Angel’s Landing, Zion National Park. I’ve hiked along cliffs, huffed up the twenty-one switchbacks of Walter’s Wiggles, and crawled on my hands and knees up smooth-shouldered sandstone the shape of prone elephants, just to get to the saddle. An airy isthmus stretches out before me, connecting the mainland to a camel’s hump called Angel’s Landing, […]
Essays
Attack of the Zippers
Camping requires a minimum level of technical competence. I wish I had it. I decided to camp out at Indian Gardens, a half-day down from Grand Canyon Village on the Bright Angel Trail. The problem with my plan was that it was damn icy at Indian Gardens in January. And cold. I ended up with […]
Hero’s Journey
Near dark at Grand Canyon Village. Around dinnertime, even the waiters and cooks felt called to step outside and breathe in the spectacle: low-lying snow clouds, swimming just below the rim, transited the Canyon from west to east in single file. We lived in the sky now, in a flight of impermanence. Snow had settled […]
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 […]
Reasons
I asked myself if it wasn’t better to pack my truck, declare this trip a detour disaster and be back in Chicago for Christmas. I had credible evidence to argue my claim. My truck had broken down and I’d had to spend nearly a week in Albuquerque waiting for a new gas tank that had […]
The Inside-out Canyon
The Grand Canyon complex, seen in its entirety from the North Rim, looks as
though a roving band of gods poured a molten mountain range into a mold, and let the batholith cool. When they extracted the mountains and set them farther east, they left the empty mold upside-down. Litterbugs. Over the centuries, dust and water […]
Even in the Utah Desert, Every Trail is the Right Trail
There are some woods by the house I used to live in, back when I used to live in the conurbation of a major eastern city called Chicago, in a universe far, far away. Those woods are slowly lapsing back into oak savannah, and crossed with muddy paths. I can’t tell you the number of […]
Foothill
In the Mancos Valley, I hiked some foothills which lap the northern scarp of Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado. The steep slopes of these foothills, called Summit Ridge, wore on their shoulders a loose, black garment of shale. A pinion-juniper woodland of shaggy-barked pines and waxy berries clung to the ridges.
As I mounted the long […]
Ghosts of the Hoh River Rainforest
The Hoh River Rain Forest, Olympia National Park, Washington.
Sitka Spruce stand like statues, 200 foot guardians draped in robes of fog, sheathed in velvet undergarments of moss. Contortionist Big Leaf Maples twist and freeze in a belly dance, laying on a lot of epiphytes and dripping with green breath. An old aspen seems to sleep, […]
Highland
You can glide all day through the Ozarks and not hit a mall until Branson. I wind through oaken national forest on routes that snake like true mountain roads even though they rise only 30 feet here, dip just 20 feet there. I don’t reach higher elevation until the Boston Highlands, a well-watered plateau heavily […]