Riding south down 191 out of Canyonlands, the landforms undergo serial metamorphosis: from sweeping canyon to mountaintop with stiff stands of pine, to plains of beans more like something out of Iowa. As I crossed into the Ute tribal lands, the geology opened its wings even more. Azure peaks in the storm-halo distance; the Carrizo […]
Author: mikejust
Dead Wood
Canyonlands NP, Needles District: I decided on a day hike from Elephant Hill trailhead. The trail ends about seven miles – or three to four hours later – at Druid’s Arch.
I passed by sandstone domes and open canyon, representative of much of southeastern Utah. The sandstone smoothed into blunted heads, stained with desert varnish in […]
The Clouds – West Side
I’d been broken up with my Four Corners girlfriend for six months or thereabouts. She’d been my second New Mexico girlfriend. That break-up dovetailed nicely into another depressed winter for my failed mission out west.
Every time I go west of the Mississippi, not only do the call letters of TV and radio stations change from […]
The Vision
Along the lower reaches of the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Trail as it nears the Colorado, a door-sized portal seems carved into the sandstone, the shape of a mouse hole. Reminds me of what I’d imagined the tomb of Jesus looked like. Beyond the portal, impenetrable darkness against the sunny walls of the inner canyon. […]
Thou Shalt Not Kill the Chrysalis
In a rain soaked walk through the woods one Sunday afternoon, I encountered the tiniest of cocoons dangling from a branch. The thought occurred that there is no insignificant life. What if all the divisions you and I placed between life were just artificial screens that prevented life from getting to experience itself? And what […]
The Unawareness Sleeping in Awareness
If you take the Grand Canyon for granted, you’ll take everything for granted.
I hike back from Ribbon Falls to Bright Angel Campground, through Bright Angel Canyon. I felt curiously disconnected from the side canyon which opened up before me. I pressured myself to enjoy and appreciate every moment, because I’d only be here a few […]
That Which Upholds the World
Treading beside a monolith of sandstone over a thousand feet high and miles long. Many times I stop along this barrier and feel the power bleeding off it. So much blood coursing through the stone.
The creatures that take refuge here—sand fills the wall’s smallest dimple, where a sacred datura harbors the dreams by which demons […]
Squandering Wandering
I arrive back at Bright Angel Creek, to its infinite rush to feed some other insatiable hunger of a stream not itself, yet itself. I take off my shoes and examine my purple toenails as a skinny silver fox trots, stops, stares; trots, stops, stares, then meanders off. Each step is a decision. Each step […]
My Rod and My Staff Comfort Me?
Anger and rain pelted the rubble as I half-stumbled down the South Kaibab Trail in Grand Canyon National Park. Seems every time I take South Kaibab down, I get mad at myself for something. I’d missed a shuttle bus to the trailhead and I’d forgotten the rain-hood that protects my backpack. I was blind to […]
Things a Mountain Taught Me
I had hiked mountains in England’s Lake District a couple years before, and again yesterday. Today I decided to get adventurous. I took a ferry from the resort town of Windemere across the eponymous lake, largest in England, to the tea-cozy village of Ambleside with its farms hemmed in by dry stone walls. Then I […]