Between a Rock and a Hard Place

to the head of Blue John Canyon, through two narrow and deep slots, over a twenty-meter rappel, and out to the confluence with Horseshoe Canyon, past the petroglyph alcoves of the Great Gallery, finally returning to my vehicle. A thirty-mile day. I figured if I started by nine A.M., I would be out by five P.M.

At mile 162 on I-70, I exited for Green River, recognizing the sign warning travelers that the next available gas and food services were 110 miles to the west. I stopped at a convenience store in Green River and considered whether to call Brad and Leah for a final confirmation on the Goblin Valley party. Because of the late hour, I deferred the call, thinking I would get in touch the next afternoon from Hanksville. Brad would be getting up early in the morning to ski, and I didn’t want to wake them. I bought two bottles of Gatorade in the store and then made a lap up and down Green River’s main street until I found the Bureau of Land Management access road heading south out of town.

At the southwest edge of Green River, I pass the empty parking lot of a yellow aluminum-sided building, the Emery County sheriff’s office. After hooking a right on Airport Road, I drive under the interstate into a landscape of obscurity. Not a single light perforates the absolute blackness of the San Rafael Desert.

I drive over weeds growing obstinately in the unstriped and roughly paved road, wondering if their presence is a sign of the tenacity of life or of the laxness of county maintenance. Slowing at an intersection, I turn left onto the graded dirt road leading into the Roost. It’s just after ten P.M. A BLM sign indicates that the Horseshoe Canyon Trailhead is forty-seven miles ahead through the desert darkness. My truck obliterates a tumbling tumbleweed as I pass a yellow triangular sign cautioning, ROADS MAY BE IMPASSABLE DUE TO STORMS. I get the feeling I’m headed out into nowhere. Jackrabbits dart onto the road in my headlights, racing me, scurrying left then right, then heading straight down the road in front of my tires before dashing back into the hardscrabble badlands.

Cresting a swale at high speed, my headlights drop off into an arroyo, and I nearly follow the beams into the gully before I blindly swerve left and find the road cut again. The rear of my truck fishtails madly for the first of many times. Dozens of curves, swoops, and sandy washes try to catapult my truck off the road, but each time I correct my tack and make the save. I feel like I’m driving an off-road rally: skidding my tires through the corners, kicking up dust clouds, accelerating after the curves, launching over humps in the terrain. Stuff’s flying all over the place in my cab as the rock music on the stereo eggs me on. The road is like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I’m driving with my brights on to help me anticipate the curves hidden on the backside of the hilltops, but they barely help. I could slow down, except I’m averaging only 30 mph as it is, I’m tired, and I want to get to sleep before midnight.

I catch the distinct constellation of Perseus out my left window. Except in one ravine that I suspect is the waterless San Rafael River drainage, there are no trees and only scarce bunches of grass growing higher than a few inches. On occasion, I cross a fence line at a cattle guard-the bright yellow bars entrenched in the road have been recently painted, telling me that somebody still uses this land. Still, there are no lights to break the desolate spell that the night casts over the barren country. A beer bottle appears in the throw of my headlights; I don’t swerve to miss it. My front right wheel hits the neck of the bottle, and it jumps up, bumping the bottom of my truck. I think, “Hayduke has been here,” recalling the eco-protagonist of Edward Abbey’s The Monkeywrench Gang, who protests the presence of roads by chucking his beer bottles at them.

Periodically, my truck hurtles over grooved sandstone slabs in the road tread, where county graders have scraped outcroppings flat. The graders have piled earthen banks along the roadsides, which block my headlights from reaching the desert floor. I fly over the edge of the next swale at 40 mph, to meet another curve in the road and slam my brakes hard. Dramatically reducing my speed just in time, I make the corner and shift from third into fourth on the next straightaway. I rev my truck obnoxiously through a skeletal forest of scrub bushes and rush through the night.

Another rabbit.

Another fence line.

Another curve.

Unexpectedly, a small brown sign flashes past me, pointing out the road spur to Horseshoe Canyon. I stop and reverse, then turn left down the significantly bumpier approach to the dirt parking area. There are three other vehicles and two encampments at the trailhead, despite the signs prohibiting camping in the parking area. I turn my truck around and find a flat spot near the sign board welcoming visitors to the Horseshoe Canyon quadrant of Canyonlands National Park. After organizing the splayed equipment in the bed of my truck, I roll out my sleeping bag and pad and call it a night. I drift off to sleep, thinking about the Blue John-Horseshoe circuit that I will undertake in the morning, the wind rocking my truck in the organic lullaby of canyon country.

Day Four: Out of Food and Water

I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe-what other choice was there?…We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself…believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing…

– LANCE ARMSTRONG, It’s Not About the Bike

DIFFUSE SUNLIGHT catches on the swirling undersides of thin clouds high above the Utah desert. “It’s gonna be a nice sunset,” I think from the bottom of the fissure. I hope that the clouds will stick around and help hold in the heat tonight. It’s early Monday evening. I’ve been awake for fifty-seven hours. I’ve been trapped for fifty hours. And I’ve had the same song stuck in my head for forty-three hours.

Like a radio with the scan button permanently depressed, my restless and unrested mind expends its energy trolling for distraction, only to land on the same station again and again. The station has but one ten-second sample of one song. Over and over, always with the same lyric; “BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, BBC5, BBC6, BBC7, BBC Heaven!” It’s not even a real song. I feel like the antagonist Dr. Evil, my plans foiled again. I’m left shaking my fist in the air-“Why won’t you leave me alone, Austin Powers? Why must you torment me?”

My fatigue has taken on the heavily drugged feel of an intense fever cooking my brain. I’ve fallen asleep in some odd places before-standing in front of a painting in a Paris museum; sitting at a 110-decibel Guns N’ Roses concert-but I’ve never felt this level of sleep deprivation. It’s like a disease breaking down my higher brain functions, pushing me closer to the line of irrationality. Maybe it’s best that I can’t sleep, lest I drift away into hypothermia. I can’t sleep, but neither am I fully awake-this mental miasma has put me well on my way toward madness.

I remember a time I felt almost this way, descending the east bowl of Mount Princeton in the dark with my endurance-training mentor Theresa Daus-Weber during our first annual fourteeners bender in September 2002. We linked seven high peaks in forty-eight hours of continuous hiking, and were into the second night of the sixty-mile, 25,000-vertical-feet climbing spree when my sleep-weary mind lost its grip on reality.

I scampered across a two-mile-wide slanting boulder field ahead of Theresa. We each had a headlamp and a hiking pole to help us traverse the unstable terrain in the dark. I frequently lost sight of her behind me, since the rock flutings that featured the mountainside stood in my line of sight. Stopping to wait around each corner, I would sit and fall asleep for a moment, waking within twenty or thirty seconds to the sound of Theresa’s trekking pole tapping the rocks in sync with her stride. I would see the light of her headlamp bob up in my face as she approached, and then I’d stand up without a word and scramble off over the next few dozen boulders until I couldn’t see her anymore, then stop to repeat the cycle. Tick, tick, tick, her pole lightly striking the boulders. Flash, her headlamp shooting into my eyes, blinding me to the fact there was a person behind the light. Another wordless encounter, boulders zipping underfoot in the throw of my headlamp, then blessed rest.

Despite an hour and a half of movement, it never seemed like I made any progress toward the far side of the bowl, where we would intercept an access road at about 12,000 feet. Something was wrong. After the tenth or twelfth or fifteenth time I had replicated the scramble-doze-wake-tick-flash-scramble pattern, a surreal tug of insanity gave me the idea that each time I fell asleep, it reset my position on the mountainside to the same point in the middle of the boulder field. My body was somehow being transported mysteriously back uphill during my