textfiles/fun/CAA/gecaa-31

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