Stone Desert

INTRODUCTION

Originally published in 1995, Stone Desert was my first book, the record of a young backcountry guide drifting through the wilderness for a winter, gasping out loud at every turn. I could barely keep up with all that I saw in the geologic architecture of Canyonlands National Park in southeast Utah. What I experienced that season, from first snow to last snow, became this book.

I was a dirtbag when I wrote this—no rent, no roof, most nights of the year spent on the ground. When I was nineteen, I started working as a canoe guide in Canyonlands, paddling the broad, lazy rivers through places called Labyrinth, Stillwater, and Meander. I’d been reading the nature writer Ann Zwinger since high school, and in the backcountry I carried the work of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez. I wanted to immerse myself as these writers had, and come out the other side with words. When Williams wrote about this elegantly eroded country, she described cutting her flesh and out came red sand instead of blood. Walking for months in the mazes and arid gardens around the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, I began to understand what she meant.

Turn this book over and you’ll find on the other side a full reproduction of the original journal that formed Stone Desert. One side is the seed, a personal document from a winter of studious foot travel, and the other is the germinated blossom, the published work that came out of it. I think of the two as an ouroboros, a snake biting its own tail.

Stone Desert went out of print long ago, and I scarcely thought about it again until Andy Nettell, longtime owner of Back of Beyond Books in Moab, arrived at my home in Colorado bearing a bottle of whiskey. He said that after three decades, he wanted to see it back in print, along with a complete reproduction of the journal. Warts and all, he said. He wanted every misspelling and awkward notation. Andy saw this as a document of a time and a place, Canyonlands through the eyes of a wet-behind-the-ears naturalist. I brought out the leatherbound book with its drawings and scribbled words and we opened it on the kitchen table. With whiskey tipped into glasses, this project unfolded.

I’ve learned to write with greater sensitivity and awareness since my twenties. You’d certainly hope so. My relationship with Indigenous people in this landscape has evolved, as has my understanding of wilderness and a person’s responsibility to it. I would have rewritten the whole thing, but that’s not the point. This is what my winter was like, pen in hand, as I vanished into these sensual folds of earth. The book is as-is. Dust off the sand by reading it yourself.

—Craig Childs, Norwood, CO, 2022

Chapter One

WATER ON STONE

Karyn Brown, a Scottish artist, outdoor education instructor, and a former pub bartender, had been dropped off at a bar in Moab, Utah. We were meeting to enter the desert together. Where and how had been superfluous until now. We drank beer and discussed options. There was a river nearby, cutting through Canyonlands National Park. Nobody would be on the water this late in the season. Of course, the only way out of the canyon was to stash the boat and find a route by foot. We drank more beer.

In the morning we borrowed a canoe. We frantically attacked the grocery store for ten minutes, purchasing supplies for a twenty-day venture down the river, slinging objects into the cart. We duct taped the edges of cardboard boxes for last-minute water proofing, and piled everything into a seventeen-foot boat.

Late afternoon, November, we shoved in the canoe and unceremoniously slipped into a canyon which consumed most of the space between earth and sky.

×

Two days down, the canoe rotated aimlessly, a needle on an erratic compass. There was no one to watch us, no one to care, no navigation because the river moves in only one direction. Karyn was curled over her journal in the bow. Our shadows crossed each other in the tilted autumnal sunlight. An alcove several hundred feet high hung into the sandstone corridor above the river like the inside dome of a palace. It was streaked where flash floods had sprayed over the edge. The walls around it slipped into the water beside the boat at right angles. The canoe moved by. The alcove blended back into the canyon behind us.

We were on the river which divides the desert, the Colorado. Around it, the Colorado Plateau expands into 130,000 square miles of dry canyons and worn sedimentary shapes. The river gives a sense of passage, a winding brown string leading into an alien fortification of pure rock. From Moab the river cuts south through a north-tilting uplift. This puts the river and the earth at odds from here to the end of the Grand Canyon. There is a great deal of resistance and tension as the two grind on each other. The landscape dissolves in places and remains in others. The river turns between these forms.

A native story was once told here. A leader had mourned so much over the death of his wife that a route was made for him to an eternal world where he could see her again. The route cut through places no one had seen, regions too fantastic for human eyes. If people knew where it was, they would certainly grow tired of their lives and seek out this place. Tah-vwoats, the god who created the trail, filled it with water behind him to keep the people away. That water became the Colorado River. Major John Wesley Powell, who led the first U.S. charting expedition down the Colorado in 1869, recorded the account in his journal, adding More than once have I been warned by the Indians not to enter this canyon; they consider it disobedience to the gods and contempt for their authority, and believed that it would surely bring their wrath upon me. So we paddled in silence, gliding beneath wrath where the gods were frozen in stone over the route to heaven.

Prior to this we had been teaching desert ecology to Southern California high school kids. We had led them down the lower Colorado River above the Mexican border, just before it dwindles to a salt-laden, lifeless pit of chemicals and irrigation runoff, never reaching the ocean. One hundred degrees in the air, clear, poisoned water, surrounded by the ragged, volcanic Sonoran Desert. We were talking to them about water and politics, showing them which rocks to turn over to find scorpions. We put them on a bus at the end and sent them across the Imperial Valley, once, before irrigation, called the Valley of the Dead, home to Los Angeles where they could turn on the tap and drain the Colorado River.

Karyn looked up from her work and stared mystified into the cliffs which were ringed by thousands of fallen house-sized boulders. The cliffs reared pinnacled heads into the next level of cliffs, which rose again through collapsing shields into bench lands and mesas, all resisting the draw of a river thousands of feet below. She said This river made major damage. She had a cutting Scottish accent. Her words were always quick.

I set down my own journal, like hers filled with drawings and notes of everything we saw—each set of dried mouse bone’s, each skeletonized stone granary left by vanished farming cultures. The damage was unimaginable. Erosion was steadily stripping away the layers which had been so laboriously placed. The formations visible in Canyonlands began depositing about 280 million years ago, taking less than five million years to gut the whole thing down to here.

It begins where it has now ended, with grains of sand. Sand composing towers, buttes, canyon walls. Sand drifting against an island of blackbrush. Sand curling through the wind of a 500-foot slot in the rock. Sand in the cook gear, sand in the sleeping bag. The grains are laid throughout several thousand feet of mostly sandstone extending across Utah, into three surrounding states. They are memories of fallen mountain ranges, dune deserts, oceans, rivers, and estuaries. Encased, one layer upon the next, the sand-turned-stone records the passages: which way a 200-million-year-old wind blew, where a great river delta once ran upon an ocean, the direction a dinosaur walked when it left prints around a water hole. Under a microscope the particles have changed slightly, more smooth, minutely smaller, but sifted in the palm they are unchanged to the eye, the same sand that once tossed across Triassic sand dunes.

Sandstone is a combination of sand, chiefly quartz, and cementing agents such as calcite, assisted by iron-oxide and clay. As the original ingredients rest beneath accumulating layers, the calcite cement hardens sand into stone. There the grains are packed tight, compressed beneath ever-increasing layers for millions of years until they are exposed by the motion of wind and water. Sand is then set free and sifts to the bottom of the canyons, into the river, mobile again.

When I struck the blade of my paddle into the cold water, it created whirlpools in the flowing silt. The water was clear down to four inches, typical in this low-water season when most silt-laden runoff is detained by snow in the mountains. It is the spring and summer which feed this river. Some 26,500 square miles of Rocky Mountains dump in mud and water and you cannot even dip a fingernail without losing sight of it. But now we were riding down with the last of the sand.

We had been sleeping on islands of this sand, waking covered with the heavy frost of November. The desert was closing down. Canada geese, bellowing their way up and downstream, were heading out. Drought-resistant plants that barely made it through another dry, super-heated summer were entering dormancy to keep from freezing their vital cells. Paper wasps littered one island, caught in the open and curled into balls as if they hoped to survive the entire winter here. I clutched one and breathed across it. It began unfolding. I rolled it onto a journal page and it jabbed the paper with its stinger, leaving a drop of venom, before curling back to immobility. Or immortality.

The river, having been bombarded by sun for the summer, was now set mostly in cold shadow. We swallowed the sunlight until the canoe hit shade. Then we slipped gloves on, snapped buttons and pulled our arms inward. The water conducted cold through the boat, into our feet, up our legs. We pondered over the compass, estimating exactly where the sun would rise and where we should set camp. Otherwise we would lie in our frosted bags in the morning and talk for hours, wondering if the sun would hit us before afternoon.

As a final glimpse of civilization, the canyon opened briefly on a potash mine and processing plant that was accessing salt deposits 2,700 feet below the surface. Two superstructures processed 20,000 tons of potassium every year to be sold primarily as fertilizer. Blue smoke trailed from an unseen point behind the railroad cars and fences. Trucks streamed in and out of the groaning compound. This would normally appear huge, but there was nothing to compare it to but the gorge. Under the glare of 500-foot sandstone gargoyles lining the horizon by the hundreds, it was infantile. When it was gone behind us, we were free.

The last person we saw was on a motor boat carrying canoeists upstream. Since roads could not be cut through this landscape, and a set of twenty-five impassable rapids suddenly pile up downstream, canoes can only get out of here by aiming back upstream to Moab. The driver looked confused and yelled over his engine, asking if we needed a ride out. I shouted back that we were stashing the canoe and hiking out. He looked confused again. I’ll be back in early spring, he offered. We’re hiking out, I yelled. He realized I was serious and began a deep, loud belly laugh before he gunned the engine and vanished.

The thought of hiking from the river, leaving the boat behind, was like one of throwing away a passport in an unfamiliar country and wandering into the dark heart of its cities. The sound of the engine left us. Karyn was eyeing me.

What did he mean? she asked.

Nothing.

×

They put a park on it in 1964. Canyonlands National Park. People struggled to define its borders, to leave in Indian Creek, or to exclude Lavender Canyon, should the Orange Cliffs be inside or outside? A Congressional hearing was held. Meanwhile rocks off the Orange Cliffs broke loose and moved from BLM land into proposed park land and no one knew. Lost Canyon flash flooded and dumped a load of pulverized cottonwood trunks and crushed boulders into what is now called the Needles District. No papers were signed for it. It was not even permitted.

The park was draped over the confluence of the Green and the Colorado Rivers like a 527-square-mile acetate overlay. There were many battles and concessions, with conservation groups squaring off against county commissioners and uranium prospectors. They were talking tourism dollars versus what some saw as honest ways of making a living. And there was the valid argument that no one would visit a park which had few roads and an interior accessible only with the shedding of blood. All the more reason for wilderness, the park said, and the area finally fell under its protection. They chose the heart of the desert, where the greatest diversity of shapes and colors had been jumbled around the big rivers.

It is a park which grudgingly gives up its secrets. In a few places a four-wheel-drive can poke through if you throw enough rocks into the washouts to build bridges. Only two main routes are paved. The rest is raw. Even the established trails cannot avoid the dramatic topography. Seamless inclined stone does not yield well to trail building, and major paths are often marked by long black skid marks of hiking boots sliding to hard landings. You’ve got to stare at this land for a few days and shuffle around for a mile or two before entering it. It requires some familiarity, or about the time you can’t find water you will find the trails fading off on naked rock around you, or disappearing into sandy draws. No idle vacations.

The first days on the river were like an opening and closing of stage sets. The props were buttes, cliffs, uplifts, and broad open bottoms. It is a sampler canyon because every hour brought new topography. The Navajo formation rose over our heads, eroding into pale one-hundred-foot amphitheaters, gaping out great holes like phantom mouths.

I forgot to bring the maps of the river. Or maybe I never wanted them. Too confusing, all those lines. We followed the course of the water, making stops to poke into side canyons that were increasing in number as we slipped lower.

The canoe was wide enough so that each knee rested against a gunnel. The duct tape boxes were wedged under the thwarts, topped with loose odds and ends such as a throw line, a camera tripod, and a rusted out garbage can lid being used as a fire pan. Two backpacks rode behind each of us, carefully placed so that we could lean into them, pressing our backs around boot tips and the corners of buried books.

We came to the first major rise in the rocks, a curved uplift followed by a drop known as an anticline, which arched the strata at the edges of the river. It was chinked by cracks along the arc like a Roman fresco. Anticlines are bulges pressed out of the land, and where the river bisects them, they look like roller coaster ramps rising and falling. They continue upward for thousands of feet in some places, going on for miles. They are caused by a formation of salt and evaporites, the Paradox salts, underlying the entire region. It is the same salt extracted in the mine upstream. Because salt has a lower specific gravity than the rocks above, it rises like a hot air balloon. In some places it squeezes through fissures and a gypsum mixture extrudes onto the surface in thin bands geologists call gypsqueeze.

In other areas the Paradox salts make a more serious push for the surface, rising like huge bubbles. These salt domes punch the overlying sandstone into anticlines. The stone, not being pliable, cracks into splintered columns along the arc.

The salts and various deposits were dropped in the shadow of an immense mountain range about 300 million years ago. The Ancestral Rockies were striking northwest from Colorado into Utah on the present-day