on the eve of bad weather after a few beers and some pizza she invited us in. We ended up staying for a while and did a sizeable amount of home repair, cleaning, and excellent BBQing.
After a week of mountain biking, Josh Foss and I planned on spending the next week touring towards Bryce Canyon National Park. However, while BSing with the locals in the Springdale park, news of foul weather came our way. Springdale, it turns out, is the last small enclave on the edge of the massive Colorado Plateau, a high-elevation desert that occupies much of Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. In fact, Zion Canyon is eroded directly out of the edge of this plateau. The rest of the park is a few thousand feet higher than the canyon, and it’s pretty flat. Due to its high elevation, the rain Zion Canyon was expected to receive would fall as snow everywhere else. So Foss and I found ourselves, in effect, stuck in Zion National Park. Unless we wanted to brave accumulating snow and temps in the 20s. We both quickly decided that there are much worse places to find yourself stranded, and certainly there is plenty to do around here—enough to make freezing, snowy weather seem highly unappealing.
The town of Springdale resides in what outsiders call the “Zion Curtain”. This small community, along with Moab, is one of the few in the state that are not two-thirds Mormon. If Eugene were shrunk down to 500 people and surrounded on three sides by an epic national park, it would be a lot like Springdale. Katie’s roommate has dreads. The last time I saw those? Eugene. Indeed, the Zion Curtain of culture has been treating me quite well. There are cool coffee shops, great restaurants, and interesting people--and the only folks around here with lots of kids are the tourists from Salt Lake. Springdale is the kind of town where people say, “Oh, you live here? Why haven’t I seen you before? That’s weird.” And they actually mean it. It’s also the kind of town where I can go into the grocery store for the third time and start getting the locals discount. Crazy. The beauty here is so surreal, so intense, and so omnipresent that I’m kind of worried that the world is going to see flat and boring once I leave.
There is an added bonus to being stuck here for so long, and that is The Narrows. When water flow levels are too high the park closes the region because it is too dangerous, but in the past week the flow has dropped to acceptable levels. So tomorrow I depart for The Narrows, the grand daddy of all slot canyons, in the northern section of the park. This is sole reason some people come to the park, and for me to be here and not visit it would be insane. So I am taking a shuttle to a distant trailhead, donning a dry suit, and spending three days walking/swimming down 16 miles of narrow, remote canyon cut out over the last few million years by the Virgin River’s 48-degree water. Alone. Wish me luck because it is going to be very intense. The upper section just opened yesterday and no one is really sure what kind of shape it’s in.
Of course, it’s not like I haven’t been keeping myself busy around here for the last week with other epic adventures. For our introduction to Zion, Foss and I awoke at 2AM and rode 12 miles into the park under a full moon and a strong down-canyon headwind. It was the most spectacular bike ride ever, and we arrived near the end of the canyon completely alone. Foss is pretty sure he saw a cougar stalking beneath a cliff above us. The only other humans nearby were halfway up a 1000’ foot wall on Angel’s Landing, rock climbing by headlamp. We beat the first shuttle into the park by a full two hours and commenced on a 4-mile hike up to Observation Point 2,100 feet above the valley floor. We arrived just as the sun glittered its first yellow rays across the white Navajo sandstone walls. It was so early, in fact, that a rattlesnake sat coiled out in the open from its hunt the night before. I watched it slowly retreat into the rocky recesses, mirroring the shape of the winding river illuminated by reflected twilight far below. It would wait out the onslaught of tourists that would be trampling all over the place, unknowingly with a rattlesnake mere inches beneath their feet, and emerge at dusk to hunt the overfed white-striped antelope ground-squirrels. Death is always at your heels whether you know it or not, and rarely do you have a say in what happens.
Of course we hiked the fabled Angel’s Landing trail. This is by far the most absurdly sketchy trail in the national park system. At one point you’ve got a 1200’ drop to one side and an 800’ drop to the other and the platform you’re on is not only uneven, it’s less than an armspan wide. They put up some chains but they’re all so loose they make me feel more unsecure than rock handholds. Our original plan was to hike Angel’s Landing for sunrise instead of Observation Point, but fortunately I’m experienced enough now to know what may or may not be a good idea and that seemed like it wasn’t a good idea. We were both way too sore and stiff after hundreds of miles of mountain biking in a few short days to deal with that kind of scrambling in 4AM twilight. So instead we hiked it in the rain.
To get away from the Memorial Day Weekend crowds, we looked for an off-trail hike that not many people would do. I found one online up around Mt. Kinesava that started in Springdale. We didn’t know what we were getting into when we started, but we ended up scaling one of the cliffs. It was described as a “steep, Class 4 scramble” but I didn’t really know what that was. Now I do! I think we gained over 1,000 feet in 0.3 miles or something ridiculous (3000 feet in 2 miles total). Hand-over-foot through near-vertical loose debris—looking at our route from afar it appears as though we just rock climbed the cliff face, although I do have to say that the scramble wasn’t as sketchy as you would guess by looking at the route. All in all, the prarie on top was well worth it, and so were the isolated petroglyphs!

But this leaves out how we got to Springdale, or even how I got back to St. George to pick up Foss upon his arrival two weeks ago. The last time I posted I was preparing to go camp down by the Virgin River. It was a beautiful campsite, although immediately upon my arrival a massive thunderstorm built up and scared the hell out of me. Fortunately only the far edge of it hit my camp. I have really wanted to see one ever since I arrived in the desert but damn, be careful for what you wish for! I spent the first whole day on the river doing absolutely nothing but observing, writing, and sketching. I didn’t move out of a 6’ square all day. In the process I managed to discover a Black-Chinned Hummingbird nest, a holy grail for me, and I got a glimpse of a hummingbird egg for the first time in my life. In the three days I spent by the river, it hatched. When I returned with Foss a week later, the nest was abandoned. The baby birds were nowhere to be found. They probably made a great mid-morning snack. The parent’s 700+ mile migration from Mexico was all for naught. The difficulties we encounter our daily lives, me and you, they’re pretty managable.
After going on a mountain bike ride with the local shop in Hurricane, I finally ended up staying with someone from CouchSurfing.com. They seemed like a really cool outdoorsy couple, the only people in Hurricane on the site. Chris picked me up and drove me a few blocks to his nice subdivision house that I assumed he and his wife owned. When I walked in the door he introduced me to his father who sat in the livingroom wearing a BYU shirt (man those things are everywhere here!). I was placed downstairs in a room with a nice bed and a bathroom all to myself. Next to the bed were three or four dolls—freaky, I hate dolls, especially at my bedside—and a multifarious assorment of trinkets. “This”, I thought, “is what happens when you have 12 siblings to buy something for at Christmas.” Endless amounts of weird, random, useless and only half-artsy crap; it was an odd and ill-conceived mixture combining 1950s Americana from Kansas and elements of Navajo/Hopi/Paiute beadwork, with some kind of heinous Dutch vibe thrown in for good measure. I hopped in the shower and collected myself. This was my first time in a house in over five weeks. That in and of itself was stressful, I felt claustrophobic and I was sure that at any moment I would break something from Aunt Betty (no, the other Aunt Betty, the one who only had three kids). “Okay”, I thought, “here it is, my night with the Mormons.” It was an inevitability, I knew that, but I thought I would know what I was getting into when it happened. I decided I needed an escape to collect my thoughts further, so I came up with a ploy to head to the store for a few minutes and make some phone calls. Before I could depart, the father had his teeth in me. Within seconds he was off on some crazy Constitutionalist rant lambasting every single federal land/wildlife entity you can think of, talking about shooting Bill Clinton with a shotgun, etc. etc. etc. The whole damn nine yards. This lasted for not less than 45 consecutive minutes, to the point that his wife and son were saying things like, “That’s enough already.” He was saying things like, “Now I know you like to bicycle, but me and six billion other people on this planet love gasoline. Once you get above 30 that bicycle isn’t going to be so appealing.” Overall, this wasn’t a big deal for me to handle. I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about the land use issues out here so I don’t have too much of an opinion, and in general there is no right answer with land use issues. The best way to diffuse these situations, and the only appropriate and realistic approach to just about everything in life, is to admit that the situation is infinitely complicated and without any “right” course of action. There are many paths, there are many consequences, there are many benefits, it just depends on who gets screwed. So instead of arguing with him, I just took the issues and folded them on themselves so many times that he basically forgot what he was arguing for in the first place. Politics, very simple. There are, however, a few huge ironies to this story. The first is that he delivered this whole rant, including the part about bicycling, while sitting on an exercise bike in his living room. It was the most beautiful evening out you could ever imagine, just perfect biking weather, and he’s in his living room talking about how much he loves gasoline and how silly I am for riding bikes. Okay, well, I’m pretty sure he’s got more miles on that stupid exercise bike than I do on my touring bike so far—go figure. The other irony is that he’s a History teacher. This is ironic because a lot of what he was supporting is blantantly history repeating itself, and that was rather sad to experience. If our History teachers don’t see it, what hope do we have? And not only is he a History teacher, he’s a History teacher at a private school for rich, screwed up kids (it’s $5,000/month to attend). This he blamed on the parents, and he said that they were screwed up because of the “Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, and all that crap when my generation really started to go downhill”. I had a hard time not laughing because Mae’s parents were an active part of all that, and their three kids are doing pretty damn awesome. In fact, they’re doing the same kind of shit that this guy’s son and his wife are doing, which is the same shit I’m doing (backpacking, traveling to South America, bicycling, etc.). Overall it was a simple rant about a simple world from a simple person. That’s okay. I could tell it had been pent up for a while. It’s not often, or maybe even really ever, that he gets to meet someone with different world views. Unfortunately I think that the History concentration actually increases his myopic tendencies, pushing him further into the realm of simplicity. Philosophy did the same thing for me which is why I have largely abandonded it. When you sit back and view the world through ideas and theories and books that summarize entire centuries with a few terse sentences—“the ivory tower” syndrome of academia—the implicit knowledge of the intensity and complexity of lived experience for every being on this planet fades into oblivion and its only a matter of time before the repressed, small daily doses of reality build up into daggers that leave scars as reminders of what life truly is. If you don’t seek it out, if you don’t actively keep yourself grounded firmly in the reality of the world on a daily basis, it will seek you. Generally with an unforgettable vengenace.
Go out of your way to watch an ant drag something 10 times its size back to the nest. In terms of social organization ants are basically our closest relatives. They are pretty much the best mirrors we’ve got to look into. Spend the time to watch the entire colony excavate the opening so that this new thing can fit in the nest. Then watch the ants pull it inside, everything disappearing into the earth. There are thousands of them, everywhere, all doing something but who the hell knows what? Some are working really hard, some don’t look like they’re doing anything (why are those four going in that other direction?), and maybe you accidently killed 15 of them before you even recognized that they had a nest right under your feet. Such is life. The struggles, the joys, the intensity of life and sorrow of death and unfairness of dismemberment and miracle of birth, the soup of collective consciousness that ties it all together—it’s fucking beautiful and insane and complicated. And the ants have it too, including huge land use issues, you’ve just gotta get on your hands and knees and pay some respect to your closest of kin.

And it is with this sort of bizarre spectrum of ideas, interspersed with the feeling of my first night of sleep without the sound of wind rustling through leaves in over a month, after holding a mindblowing 20-minute Q&A about the Mormon religion in the car, that I found myself in an LDS church parking lot on a Sunday morning the day prior to Foss’s arrival over two weeks ago in St. George. “My god, what the hell just happened?” My crazy ass sitting there slowly reattaching all the various gear to my bicycle while perfectly manicured people in suits and dresses hurried into church a few minutes late. Well, it got even more weird. Again through CouchSurfing.com, I met Amy, a very ambitious 19-year-old girl living in St. George. I spent Sunday night at her house, and we talked about her background growing up in a polygamist community in Hildale, UT while I taught her how to make stifry. She was one of 11 children, although her father only had one wife. The number of wives you have is decided by the prophet, not by you, and although the marriages aren’t technically arranged, they do have to be sanctioned by the prophet. So Amy’s father only had one wife. But she does have seven—count them, seven—grandmothers. She couldn’t even really count all her cousins, somewhere around 38. Both sets of grandparents grew up in the polygamist sect of the church (known as “Fundamentalist” LDS, or FLDS), so her family roots run strong, all the way back to the beginning of Mormonism. So why is she in St. George living in a random apartment picking my brain as much as possible about international travel? Well, her family was kicked out, largely because her father was too “liberal”. Liberal here means things like, oh, he would take them to a movie every once in a while when they were in town, and he insisted that all his kids go to college. You see, the FLDS community has certain members who go to college, and generally they do so only to service the community. An FLDS doctor would go to school and come right back. But not this guy’s kids. So the prophet showed up and kicked them out, which included being kicked out of their house since its technically on church ground (even though her father built it himself). Some people stopped talking to her (which they are supposed to do), but she still retains many friends there. Truly, absolutely bizarre and completely fascinating. Aside from the whole prophet gig, the FLDS people have a lot of cool stuff going on. They grow most of their own food, make their own clothes, don’t get involved in mass media, etc. Take note of this everyone: If we don’t start doing more of that ourselves, when the shit hits the fan the FLDS folks are going to rise up and RAPIDLY repopulate the earth since they will be some of the few left that can actually care for themselves. If you don’t like that idea, grow some spinach.

Then Foss arrived. We travelled, but not far; we mountain biked, but too much; and we followed the whims of the Great Magnet with a confidence that can arise only from knowing each other way, way too long. It was hedonism at its finest, a true testament to the possibilities and beauty of life in this country. Needless to say, we did what all men our age do when they get together: Drive each other into the ground as hard and as fast as possible. The best story, I think, was when we did a 21 mile mountain bike loop outside of Hurricane, including 10 miles of it by moonlight and headlamp along the canyon of the Virgin River. Absolutely beautiful! That night, after getting back into town at 10:30PM, we hit up the grocery store for a six pack and decided to get the “Full Suspension Pale Ale” because “Full Suspension” is definitely what our bikes needed to be on these trails, but weren’t. While we were paying Foss randomly makes mention of the fact that we’re looking for a free place to crash for the night (keep in mind it’s now 11PM and we look like hell), which I thought might get us arrested in a highly conservative town of 8,000, but it ended up getting us a place on the patio of an empty house that one of the store employees just moved out of. So there we were, squatting at a random empty house in Hurricane, Utah after just completing one of the most amazing mountain bike rides imaginable, drinking our Full Suspension Pale Ale under a beautiful moon. The true irony of this story though is the name of the brewery that made the beer: Squatters.

Last night Foss departed. Only Hunter S. Thompson is adequate to capture the moment:
”There he goes--one of God's own prototypes--a high powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live and too rare to die.”
I can say with confidence that as he watched me drive away, Foss was thinking the same thing about me.

And that brings us here, now. Full circle, like me returning to my solo journey once again. I will depart Springdale and head east this weekend after my return from The Narrows. The next few hundred miles are some of the most remote in the lower 48. I don’t even know the next time I’m going to run into a town that has more than 1,000 people—perhaps not until Moab, if I end up there? That is weeks away. But the moon is waning quickly, almost gone now, and the places where I’m going are where the stars speak even when the moon is out. On and on...

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