Elephant Canyon- pt. 2 of the desert memoir

It took me about two and a half hours to get into Canyonlands National Park.  Around forty miles long in all, the road—like most things in Canyonlands—is both beautiful and terrifying.  It starts with an interminable straight stretch through nothingness that baits you into taking the road far too fast for the sharp, hidden corner that suddenly drops you into the main canyon.  Once you’ve slammed on your breaks just in time to make it around the corner without rolling your car, you begin the snaking along the canyon walls at a questionably high legal speed limit.  Over half of the road lies on the rim of open range, and the backside of every blind corner undoubtably has either a cattle grate to send your car bouncing sky high or a sweet, doe-eyed brown cow whose life you see flash before your own eyes.  Between grates, cows, corners, and potholes, I took the road at a reasonable sixty five miles per hour.  I was too excited to get into the backcountry to take the road any slower.  I braked twice—once to take a picture of the road winding along the canyon floor, and again to take another of the sign reading “Canyonlands National Park.”


“Do you have enough water?” The ranger at the visitor center asked me as he checked over my backcountry permit.  I nodded—I had all twenty four pounds worth, fifteen liters, just under the suggested level of a gallon a day.  A liter more and I may not have been able to pick up my pack in the first place—it currently clocked in at about forty five total pounds.  The ranger proceeded to warn me that the only thing I should potentially be concerned about is the thirty mile per hour winds they were supposed to have in the evening.  He mentioned that a storm might blow in.


I set off from the Elephant Hill trailhead around one thirty in the afternoon, teetering my way up the uneven rocks of Elephant Hill, until I was just high enough to see North into the main basin of Canyonlands. The signature grandiose mesas rose colossally above the canyon floor—tremendous vertical slabs of rock as atop beds of crumbled boulders, stained the shade of dried blood.  Even farther off, slightly past Moab, the La Sal mountains tower above the russet mesas that framed the foreground.  They were just as I’d pictured them from Abbey’s descriptions in Desert Solitaire—dark grey-blue, snow-capped, and almost perfectly pyramidal, rising regally above the rust of the desert.  Despite their royal quality, their dull blue shade gave off a melancholy air—I decided I’d dub them the range of sweet princes.  


I wondered if they looked the same from Abbey’s perspective a hundred miles Northwest of here.  On the same note, I soon found myself generally considering what he’d think of what’s become of his precious desert in the modern era.  I do not pity the dead, and especially not Abbey; he would’ve been killed in a far worse manner to see his precious Arches National Park with not only a paved road (which he heartily protested), but families in their “rolling sardine-cans” bumper to bumper the whole way in. 


I plowed ahead, arriving at the rim of Elephant Canyon within the hour.  The descent felt interminably long and unnervingly treacherous as I navigated through steep rock slabs and boulders, my pack threatening to tip me over and send me tumbling down to the canyon floor—although, in retrospect, it would’ve been faster.  I could see my campsite across the canyon, a single rectangular flat patch just barely beneath the slope of the opposing canyon wall, apparently only accessible by way of a dry creek bed.  I managed to survive the climb down, make my way over to the site, unpack my gear, and set up my tent all within a half hour of entering the canyon.  I was suddenly slapped in the face by a rather serious dilemma: what to do now?


  I took my brand new, nondescript brown paper journal and settled down in a perfectly carved seat slick rock, leaning back against a gnarled juniper whose roots clung to the cracks in the sandstone.  The image of Buddha beneath the bodhi tree crossed my mind—although less glorious than the towering tree of enlightenment, I could almost more easily picture the Buddha sitting in this little niche, at the foot of a humbly scrubby juniper.
 
The canyon walls were made up of rounded, bulbous, black-streaked sandstone towers that taper into sienna sand and boulders crumbled off the wall over the millennia; the pinyon pines and junipers fully exploited the available semi-flat ground, lining the rim of the canyon’s belly with swatches of rich dark green.  The dry creek bed snaked its way across the floor of the canyon, a ribbon of soft, light red sand.  The canyon’s mouth opens too farther-off needle formations, tightly packed pinnacles and spires like rows of razor teeth.  Every once in awhile, I’d hear the echo of a party of hikers moving noisily through the canyon—laughing, yelling, singing.  I felt haunted by their bodiless tittering, a few times wondering if I’d merely imagined the voices.  I almost wished that’d be the case; every time they finally came into view—a merry little couple, family, or friends—I realized how very alone I was.  Eventually, regardless of how hard I fought it, my aloneness began to morph into loneliness. 


Home was ten hours away, around 606 miles North.  But cars let us cheat distances—my ten hour trip distorts the reality of exactly how long a journey of 606 miles is.  If I were somehow super-human enough to run a marathon a day, it would still take me over three weeks to run all 606 miles from the Elephant Hill Trailhead to my home in Sun Valley.  Not to mention I have no friends or family south of Salt Lake City, the drive in and out of the park is dangerous, long, and accessible only to certain cars, and the peculiar spires of the Needle formations make all forms of rescue beside on-foot unavailable.  There was no trip leader instructing me, no base camp stocked with warm clothing and food, no expert to these parts to give me advice.  I’d done all my own research with no prior knowledge of the Needles region specifically, I’d sought no help from anyone familiar with them.  My head started to swell with uneasiness—I was far more isolated than I’d lead myself on to think.



The writer’s block that crowded me began to clear up.  I put pencil to paper, scribbling furiously as the wind tried to whip the notebook shut.  The first line reads: “It is for the very first time now I realize how terribly alone I am.”