PUSHED TO THE EDGE
A visit to four of Utah’s national parks last week tested my endurance and pushed me to the edge of my physical prowess. I may be intrepid enough to go canyoneering next.
“We’re going on the hike to Delicate Arch, that’s what,” my husband said, swiftly maneuvering our rental car into the spot that opened up in the parking lot at Arches National Park.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Did you hear what our Gypsy Guide just said?” We had come to rely heavily on our audio tour guide suggested by my cousin. But my husband wasn’t in a mood to heed our guide’s warnings.
“Big deal,” he said. “You can do it.” No way, I said. I didn’t hike. I preferred to amble, to stroll. I relished a pretty meandering walk by the water.
Just two weeks before our Utah trip, a friend took me on the Garrapata Bluff Trail at Garrapatta State Park, a 0.6 mile trail located near Carmel that features beautiful wild flowers and stunning views of the Pacific ocean. Garrapata is to Delicate Arch what the scorpion is to the tiger. Both will kill if you choose to do dumb things. The chances of dying, however, at the hands of the latter are infinitely higher.
The Delicate Arch came with warnings from several sources. There had been deaths at the trail. While our Gypsy Guide had warned us well ahead that the trail to the arch was strenuous and recommended only for experienced hikers, the park, too, had similar warnings. Despite that, my husband—whose torso hinted at a predisposition to margaritas than at a predilection for intense hikes—was throwing all caution to the wind and claiming we were about to embark on a trail where many of the challenges were as yet unclear.
At the trailhead we stopped to read the description of the hike and all the helpful hints. Each hiker was told to carry at least a quart of water. Between us we had just a pint. I proffered the shortage of water as an excuse. “Look, there’s simply no way we can go when we aren’t carrying enough water,” I said. My husband waved away my objections. “If we are desperate for water, someone out there will give us some.”
Had I heard right? Here was a man for whom the glass was always not just half empty but also filled with rock and gravel. “Wait, someone will want to give us their water?” I wondered aloud. My partner is a sharp, critical thinker with a sponge of a brain that tends to swallow, whole, entire research papers, algorithms, authors, footnotes, indices and all marginalia. Still, I maintain that acute intelligence and worldly wisdom often run on parallel tracks. (Just consider the Ozy scandal and Facebook’s ethics as examples.)
According to my husband, while we were puffing and panting and keeling towards our grave, someone in the arid wilderness would spare us their last drop of water even though that someone was equally dehydrated and exiting the world. That was the exact moment I should have walked back to our car. But I’d schlepped alongside him for so long arguing as to why he was clueless about what hiking entailed that, soon enough, we were so far along on the trail that I didn’t even have the courage to turn around and return to the trailhead on my own. I had been gypped.
The Delicate Arch trail is a round trip of just three miles and it climbs up to about 480 feet. The pace goes steadily uphill for the first half; in the latter part, hikers are climbing almost all of the time over the surface of a large rock that is relentlessly long. Imagine hauling one’s weight up the gradual curved back of a gargantuan mammoth. While the suspense of this trail kept me going, the reward felt elusive almost the entire time on the onward journey. We never saw the arch during that arduous upward trek—until after we’d negotiated the dramatic short walk on a four-foot ledge of a massive bowl-shaped surface of another rock. In the blistering heat of the noonday sun for which we were entirely unprepared, I felt sorry for myself and worried that the destination would not justify my hard work, after all. When the arch finally showed up against the blue of the skies, it was worth every second of my trek.
To see this thing is to be in disbelief that nature can hack and hew into rock surfaces and carve out something on this scale; the opening beneath the arch is 46 feet high and 32 feet wide. In a park with over 2,000 stone arches made of Entrada sandstone created in the Jurassic period, this magnificent edifice is an iconic emblem for the state of Utah. What was even more unbelievable for me was that some fearless adventurers had cobbled together a path to help cads like me reach this magnum opus of nature even when we were so ill-prepared for the hike.
At least my husband and I were well-prepared for the terrain. I learned that most falls and injuries on hiking trails can be blamed on poor choice of footwear. Our hiking boots—purchased just one day before we set off, thanks to a tip from a friend—blunted the harshness of the land we walked on. The Delicate Arch would be the first of three challenging trails I would be cajoled into doing on this trip.
Each of the subsequent two hikes would pose their own perils. The Navajo trail at Bryce Canyon National Park is a plunge into the valley 515 feet below with views of towering Douglas-fir trees and the park's most famous hoodoo: Thor's hammer. I was petrified during this trail but energized by it all the same. We walked among hoodoos sculpted by ice, wind and sand; the return to the top was through narrow walls of limestone and umpteen switchbacks that were unpaved and unfettered from the sheer drop below into the canyon floor.
The roughest of the three trails, however, at least in my experience, was the Upper Emerald pools trail at Zion National Park where the trail was so effortless at the lower levels under the waterfall that it was hard to believe that the path could get any worse. As in daily life, however, what’s often looming around the corner is never clear—even when you’ve become wiser with the third hike and actually possess a hat, several bottles of water, the best boots and hiking poles, a phone and a portable charger. By the time we reached the end of the upper trail, my left thigh was sore from lifting it high over one sand-bathed rock over another for a third of the trail which was steep, sandy and had several eroded sections. This trail was not for weasels like me; I’m a weasel who asks her husband to wait downstairs while I’m up in the attic situated at a 10-foot elevation.
When my husband and I finally emerged to take in the scene at the Upper Emerald pool, the waterfall was almost nonexistent. The pool was hardly limpid or reminiscent of the gemstone after which it had been named. It was the color of slime. The setting was not beautiful in the least; yet the feeling of having completed the trek to the pool itself was beautiful, however, because we had each put our bodies through a monstrosity of a climb.
At the slime pool, I leaned on a rock and watched people take selfies and pictures. Some had brought a picnic lunch. Squirrels darted about the rocks between humans. I recalled another line that I’d seen often in brochures about Utah: “It’s not the destination. It’s the journey.” Nothing could be truer. The end—of this trail and of life itself—wouldn’t be pretty for the most stoic and philosophical among us all. We had better stop to savor the minor and the mighty accomplishments. But I was peeved. Just why couldn’t the destination also be stellar enough to justify the journey? Why couldn’t we always experience something unreal and unexpected and inexplicable?
After sulking a little more, I told my husband we must head back. A fair part of the descent was strenuous, too, because most of the upper section of the trail was cobbled together from rock, tree roots and sand.
Our return through the Grotto Trail—my husband made it his policy to never return the same way—was memorable. Every turn offered another view of the rust-orange cliffs, the sky and the waterfalls. As we walked down the rim of the cliff, we saw the shimmer of the Virgin River snaking by the rocks below. We stopped, literally, every few minutes, simply to take in the beauty of it all, astounded by the vision of water, tree, mud, stone and sky in perfect harmony.
At that moment, I understood the significance about both journey and destination. Our personal visitations of what was beautiful was often colored by our expectations. In nature, we had to let go of preconceived notions and of anticipation. We had to merely take things as they came.
On our travels through Utah, the idea of perspective and “balance” returned to me repeatedly. “Balanced Rock” at Arches National Park is one of the park’s most iconic features. At 128 feet, this slick rock boulder of Entrada Sandstone sits on an eroding pedestal of Dewey Bridge mudstone. “Balanced Rock” has defied gravity every day for thousands of years. It’s believed to be the size of three school buses but watching it etched against the landscape of the mighty stones of Arches National Park, it could be a pebble. One day, as erosion continues to chip away at the neck of the pedestal, this 3,600 ton boulder will come tumbling down.
Everything was in fragile balance at all these ancient parks reminding me about the significance of perspective. What was a given today could change tomorrow. Things shifted from one day to another. Life would go on. The sun would rise and set at the appointed hour. This notion of shift and balance was just about everywhere around me at Bryce Canyon where every lookout—carved out from natural ledges in the cliffs—revealed how every cliff was in a perpetually frightening state of erosion. The ledge we were standing on would be going away one day. Everywhere, firs poked out of sheer walls of eroding sand while tenuously holding it all together, making a dramatic statement about survival and longevity.
Late one night as we drove back after the only pizza place in Bryce Canyon City, my husband stopped the car on the side of the empty narrow road flanked by ranch land. He shut off the headlights. Now we had all that massive blackness to ourselves. I got out and looked up at the night sky. At about 7600 feet above sea level, I was closer to the stars than I had ever been in all my life. Still, as Paul Bogard writes in The End of Night, I was overwhelmed. I was scared, even.
“I let a storm of stars swirl around me. I remember no light pollution—heck, I remember no lights but I remember the light around me—the sense of being lit by starlight—and that I could see the ground to which the stars seemed to be floating down.” ~~~ Paul Bogard, The End of Night
As Bogard says in this mesmerizing treatise to the quality of darkness, human beings are simply not used to the dark anymore. That inky, heavy, blue-blackness that I experienced in the middle of nowhere near Bryce Canyon city felt other-worldly. The sky was dripping with stars.
It was impossible to not perceive a world in perfect harmony on that last trail to the upper Emerald pool at Zion National Park. As we hiked down towards rim to the valley floor, an occasional breeze caressed our faces. The rays of the sun bounced off the water many hundred feet below. We passed people of all ages and stages. Young fathers boldly trudged on with their little ones on their back. I saw pregnant women panting and pushing on ahead, their navels showing starkly through their clothes. Many hikers were senior citizens, older even than I, it seemed to me, and it struck me that at almost sixty, I was still young. I felt I still had a long way to go. One elderly gentleman waved his hiking pole at me saying “Nice smile, kid!” as I posed for a photograph by the cataract on Virgin River. The trial of this strenuous hike did not visit me until the following morning when I winced every time I lifted my left leg to climb the stairs at our hotel. By the time we rolled out of the quaint town of Springdale at the end of a packed week, I was happy simply to walk on even ground.
As I told my husband on our drive towards Vegas, the trails we had attempted were probably child’s play for most hiking enthusiasts. Yet, for me, the hikes my husband had insisted that we try had given me a sense of personal accomplishment. I felt I had been on a journey to conquer my fear of heights and my innate anxieties about the unknown. I realized I needed to lift the portcullis and will myself out of the fortress I tended to build inside my mind. I needed to just get out there more often and inhale the view.
Great article, Kaloana. So true and written do well
As the husband, I would like to take some credit for pushing the author to the edge and providing some grist for the writing mill!