127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (4 page)

I’m dedicated to finishing my planned tour, so I counter, “How about this?—you guys have your harnesses, I have a rope—you should come with me down through the lower slot and do the Big Drop rappel. We can hike out…see the Great Gallery…I’ll give you a lift back to your truck.”

“How far is it?” asks Megan.

“Another eight miles or so, I think.”

“What? You won’t get out before dark! Come on, come with us.”

“I really have my heart set on doing the rappel and seeing the petroglyphs. But I’ll come around to the Granary Spring Trailhead to meet you when I’m done.”

This they agree to. We sit and look at the maps one more time, confirming our location on the Blue John map from the canyoneering guidebook we’d each used to find this remote slot. In my newest copy of Michael Kelsey’s
Canyon Hiking Guide to the Colorado Plateau,
there are over a hundred canyons described, each with its own hand-sketched map. Drawn by Kelsey from his personal experience in each canyon, the technical maps and route descriptions are works of art. With cross sections of tricky slots, identifications of hard-to-find petroglyphs and artifact sites, and details of required rappelling equipment, anchor points, and deep-water holes, the book offers enough information for you to sleuth your way through a decision or figure out where you are, but not a single item extra. After we put away the maps, we stand up, and Kristi says, “That picture in the book makes those paintings look like ghosts; they’re kind of spooky. What kind of energy do you think you’ll find at the Gallery?”

“Hmm.” I pause to consider her question. “I dunno. I’ve felt pretty connected looking at petroglyphs before; it’s a good feeling. I’m excited to see them.”

Megan double-checks: “You’re sure you won’t come with us?” But I’m as set on my choice as they are on theirs.

A few minutes before they go, we solidify our plan to meet up around dusk at their campsite back by Granary Spring. There’s going to be a Scooby party tonight of some friends of friends of mine from Aspen, about fifty miles away, just north of Goblin Valley State Park, and we agree to caravan there together. Most groups use paper plates as improvised road signs to an out-of-the-way rendezvous site; my friends have a large stuffed Scooby-Doo to designate the turnoff. After what I’ll have completed—an all-day adventure tour, fifteen miles of mountain biking and fifteen miles of canyoneering—I’ll have earned a little relaxation and hopefully a cold beer. It will be good to see these two lovely ladies of the desert again so soon, too. We seal the deal by adding a short hike of Little Wild Horse Canyon, a nontechnical slot in Goblin Valley, to the plan for tomorrow morning. New friends, we part ways at two
P.M.
with smiles and waves.

Alone once again, I walk downcanyon, continuing on my itinerary. Along the way, I think through the remainder of my vacation time. Now that I have a solid plan for Sunday to hike Little Wild Horse, I speculate that I’ll get back to Moab around seven o’clock that evening. I’ll have just enough time to get my gear and food and water prepared for my bike ride on the White Rim in Canyonlands National Park and catch a nap before starting around midnight. By doing the first thirty miles of the White Rim by headlamp and starlight, I should be able to finish the 108-mile ride late Monday afternoon, in time for a house party my roommates and I have planned for Monday night.

Without warning, my feet stumble in a pile of loose pebbles deposited from the last flash flood, and I swing my arms out to catch my balance. Instantly, my full attention returns to Blue John Canyon.

My raven feather is still tucked in the band at the back of my blue ball cap, and I can see its shadow in the sand. It looks goofy—I stop in the open canyon and take a picture of my shadow with the feather. Without breaking stride, I unclip my pack’s waist belt and chest strap, flip my pack around to my chest, and root around inside the mesh outer pouch until I can push play on my portable CD player. Audience cheers give way to a slow lilting guitar intro and then soft lyrics:

How is it I never see / The waves that bring her words to me?

I’m listening to the second set of the February 15 Phish show that I attended three months ago in Las Vegas. After a moment of absorbing the music, I smile. I’m glad at the world: This is my happy place. Great tunes, solitude, wilderness, empty mind. The invigoration of hiking alone, moving at my own pace, clears out my thoughts. A sense of mindless happiness—not being happy because of something in particular but being happy because I’m happy—is one of the reasons why I go to the lengths I do to have some focused time to myself. Feeling aligned in my body and head rejuvenates my spirit. Sometimes, when I get high-minded about it, I think solo hiking is my own method of attaining a transcendental state, a kind of walking meditation. I don’t get there when I sit and try to meditate, om-style; it happens only when I’m walking by myself. Unfortunately, as soon as I recognize that I’m having such a moment, the feeling ebbs, thoughts return, the transcendence evaporates. I work hard to set myself up for that fleeting sense of being wholly pleased, but my judgments about the feeling displace the feeling itself. Although it’s ephemeral, the general well-being that accompanies such a moment will boost my temperament for hours or even days.

It’s two-fifteen
P.M.,
and in the balance of sunshine and thin stratus layers, the day’s weather is poised at equilibrium. In the open section of the canyon, the temperature is about fifteen degrees warmer than it was at the bottom of the deep slot. There are a few full-fledged cumulus clouds listing like lost clipper ships, but no shade. I come upon a wide yellow arroyo entering from the right, and I check my map. This is the East Fork. Kristi and Megan definitely chose the correct fork to return. The choice seemed obvious then, but even obvious decisions need to be double-checked in the backcountry. Navigating in a deep canyon can be deceptively complex. Occasionally, I’m tempted to think that there’s nothing to it; I just keep going straight. With three-hundred-foot walls fencing me in five feet to either side, I can’t really lose the bottom of the canyon, like I can lose the route on a mountainside. But I’ve gotten disoriented before.

A forty-mile solo trip in Paria Canyon comes to mind. There was a stretch about a third of the way into the canyon when I completely lost track of where I was. I hiked roughly five miles downstream before I found a landmark that indicated an exact position on my map. This became critical, because I needed to find the exit trail before night fell. When you’re looking for an entry/exit, sometimes being fifty yards off-route can hide the way. So now I pay close attention to my map. When I’m navigating well in the canyons, I check my map even more frequently than when I’m on a mountain, maybe every two hundred yards.

If we could see the many waves / That float through clouds and sunken caves / She’d sense at least the words that sought her / On the wind and underwater.

The song blends into something atonally sweet but unattended as I pass another shallow wash coming in from the right. On the map, the arroyo seems to correspond with what Kelsey has named Little East Fork, dropping from a higher tableland he labels Goat Park.

The elevated benches and rolling juniper-covered highlands of Goat Park to my right are up above the 170-million-year-old Carmel Formation, a sloping capstone of interlayered purple, red, and brown siltstone, limestone, and shale strata deposit. The capstone is more resistant to erosion than the older wind-deposited Navajo sandstone that forms the smooth ruddy-hued cliffs of the scenic slot canyons. In places, this differential erosion creates hoodoos, freestanding rock towers and tepees, and tall dunes of colored stone that dot the upper reaches of the canyon’s cliffs. The juxtaposed textures, colors, and shapes of the Carmel and Navajo rock layers reflect the polarized landscapes that formed them—the early Jurassic Period sea and the late Triassic Period desert. Settling out from a great sea, the Carmel Formation sediments look like solidified mud that dried up last month. On the other hand, cross-bedded patterns in the Navajo sandstone reveal its ancestry from shifting sand dunes: One fifteen-foot-high band in the cliffs displays inlaid lines slanting to the right; the next band’s layers slant to the left; and above that, the stratification lines lie perfectly horizontal. Over the eons, the dunes repeatedly changed shape under the prevailing force of wind blowing across an ancient Sahara-like desert, devoid of vegetation. Depending if the sandstone shapes left behind are beat upon more by wind or by water, they look like either rough-hewn sand domes or polished cliffs. All this beauty keeps a smile on my face.

I estimate that the distance I have left to cover is about a half mile until I reach the narrow slot above the sixty-five-foot-high Big Drop rappel. This two-hundred-yard-long slot marks the midpoint of my descent in Blue John and Horseshoe canyons. I’ve come about seven miles from where I left my bike, and I have about eight miles to get to my truck. Once I reach the narrow slot, there will be some short sections of downclimbing, maneuvering over and under a series of chockstones, then 125 yards of very tight slot, some of it only eighteen inches wide, to get to the platform where two bolt-and-hanger sets provide an anchor for the rappel. Rappel bolts are typically three-inch-long, three-eighths-inch-diameter expansion bolts set in either hand- or cordless-drilled holes that secure a disc of flat metal bent into an L-shape called a hanger. The hangers have two holes, one in the flush section for the bolt to hold it to the wall, and one in the bent lip that can be clipped by a carabiner, a screw-gate chain link, or threaded with a length of webbing. When the bolt is properly installed in solid rock, you can load several thousand pounds on it without concern, but in slot canyons, the rock often rots around the bolt shaft due to frequent flooding events. It’s reassuring when there are two bolt/hangers that can be used in tandem, in case one unexpectedly fails.

I have my climbing rope, harness, belay device, and webbing with me for the rappel, and I have my headlamp along to search crevices for snakes before putting my hands in them. I’m already thinking ahead to the hike after the rappel, especially the Great Gallery. Kelsey’s guidebook calls it the best pictograph panel on the Colorado Plateau—and the Barrier Creek style, “the style against which all others are compared”—which has piqued my interest since I read about it on my drive to Utah two days ago.

Gold in my hair / In a country pool / Standing and waving / The rain, wind on the runway.

I’m caught up in another song and barely notice the canyon walls closing in, forming the beginning of the slot, this one more like a back alley between a couple of self-storage warehouses than the skyscrapers of the upper slot. An anthemic guitar riff accompanies me as my stride turns into more of a strut and I pump my right fist in the air. Then I reach the first drop-off in the floor of the canyon, a dryfall. Were there water in the canyon, this would be a waterfall. A harder layer embedded in the sandstone has proved more resistant to erosion by the floods, and this dark conglomerate forms the lip at the drop. From the ledge where I’m standing to the continuing canyon bottom is about ten feet. About twenty feet downcanyon, an S-shaped log is jammed between the walls. It would provide an easier descent path if I could get to it, but it seems more difficult to access via the shallow and sloping conglomerate shelf on my right than by the ten-foot drop to the canyon floor over the lip in front of me.

I use a few good in-cut handholds on my left to lower myself around the overhang, gripping the sandstone huecos—water-hollowed holes in the wall—like jug handles. At full extension, my legs dangle two, maybe three feet off the floor. I let go and drop off the dryfall, landing in a sandy concavity carved deeper than the surrounding floor by the impact of floodwaters dropping over the lip. My feet hit the dried mud, which cracks and crumbles like plaster; I sink up to my shoe tops in the powdery platelets. It’s not a difficult maneuver, but I couldn’t climb directly up the drop-off from below. I’m committed to my course; there’s no going back.

A new song starts up in my headphones as I walk under the S-log, and the canyon deepens to thirty feet below the tops of the sand domes overhead.

I fear I never told you the story of the ghost / That I once knew and talked to, of whom I never boast.

The pale sky is still visible above this ten-foot-wide gash in the earth’s surface. In my path are two van-sized chockstones a hundred feet apart. One is just a foot off the sandy canyon bottom; the next sits square on the corridor floor. I scramble over both blockages. The canyon narrows to four feet wide, with undulating and twisting walls that lead me to the left then back to the right, through a straight passage, then left and right again, all the while deepening.