be the more outgoing one of the pair, and Kristi. Megan’s shoulder-length hair whirls attractively around her hazel eyes and rosy-cheeked face. She’s wearing a blue zip-neck long-sleeved shirt and blue track pants and carries a blue backpack-if I had to guess, I’d say she likes the color blue. Kristi’s blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail that reveals the sunny freckles on her forehead and her deep grayish-blue eyes. Besides her clothes-a plain white short- sleeved T-shirt with blue shorts over black long underwear-I notice that Kristi has accessorized for the day, wearing small silver hoop earrings and dark sunglasses with faux tortoiseshell frames and a snakeskin-pattern retaining strap. Unusual to have earrings on in a canyon, but I’m hardly dressed to kill, so I skip issuing a fashion citation. Both women are in their mid-twenties, and I learn in response to my first question that they both hail from Moab. I briefly work on memorizing their names, and which one is which, so I don’t goof it up later.
Megan doesn’t seem to mind joining me in conversation. She fires off a story about how she and Kristi overshot the Granary Spring Trailhead and got lost in the desert for an hour before they found the start of the canyon. I say I think it is easier to navigate on a bike than in a vehicle because the landscape passes more slowly.
“Oh my God, if we’d been on bikes, we’d have dried up in the wind before we got here,” Megan cracks, and it serves to break the ice.
The canyon is still just a shallow arroyo-a dry sandy gulch-nestled between two sets of thirty-foot-tall sand dunes. Before the terrain becomes more technical, we ease into a friendly exchange, chatting about our lives in the polarized resort communities of Moab and Aspen. I learn that they, like me, work in the outdoor recreation industry. As logistics managers for Outward Bound, they outfit expeditions from the company’s supply warehouse in Moab. I tell them I’m a sales and shop worker at the Ute Mountaineer, an outdoor gear store in Aspen.
There’s a mostly unspoken acknowledgment among the voluntarily impoverished dues-payers of our towns that it’s better to be fiscally poor yet rich in experience-living the dream-than to be traditionally wealthy but live separate from one’s passions. There is an undercurrent of attitude among the high-country proletariat that to buy one’s way back into the experience of resort life is a shameful scarlet letter. Better to be the penniless local than the affluent visitor. (But the locals depend on the visitors to survive, so the implied elitism is less than fair.) We understand our mutual membership on the same side of the equation.
The same is true of our environmental sensibilities. We each hold Edward Abbey-combative conservationist; anti-development, anti-tourism, and anti-mining essayist; beer swiller; militant ecoterrorist; lover of the wilderness and women (preferably wilderness women, though those are unfortunately rare)-as a sage of environmentalism. Remembering an oddball quote of his, I say how he delighted in taking things to the extreme. “I think there was an essay where he wrote, ‘Of course, we’re all hypocrites. The only true act of an environmentalist would be to shoot himself in the head. Otherwise he’s still contaminating the place by his mere presence.’ That’s a paraphrase, but it’s effectively what he said.”
“That’s kind of morbid,” Megan replies, putting on a face of sham guilt for not shooting herself.
Moving on from Ed Abbey, we discover that we’re each experienced in slot canyoneering. Kristi asks me what my favorite slot canyon is, and without hesitation, I recount my experience in Neon Canyon, an unofficially named branch of the Escalante River system in south-central Utah. I wax poetic about its five rappels, the keeper pothole (a deep, steep, and smooth-walled hole in the canyon floor that will “keep” you there if you don’t have a partner to boost out first), and the Golden Cathedral: a bizarre rappel through a sandstone tunnel in the roof of an alcove the size of Saint Peter’s that leaves you hanging free from the walls for almost sixty feet until you land in a large pool of water and then swim to the shore.
“It’s phenomenal, you have to go,” I conclude.
Kristi tells me about her favorite slot, which is just across the dirt road from the Granary Spring Trailhead. It’s one of the upper forks of the Robbers Roost drainage, nicknamed “Mindbender” by her Outward Bound friends. She describes a passage in that slot where you traverse the canyon wedged between the walls some fifteen feet off the ground, the V-shaped slot tapering to a few inches wide at your feet, and even narrower below that.
I mentally add that one to my to-do list.
A few minutes later, just before noon, we arrive at a steep, smooth slide down a rock face, which heralds the first slot and the deeper, narrower sections that have drawn us to Blue John Canyon. I slide fifteen feet down the rock embankment, skidding on the soles of my sneakers, leaving a pair of black streaks on the pink sandstone and spilling forward into the sand at the bottom of the wall. Hearing the noise as she comes around the corner, Kristi sees me squatting in the dirt and assumes I have fallen. “Oh my gosh, are you OK?” she asks.
“Oh yeah, I’m fine. I did that on purpose,” I tell her in earnest, as the skid truly had been intentional. I catch her glance, a good-natured shot that tells me she believes me but thinks I’m silly for not finding an easier way down. I look around and, seeing an obviously less risky access route that would have avoided the slide, I feel slightly foolish.
Five minutes later, we come to the first section of difficult downclimbing, a steep descent where it’s best to turn in and face the rock, reversing moves that one would usually use for climbing up. I go down first, then swing my backpack around to retrieve my video camera and tape Megan and Kristi. Kristi pulls a fifteen-foot-long piece of red webbing out of her matching red climber’s backpack and threads it through a metal ring that previous canyoneering parties have suspended on another loop of webbing tied around a rock. The rock is securely wedged in a depression behind the lip of the drop-off, and the webbing system easily holds a person’s weight. Grasping the webbing, Megan backs herself down over the drop-off. She has to maneuver around an overhanging chockstone-a boulder suspended between the walls of the canyon-that blocks an otherwise easy scramble down into the deepening slot. Once Megan is down, Kristi follows skittishly, as she doesn’t completely trust the webbing system. After she’s down, I climb back up to retrieve Kristi’s webbing.
We walk thirty feet and come to another drop-off. The walls are much closer now, only two to three feet apart. Megan throws her backpack over the drop before shimmying down between the walls, while Kristi takes a few pictures. I watch Megan descend and help her by pointing out the best handholds and footholds. When Megan is at the bottom of the drop, she discovers that her pack is soaking wet. It turns out her hydration-system hose lost its nozzle when she tossed the pack over the ledge, and was leaking water into the sand. She quickly finds the blue plastic nozzle and stops the water’s hemorrhage, saving her from having to return to the trailhead. While it’s not a big deal that her pack is wet, she has lost precious water. I descend last, my pack on my back and my delicate cameras causing me to get stuck briefly between the walls at several constrictions. Squirming my way over small chockstones, I stem my body across the gap between the walls to follow the plunging canyon floor. There is a log wedged in the slot at one point, and I use it like a ladder on a smooth section of the skinny-people-only descent.
While the day up above the rim rock is getting warmer, the air down in the canyon becomes cooler as we enter a four-hundred-yard-long section of the canyon where the walls are over two hundred feet high but only fifteen feet apart. Sunlight never reaches the bottom of this slot. We pick up some raven’s feathers, stick them in our hats, and pause for photographs.
A half mile later, several side canyons drop into the Main Fork where we are walking, as the walls open up to reveal the sky and a more distant perspective of the cliffs downcanyon. In the sun once again, we stop to share two of my melting chocolate bars. Kristi offers some to Megan, who declines, and Kristi says, “I really can’t eat all this chocolate by myself…Never mind, yes I can,” and we laugh together.
We come to an uncertain consensus that this last significant tributary off to the left of the Main Fork is the West Fork, which means it’s the turnoff for Kristi and Megan to finish their circuit back to the main dirt road about four miles away. We get hung up on saying our goodbyes when Kristi suggests, “Come on, Aron, hike out with us- we’ll go get your truck, hang out, and have a beer.”
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
