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The Mormons gave their best efforts to transect this part of the country with
road grades, but they, too, retreated to the established towns of Green River
and Moab. Today most of those Mormon trails have been abandoned and replaced by
still barely passable roads whose access by vehicle is, ironically, more sparse
than it was by horse or wagon a hundred years ago. Last night I drove
fifty-seven miles down the only dirt road in the eastern half of two counties to
arrive at my embarkation point -- it was two and a half hours of washboard
driving during which I didn't pass a single light or a house. Frontier ranchers,
rustlers, uranium miners, and oil drillers each left a mark on this land but
have folded their hands in deference to the stacked deck of desert livelihood.
Those seekers of prosperity weren't the first to cross the threshold into
this country, only to abandon the region as a barren wasteland: Progressive
waves of ancient communities came into being and vanished over the ages in the
area's canyon bottoms. Usually, it would be a significant drought or an
incursion by hostile bands that made life in the high country and the deserts
farther south seem more hospitable. But sometimes there are no defensible
answers to explain the sudden evacuation of an entire culture from a particular
place. Five thousand years ago, the people of Barrier Creek left their
pictographs and petroglyphs at the Great Gallery and Alcove Gallery; then they
disappeared. Since they left no written record, why they departed is both a
mystery and a springboard for the imagination. Looking at their paintings and
standing in their homes, gardens, and trash heaps, I feel connected to the
aboriginal pioneers who inhabited these canyons so long ago.
As I grind my way out onto the open mesa, the wind slaps at my face, and I
find myself already looking forward to the final hike through Horseshoe Canyon,
where I will finish my tour. I can't wait to get out of this demeaning wind.
To judge from what I've seen on my ride, there are few significant
differences in this area between Blue John Griffith's day and the present. The
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has graded the century-old horse trail and added
scattered signposts, but even the ubiquitous fences that partition the rest of
the West are noticeably absent. Perhaps it's the lack of barbed wire that makes
this place feel so terrifically remote. I spend a lot of time in out-of-the-way
areas -- two or three days a week in designated wildernesses, even through the
winter -- but most of them don't feel half as isolated as this back road. As I
consider this, abruptly, my solitude changes to loneliness and seems somehow
more tenacious. While the region's towns may have simmered since those raucous
days when the Robbers Roost was earning its name, the outlying desert is still
just as wild.
A mile past Burr Pass, my torturous ride into the thirty-mile-an-hour
headwind finally comes to an end. I dismount and walk my bike over to a juniper
tree and fasten a U-lock through the rear tire. I have little worry that anyone
will tamper with my ride out here, but as my dad says, "There's no sense in
tempting honest people." I drop the U-lock's keys into my left pocket and
turn toward the main attraction, Blue John Canyon. I follow a deer path on an
overland shortcut, listening to some of my favorite music on my CD player now
that the wind isn't blowing so obnoxiously in my ears. After I've hiked through
some dunes of pulverized red sandstone, I come to a sandy gully and see that
I've found my way to the nascent canyon. "Good, I'm on the right
route," I think, and then I notice two people walking out of view thirty
yards downcanyon. I leap down the dune into the shallow wash, and once I'm
around the dune's far corner, I spot the hikers, who look from this distance to
be two young women.
From Between A Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston, pages 1-30. Copyright © 2004 by Aron Ralston. All rights reserved, no part of this excerpt maybe reproduced without specific permission from the publisher.
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