hand. If my grasp slips or for some reason I let go, I have no backup; I’ll accelerate down the rope, only slightly slower than in free fall, and take a hard landing next to the pool, probably breaking my legs or worse. It’s very important that I take the overhanging section slowly.
The pucker factor is high on the upper part of the rappel. With the rope’s weight putting additional friction on my rappel device, I have to fight and pull the strands to feed them through the device bit by bit-a significant effort that saps my remaining strength-but not so much that I slide down the rope and lose my balance. It’s like trying to drive a car in 5-mph stop-and-go traffic while pressing the accelerator to the floor and controlling the vehicle’s speed by releasing the hand brake. I have to let off the brake to get going, but it’s dangerously easy to release it too far and lose control. Doing it one-handed means I don’t have any way to reach out and stabilize myself when I start to swing one direction or the other as I move my feet over the awkwardly uneven lip of the shelf. I’m most worried that I’ll let too much rope through, fall off the lip, and hit the edge of the shelf with my shoulder or my head, then let go of the rope. The poached air sucks my pores dry, and I’m tortured for three minutes as I make a prolonged series of infinitesimal adjustments and maneuvers to get my body under the shelf. Finally, I let a little more rope through the ATC, my feet cut loose off the lower edge of the shelf, and I’m dangling free from the wall on my rope, some sixty feet off the ground. A moment of giddy delight replaces my anxiety as I spin around to face the amphitheater, floating comfortably in midair. Gliding down the rope, moving faster as I get closer to the ground, I notice the echo of my ropes singing as they slide through the ATC.
Touching down, I pull the twenty-foot-long tails of my ropes through my rappel device and immediately lunge for the mud-ringed puddle. I move out of the sun and into the cool shade, brusquely swing my pack off my left side and then more delicately over my right arm, and once again retrieve my Nalgene. When I open the lid this time, I toss its contents into the sand off to my left and fill it in the puddle, scooping up leaves and dead insects along with the aromatic water. I’m so parched I can taste the elevated humidity around the pool, and it piques my thirst. I swish the liquid to rinse out the bottle and then dump that to the side as well.
Scooping the bottle through the pool twice, I again fill it with the brown water. In the time it takes me to bring the Nalgene’s rim to my lips, I debate whether to sip it slowly or guzzle away and decide to sip then guzzle. The first droplets meet my tongue, and somewhere in the heavens, a choir strikes up. The water is cool, and best of all, it’s brandy-sweet, like a fine after-dinner port. I drink the entire liter in four chugging swallows, drowning myself in pleasure, and then reach to fill the bottle again. (So much for sipping.) The second liter follows in the same manner, and I refill the bottle once more. I wonder if the water would taste as wonderfully sweet to a normally hydrated person. If the water really is this delicious, what makes it that way? Are the dead leaves stewing the liquid into some kind of desert tea?
I sit at the edge of the puddle, and, for the moment, I am enjoying myself, as though my thirst is all that really matters, and now that it’s taken care of, I am totally at ease. Everything disappears. I even cease noticing the pain of my arm. I daydream as if I’m on a picnic, sitting in the shade after a long lunch, with nothing left to do except watch the clouds roll by.
But I know the relief will be short-lived. As relaxed as I am, I have eight miles of sandy hiking in front of me to reach my truck, and I need to steel myself for it. I notice several sets of hoofprints in the sand off to my right. Someone, or a group of someones, has ridden up into and out of this box canyon since the last storm. My heart leaps to think I might come across a party of cowboys somewhere along my hike, but I know better than to yell out or hold those hopes too closely. The dried-out road apples dotting the wash for fifty yards downcanyon tell me it’s been over a day since those horses came through here. And tourists on horseback aren’t likely to spend the night.
I quaff the third liter more conservatively, even nestling the hard plastic bottle in the sand for a minute or two to rummage through my pack and sort out what I can leave behind. I set aside my broken Discman and the two scratched CDs, and decide that everything else will come with me. With my digital still camera, I take a picture of my doubled rope hanging down the Big Drop and then hold the camera out in my left hand for a self-portrait with the pool in the background. It’s 12:16 P.M. I am elated to have come this far, but the photo records a grungy eight-day beard, specks of gore from the operation, and a haunted grimace. After putting the camera and the video camcorder in the outer mesh pouch of my backpack, I work at fitting the bite valve back on the tubing stub at the bottom of my CamelBak reservoir and then fill up the container with two liters of the syrupy water.
Still drinking my third liter, I get out my folded guidebook photocopy and measure the distance to the first landmark on my journey, the confluence of Blue John with Horseshoe Canyon. The map is delineated in kilometers, and doing the conversion I estimate it’s a solid two miles from where I’m sitting to the confluence. After that, a short half mile will bring me to the boundary of Canyonlands, and two miles after that, I’ll pass the Great Gallery, which the caption under the photo on the left side of my photocopy describes as “probably the best [pictograph panel] in the world.” Another three quarters of a mile, or maybe a mile, and I will come to the first water seep in the Barrier Creek drainage. That means it will be at least two hours until I get to the next place that could possibly have water. I don’t know for sure if there will be anything there-it will depend on the water table and any rains that came the week before I arrived in Utah-but I’ll need water by then, whether it’s there or not.
The best I can do to prepare for the coming march is fill my CamelBak and Nalgene and seal them closed. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I stand up and feel the water sloshing in my stomach. I wish I could rest and let the water enter my system, but I’m slowly bleeding out, and I have three, maybe four hours to go from here. I made my choice an hour and forty-five minutes ago when I cut into my arm. Now I resolve to follow that choice through to its conclusion-reaching my truck and then getting to a clinic or, failing that, a phone.
Marching into the wide-open, sunny, sandy canyon bottom, I start my eight-mile trek. The heat instantly saps what little rehydration I accomplished at the pool, and within two hundred yards, I have to take a sip of water. After going through the rigmarole of digging my Nalgene out of my pack, I take my last remaining nonlocking carabiner off my harness’s gear loop and clip the gate through the bottle’s cap loop, then snap the metal link onto a strap hanging off the left side of my backpack’s padded waist belt.
Continuing on, I walk past several large cottonwoods and a thicket of tamarisks that testify to the substantial runoff that passes through this part of the canyon. In another hundred yards, the brush subsides. I tire of walking in my harness, with the belay device and daisy chain dangling in front of my thighs, so I tear the belt back through the safety ring and wiggle my legs out of their loops one at a time until the harness and the attached accoutrements drop behind me to lie in the sand like a pile of dead snakes. “That’ll be someone else’s little score,” I think, “some fine canyoneering booty, that.” Through the first meanders of the canyon, I find myself crossing the fifty-yard-wide floor to take advantage of the shade at the edges of the wash, but still, the effort of walking at even a moderate pace leaves me parched within a minute of sipping at my water. After a single mile, I’m as thoroughly dried up as I was at the top of the rappel, and I’ve already drunk a full liter, a third of my water supply.
Not ten minutes after leaving the puddle, my bowels wake up for the first time since Saturday morning. I know what’s coming, and I know it’s coming quick. I rush over to an alcove along the edge of the wash where the occasional flood action has carved out a bench on the outside curve of the stream course, and hurry to undo the belt on my shorts. I strip down my three layers of shorts, biking shorts, and underwear just in time as I desecrate the slickrock. The water I’ve drunk has spilled over out of my stomach and flooded my bowels.
As if I weren’t in enough distress already, now I have to try and clean myself up. It’s pointless to try to wipe; I have nothing except my clothes, and I kind of need those. I pull up my underwear but take off the biking shorts and stuff them in the top of my backpack. I put my tan-and-blood-colored shorts back on and feel ten degrees cooler without the black padded shorts. No time to dwell; the episode is past.
Hiking again, just before the canyon swerves to the right in a sweeping gooseneck bend, I take a left into a side canyon, thinking it to be the main drainage, but within forty steps, I feel an added strain on my debilitated system and realize that I’m actually walking upgrade and turn around.
Suddenly, I feel a wetness spreading across my lower back. My CamelBak is leaking. I stop and drop to my knees, swinging my backpack around to the front. Sure enough, the bite valve is leaking water out of the bottom of the CamelBak. It’s not designed to hold back pressure at the bottom of the reservoir, and since I sliced away the
