Distant Canyons

I've long felt a sort of mystic connection to Native America, mostly because of where I grew up, my parents, and because of my religion, which sees a connection between ancient Israel and ancient America. The little town I grew up in is surrounded by Ute land, and to the south is the Navajo Indian Reservation. And beyond the Utes and the Navajo in time are the Anasazi, or the Ancestral Puebloans. I have many memories of investigating ruined mesa-top pueblos and sandstone cliff dwellings. Long before my ancestors left Europe, these people lived on the land I grew up on. My parents have also long been interested in Native American cultures: my mom collected Navajo rugs and Hopi Kachina dolls; my dad collected arrowheads and pottery shards. I have worked at a couple of places whose identity relies heavily on indigenous culture: The Anasazi Foundation and Mesa Verde National Park. So last winter when my brother Clinton and I began planning a trip to the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, I felt as though I was preparing for a sort of communion, a return to a part of my spiritual and existential core. The reality, however, turned out to be less romantic. The trip was much shorter than anticipated and made me embarrasingly aware of my distance from the long-dead people I feel a kinship with.

Clinton and I hit the trail last Saturday morning. We started hiking around noon, which was a few hours later than we had hoped to start, but it still left us enough time to get to the spot we had decided would be our destination that day. We began hiking down Sand Canyon trail and were enjoying the slight downhill grade of the trail. Along the way, I pointed out things I had learned from my time at the Anasazi Foundation: which plants make good bow and drill fire sets, which plants are edible, what barks make good tinder. Clinton knew much of this already, but I told him anyway because I was excited to be in the desert again. We were both confident and excited for the challenge and the adventure.

We had prepared well for the trip. We were both in reasonably good shape; we had enough food to easily last seven days; we had a tent, sleeping bags, a stove, a water filter and everything else we would need. We knew from the planning phase onward that the biggest challenge to the trip would be the lack of water. In the summer, none of the streams in the monument run. But from several experiences in Arizona digging in dry creek beds and finding water, and from learning at Mesa Verde that Ancestral Puebloans almost always built their cliff dwellings next to a seep spring, I was sure that I could find water. Still, as the day grew to be very hot, and our 70 pound packs weighed down on us and as the warning of the ranger at the Anasazi Heritage Center ("I don't think there is any water out there") continued to echo through my mind, I became a little less confident.

Most of the first few cliff dwellings we saw were not dwellings at all, but were probably grain storage buildings. There were no reliable sources of water near these that we could find. We did find one dwelling that had obviously been built to be lived in and after poking around a nearby shallow alcove, I found a seep spring. It was not flowing, but the soft sandstone was wet to the touch and could have yielded water with a little effort. Finding some indication of water bolstered my spirits somewhat and we hiked on.

Besides water, another major challenge in to our undertaking was the terrain. The topographical map I was using, I came to realize, used meters instead of feet to show elevation changes, and it was of a scale I wasn't used to. What this amounted to was canyons that were deeper and plateaus that were much higher and more rugged than I had anticipated. Most of our planned route followed no trails; instead we hoped to climb out of one canyon, over a plateau, and into another canyon day after day. The extreme scope of what we had planned began to dawn on us as we sank deeper into our first canyon.

At first, we took several pictures of ruins we noticed in the sides of the canyons, but as we grew more an more tired and as our water supplies diminished, we would simply glance at at a ruin and then continue on, not bothering to take out the camera and document it. That afternoon, when we realized we were not going to make it to the point we had originally intended to reach, we picked a place on the map where two creek beds merged and where I thought we could find water. We climbed over a plateau at a low point and into a sandy creek bed. By this time, we were rationing the little bit of water we had left. We stopped at small grove of cottonwood trees and I took out the small spade Clinton had brought with him and began digging in the sand to look for water. After digging about eight inches down and encountering only dry sand, I decided to hike farther downstream. I left my pack with Clinton (he was trying to rest in the shade, but the deer gnats hounded him until he gave up), and walked about a mile and a half down the creek bed. I stopped at several promising spots and dug a hole a few inches deep with the toe of my boot, but never found any hint of moisture. Finally, when I was much farther from my brother than I had intended to be, I heard water running.

I walked toward the sound of the water and had to cross onto private land to get to it, but I found a little oasis--a large, fast-flowing stream. It didn't look like a natural stream, more a product of irrigation, but it was wet and I was excited. We camped that night under an old cottonwood tree a few hundred yards away from the source of water. That night was enjoyable. We stretched our tired backs, boiled water to poor into our freeze-dried meals, talked about the hike, what we had seen and gone through, discussed our families, and talked about life. We were glad to be alive and felt somehow victorious, as if we had defeated nature. From where we were camped, we had cell phone reception and he called Mandy and I called Elizabeth, to let our wives know we were alive, we had found water.

The next morning, we got an earlier start, though after filling up with water, our first task was to climb up the east-facing side of a plateau. The sun reflected off the rocks and the heat was astonishing even at nine in the morning. Toward the top, after we had scrambled and climbed for most of the morning, I began to feel nauseas. I'm not sure why I was feeling sick, but I quickly lost energy as well and began lagging and wanting to take long breaks. I few times I dry heaved and wished I could just vomit and get it over with. I thought maybe the nausea came on because of the ibuprofen I took that morning to help with the soreness I felt all over, but I was also afraid my body was dehydrated. After we had sat in the shade for about half an hour waiting, without success, for me to recover, Clinton half-jokingly offered me a sprig of Mormon Tea. I chewed on the thin, green eight-inch stick for a moment and then stood up and we started hiking. After about five minutes, my nausea was completely gone and ten minutes after that, my energy level was back to normal.

We hiked at a brisk pace across the top of the plateau and continued on until we hit an old 4x4 road, which we followed farther to the northwest. That day, we were headed for a spring that was somewhere in about the middle of the Monument. We thought if we could find a reliable source of water, we could set up a base camp there and do dayhikes to areas that looked interesting. When we dropped back into a shallow canyon and hiked on top of another plateau, we got to the canyon I thought should contain our spring. We dropped off the side of the plateau, bushwacking our way down through juniper and pinion trees and brush. We hiked downstream for about a mile to where I thought the spring should be. We got there and found nothing. By this time we were tired and we each had maybe two cups of water left. The day was very hot again, and we were losing a lot of water through sweat and through breathing. We walked a little farther downstream to where we had a good vantage point of the lower canyon. We could see a little clump of cottonwood trees among the darker pinion/juniper trees and we decided to head for the cottonwoods. That must be where the spring is.

I think we both knew there would be no spring there, that we would find only dry sand just as we had done every time before when we used cottonwoods as our guides. And besides, the canyon opened up considerably where those cottonwoods were; it was more of a valley than a canyon at that point--not the sort of terrain that produces a spring in a desert. However, we went for it, hoping we would find water. Just as our intuition told us, the creek bed was a dry downstream as it had been above. We dropped down for a rest beneath what would be a waterfall if there had been water. I took out the little hand-sized shovel Clinton had brought and began digging in the sand. It kept collapsing on me, but I kept digging anyway. This, I knew, would be a moment of decision.

I dug the little well about one-and-a-half feet deep, until I hit the sandstone bottom and could dig no more. The sand and rocks were moist, but no water came seeping into the hole, not even a little water pooled in the bottom. In fact, every minute I waited, I notice the damp sand that lined the walls of the well becoming dry as the heat and thirsty air quickly wicked away the moisture in the earth. That is when I knew we were done. To continue on would be stupid. By continuing on, trying to find the elusive spring, we had already put several more miles between ourselves and our cars.

Hiking back out of that canyon was tedious and tiring. We had decided to head for the cars and go camping instead in the mountains near a river, where we would lie back in its cool waters and be refreshed in its clear abundance. But the cars proved elusive. We followed Clinton's GPS, which he had used to mark where the cars were. As the crow flies, it placed us only a few miles from the cars, but as the hiker walks, we were several times that distance away. We climbed and staggered until we ran out of water. Clinton began to get nauseas, and his nausea was definitely a result of dehydration. He had urinated only one time since we started the trip a day and a half earlier. His muscles were beginning to cramp. Both of us were tired, almost unnaturally tired. We stopped in a little patch of shade. I could tell that Clinton wasn't going to be able to continue much longer.
After we rested for a few minutes, I suggested I leave my pack with him and that I take the GPS, find the cars, and bring my car back and pick him up. We had been following a 4x4 trail for a while and I thought I might be able to get the car back to him. He agreed to my suggestion without reservation. He held out to me his Nalgene bottle. It had maybe a fourth of a cup of water in it. "Take this with you, man," he said. I protested. He needed it more than me. He shook his head, "Just take it. You'll be walking; I'll be sitting here. You need it." I took the orange bottle and his GPS and set out. The GPS said I had 1.9 miles to go, but it ended up taking me five miles to get to the cars, as I had to follow a road of some sort so that I would know how to get the car back to my brother. Strangely, as I was hiking, I did not feel tired or thirsty. I maintained a pace of about 4 miles per hour and found my way back to my car.

I was only able to get my car to within about 3/4 of a mile of Clinton. The road became impassible, but I brought him some water I had left in the car and we hiked out alright. That night, when we finally got out of the Canyons of the Ancients, we didn't go to the mountains to bathe in a river. Instead, we headed for a hotel in Cortez, a hotel with beds and running water. I told Clinton I felt like the land chewed us up and spit us out. "That was rough. That was rough," we kept telling each other; that was rough.

The thing that kept coming to my mind, still keeps coming to my mind, is that thousands of people lived where we could not survive for two days. Tree ring data taken from logs used in Ancestral Puebloan dwellings suggest that the climate 1,000 years ago was not much different than it is today (it has gotten a little warmer and a little dryer). That means there was only about as much water then as there is today. But they survived, they built rock homes with square walls and multiple stories. They built large, round, deep ceremonial spaces using only sticks and rocks. They made pottery and painted intricate designs on it. They created art.

When I realized these things, I realized I am not as close to these ancient desert dwellers as I had previously assumed. We grew up on the same land, but I grew up with electricity, with factory-made clothing and footwear, with a well dug by a machine, in a house built out of lumber made of trees hewn hundreds of miles from where they would be nailed together into a structure.

I'm glad we went; I enjoyed spending time with my brother, and I am glad for the reminder of the immense cultural structure we take for granted but which keeps us from dying. But I feel a little more removed from the ancient people who played a part in constructing the mystique of my childhood. We aren't as alike as I had previously thought.