National Park Overload, Part I

Grand Viewpoint, the wagon wheel scars clear
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When I returned to the park on Sunday, I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. There are actually two parks in Canyonlands, one in the north: Island in the Sky, is the district most people visit because it is close to Arches and Moab; the other district is Needles, located farther south, past the basin of Island in the Sky. Needles attracted me because after a few days in the desert, looking out on valleys below, the opportunity to experience the park from within, looking up, seemed a welcome change. And I knew my camera could handle the close-up shots of the meadows. Then I realized the meadow would still be parched in the March winter, and that entrance is a further 76 miles out of my way. Island in the Sky it is! (And thank goodness for that revelation, because Needles is not the from the bottom-looking-up perspective that I believed, my guidebook led me astray.) The name comes from the illusion that this small plateau is an island above the gaping wound that is the canyon. Tiny in scope to the Grand Canyon, this one charms with its width.

This is the desert.
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There are a number of officially named canyons within the breadth of the park, each different, carved by one of the two rivers that warped this land. The Green and Colorado rivers met at this territory, and what they left behind is staggering (and tells us that at some time, these rivers were far more majestic than the silty streams they are today). Their separate paths south created the Island, and their confluence can be viewed at the northernmost point at the Needles. To the adventuresome with more time, a third district, The Maze, is accessible only by trail.

Mesa Arch
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After climbing a thousand feet or two from Moab, the drive is pretty, decorated with red rock formations and rolling prairie. The drive is about 40 miles, and it isn’t until you reach the ranger booth at the entrance to the park that what you are driving on appears to be an island. The rock has been carved, leaving smaller plateaus, hoodoos, exposing the layers of sediment from the ages in sloping walls. My breath caught in my lungs and I prepared a conversation with the ranger about the view out of the booth. Alas, there was only a sign urging me to pay at the visitor’s center. So I drove on, a few miles, smiling and giving enthusiastic thumbs up to the road bikers who flew past, as if their muscles propelled them with a fuel that my body is not evolved enough to generate. My car had had a difficult run of it climbing the altitude to this island, for goodness sakes.

From prairie to Canyonlands to Rocky Mountains
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A young ranger with a starry-eyed boyish face and hippie hair was training a grandfatherly ranger at the visitor’s center. I showed him my park pass (*note* the greatest single purchase you can ever make for an American road trip is the Interagency Pass, now going for $80. It offers some discounts on other services like camping, but will be paid off within three large parks and a national monument. The big ones charge $25 as of 2007. It is my most prized possession, close to my heart, second only to my car.) and he asked me if I would like a map. I had one. I asked him about the ranger program this morning, where the geology talk would be held. He gasped quietly to himself and apologized, there would be no such program. He removed the sign from the notice board, and lifted a large standing sign that read “Ranger Program Here 1:30” and walked it to the road. He told me that he would be speaking about the park at that time. The other ranger approached me as I was intently shopping for postcards. “Your first time to the park?”

It's another world
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“Yeah, except I drove through yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, my first time too.”

“Really? You’re lucky. It’s beautiful here.”

“Are you here alone?”

The ruins under the lip of the Butte
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“yup”

”wow.”

After purchasing my postcards I excused myself and went to my car to brainstorm. A number of hikes appealed to me and I wanted to spend the day here, but I needed to camp. So I drove about, snapping photos as I went, and found the trailhead I intended to start my exploration with, then turned around and went to find a campsite. The size of the place is misleading: it is designed for mostly dayhikers and a smattering of backpackers. There are twelve sites or so at the campground at Upheaval Dome, and the rest are reachable only after a rather long walk. The second site was open. I quickly registered myself, neglecting to read the fine print that with my pass the site is half the regular price, and surveyed to see if any superior sites were available. None were. I got the only vacancy. Pleased with my cautious plan, I decided to go farther within the park so I could make my way to the Grand Viewpoint, then Upheaval Dome trail to finish the day.

Cairns mark the way
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My first hike was a quick mile loop to the Mesa Arch. This got me closer to an Arch than I had at my previous National Park, and it was wide and grand and offered me wonderful photos.

My next hike was about three miles round trip, climbing the Aztec Butte that sat on the prairie like an anachronism. The butte is slickrock, which makes the climb a nice challenge, and completely dangerous after rains. After a mile of ambling along the prairie the butte looks something like a once-conical biscuit left there by some giant. The slickrock looks nothing like the other rock in the park, and at the plateau peak is Navajo sandstone. The path idles around the piney top, but you must scramble (easily) onto a hidden path to find the graineries from the Ancient Ones. There are two ruins that I could find, preserved by the ingenious stacking of rocks that is somehow beyond modern man. Under the lip of the butte, the sandstone is delicate, a frozen imprint of a large wave that carved and curved the sand. There are small arches, within two of which the grainery was built. The other was on the surface, a ruin of some other purpose, I imagine. After I felt accomplished in my exploration I began the descent. The cairns were placed along the slickrock, guiding amblers down a steep slope without anything resembling a stair. So I slid down the butte on my butt. It's true.

Upheaval Dome
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My next hike would be more of a walk, exploring the paths around Shafer Canyon Overlook. The main path walks out on a ridge, displaying both sides of the canyon. The ground is silty and rich, so I didn’t want to go too far off the paths, but the vegetation is so curious in the desert island- odd pine shrubbery, twisted skeletons of juniper, small flowering things I would relate to manzanita.

Next were the two miles along the ridge of the Grand Viewpoint. Here the canyon appears to be extended, pulled apart from the sides. The acreage of the land left behind is massive. A single hoodoo three hundred and fifty feet tall stands alone by a wall, and smaller, shorter islands dot the expanse. The rock is red and brown, wrinkled from the water, the plates, and the volcanic activity that some conjecture to be below this awesome landscape. The floor is scarred from wagon tracks from the first speculators, the men who found uranium maybe a century ago. The delicacy of the floor is such that the tracks are perfectly preserved but no winds have picked up dust to scatter and cover them. Once every thirty years or so enough rain will fall to allow the seeds waiting in the valley to germinate. I tried to capture the depth, and the scope, and the definition of the floor below. And as I walked along, turning this way and that for the panoramas, when I looked back to my photos, a single spot was the focus of my attention. A small garden of hoodoos, probably hundreds of feet tall, sticking up like fingers next to the canyon wall, was overwhelmingly represented on my memory card.

The beginning of the sunset
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I continued to drive, taking in all the scenic outlets and paths, to finish at the Upheaval Dome trail. I must say I would have liked to explore the Syncline Loop, a more respectful 8 miles of demanding climb, but without a large container of water and no one to talk about my plans, I felt more secure tackling every short trail the park offered. Upheaval Dome is an anomaly. The dome is a salt basin rising out of the valley. A number of theories speculate its origin, my personal favorites are: the result of a meteorite falling and the earth responding with a great exhale of its contents; and that the thousands of feet of salt were left behind by a now evaporated sea. The salt was covered for years with silt and sediment (are they the same thing?), and under this pressure, salt becomes plastic, it moves and began to push upward, thanks to all the plate activity and most likely some lava or something deeper underneath. The dirt above is displaced, and the salt rises up in escape from the pressure. That's the lay-version. But it was awesome! Not especially pretty or tear worthy, but a fascinating geology lesson.

And the end
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When I ran down, I was full of energy. I was fit and ready to tackle the Syncline Loop, because at my own pace I’m surprisingly quick. So I jumped in my car for a snack and realized I was about to faint. This was bad. I’ve never fainted before, but when I know I’m about to, it’s a sign of overexersion. I was overheated. I blasted the A/C and disappointedly drove back to camp.

Here is where the story changes. I made camp and read my book in the shade until dinnertime. All this time it was all I could do to ignore the springbreakers in my neighboring campsite. One, who I feel compelled to name Tyler, absolutely loved the sound of his own voice. This is not always a detraction, some people have wonderful things to say. Tyler, however, was surprisingly ignorant when it became clear these were college students. He would talk louder when no one listened, and made stupid arguments like the male body is not attractive, it’s like a Jeep, it gets the job done. He said that three more times while he was making his point. There were four of them, two women, and Tyler and some other kid who barely ever opened his mouth. I made dinner when they were out of camp (it was clear they were either getting drunk or getting supplies for that activity, as in the typical American fashion, they were mostly discussing other times they had gotten trashed, and how trashed they wanted to get tonight).

When the sun looked to be about forty minutes above the horizon, I took a little walk to Green River Overlook, which faced the west. I sat myself on a red boulder with my book and camera and water and waited. The winds picked up and whipped against the sides of the canyon with such sound that I could close my eyes and hear where the walls turned and contoured, obstacles to the howling wind, could almost picture the river’s path. A few tourists dropped in to snap a photo or two, ponder the great silence, and leave. I was very alone, and never felt lonely. The silence was staggering, it had been awhile since I had taken myself so far away, and then lingered. This hour will remain as one of the best, for its solitude, and my celebration of that. My batteries died as the sun’s light completely faded, it was a beautiful sunset, and it was all to myself, from start to finish.

I walked back to camp and readied for bed. My new sleeping bag was a source of excitement, top of the line 15 degree down fill, and I actually ran a mild sweat all night in its hi-tech warmth. As I shut off my headlamp, the springbreakers returned.

I had tried to find my earplugs, as I am cursed with very good hearing and the inability to filter loud noises from my dying concentration as I try to fall asleep. And so it was that I heard everything. First the discussions of the women’s bodies who were along (led by Tyler), then the discussion of whether one had poured too much vodka for Tyler. Then a woman who had been the voice of reason and compassion (relatively) that afternoon, got herself drunk and also lost the ability to control her volume. At one point they wanted to listen to music and all climbed in the car and blasted songs, which of course everyone could hear, nothing is soundproof in the wilderness. I had already completely stripped down in my bag so I was waiting for that last straw to complain, but a wonderful other camper walked over and told them that he wasn’t here to “listen to your lame-ass music,” and they apologized and stopped listening to Fog Hat. Then the quiet one thought it would be really fun to drive around the park intoxicated. The others did not agree, but did not stop him. He returned a few minutes later. During the next few hours they would quiet down for a time and I would sleep. The end of their night appeared to be obvious when the two loud campers engaged in coitus in their tent while their companions giggled. The second couple was awkwardly not at the having sex stage, but at least had their own tent. When the woman’s shrieks reached a Meg Ryan pitch, the shuffling of synthetic fabrics ceased, and Tyler began to shout at her that he could not find his boxers. He said Patagonia makes seam-free capilene and that makes it hard to get in them, but he could not even find them at all, as he had disrobed mostly in one swift move. By this time only half of their sentences were complete thoughts.

The other couple was awkwardly conversing about Tyler and Meg, then the latter engaged in their mating again. This continued on and off another three times or so, until Meg claimed that a certain physiological condition had arisen that made the act less pleasurable for her, and Tyler was very disappointed, refused to believe her, but settled on discussing how he could not find his underwear until I gather he passed out.

I woke with dawn, packed my things as loudly as possible, and hit the road for Zion.