Moab
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Moab, Utah

We spent one night here and 2 days in the neighbourhood, in two amazing national parks.

Campgrounds

Hotels and Motels

The Craggy Face of the Canyonlands
By: David Lavender

On an appointed day in April, five vans and two pickups from four states assembled in the town of Moab, in eastern Utah. There, they were loaded with a week’s supply of food and water for six couples, a four-year-old girl, a dog named Bear, and five men, including me. Our mission was a camping trip by foot and four-wheel drive along the ragged White Rim terrace in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. We wanted not only to explore the White Rim, but also to enjoy some of the park’s other spectacular scenes from the rim’s unique vantage points.

Canyonlands, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. White Rim belongs to the northern section, a great mesa called the Island in the Sky that is locked within the V formed by the Colorado and Green Rivers as they flow toward a junction near the center of the park. The Colorado wiggles in from the northeast; the Green rolls south from Wyoming. The combined waters, called the Colorado, rush southwest down a relatively straight canyon. Rapids formed by the currents thrashing over and around boulders led explorer John Wesley Powell to name this stretch Cataract Canyon.

East from Cataract spread the Needles section of the park, a multicolored area of spired sandstone walls—some as much as 400 feet high—flat-bottomed valleys called grabens, arches carved out by eons of wind and water, and creek-bottom canyons.

Opposite the Needles, extending west and north from Cataract, lies the Maze, the park’s third part. One geologist described this undeveloped area as “a 30-square-mile puzzle in sandstone.” A friend of mine uses a less elegant metaphor: Looking down on the Maze, he says, is like looking at a huge brain, a creased, convoluted, compacted mass not to be monkeyed with by amateur explorers.

Intriguing enough, these distant, mysterious, rugged precincts of Canyonlands. But our goal was the Island in the Sky, and particularly its White Rim Trail. Our caravan, held loosely together by CB radios, followed the west bank of the Colorado till sunset, when we spotted a suitable flat just shy of a back entrance to the park and wheeled our gasoline wagons into a circle.

A short, sharp rain, rare in this land that receives only eight to ten inches of moisture a year, had fallen earlier in the day. Now the clouds were in tatters, and the evening promised to be clear and cold. People scurried through the twilight to get their beds in order. Some set up free-standing dome tents—it is seldom possible to find handy trees or rocks to tie guy lines to. Some decided to sleep in their vans. Others simply spread out ground cloths and sleeping bags under a roof of stars.

Bill Booker, who, with his wife, Lyn, was the principal promoter of our excursion, had worked out the food arrangements and cooking routines. Water was critical. We had to carry enough for a week of cooking, drinking, dishwashing, for showers warmed in solar bags—and for Bear, who carried her own supply in red saddlebags strapped to her back.

And ice chests for beer. I’ve been told that when a person is dehydrated from hours in the sun, beer helps restore his system’s electrolytic balance. Whether that’s correct or not, I don’t know. But I do know that coming back from a long desert hike, settling down in a spot of shade, taking swollen feet out of hot boots, and popping open a cold can of beer—this, I say, is the earthly equivalent of opening heaven’s first gate.

Breakfast would be a catch-as-catch can affair dug up out of miscellaneous cartons and cooked over small gasoline stoves. And we brown-bagged our lunches. But dinners! Bill had divided us into teams of three, each to cook one meal for the whole group.

Luck put me on the first night’s dinner team with a husband-and-wife duo. Not having to worry about spoilage, we decided to shop in Moab for steaks, crisp salad vegetables, and thickly frosted baker cakes. We soaked a pot of beans during the drive to camp. There we got the pot bubbling over a slow fire, added chopped onions and red peppers, molasses, catsup, butter, and a dash of red wine.

And for ambiance, a moon, barely past full, sneaked into the sky behind a butte atop the eastern cliffs as we were dishing up the meal. At first we saw only its radiance around the edges of the monolith. Then, just at dessert time, it peeked over the top, rose higher, and turned into a huge orange ball balanced on the tip of a seal’s nose. It all happened by special arrangement, no doubt, for this day was a wedding anniversary of one of the couples. Cheers. Laughter. Champagne in paper cups. As I wormed into my sleeping bag, I decided to stow my watch out of reach inside my duffel. Life moves to different rhythms here.

The next morning our caravan intersected the first thin edge of the White Rim. Imagine rows of huge sand dunes, some on a sea coast, some actually underwater.

About 250 million years ago that collection of sand grains started sliding southeastward, thinning as it progressed toward the spot where we now stood. Blanketed eventually under massive layers of other material, the sand consolidated into stone, each grain cemented to its neighbor by a thin chemical coating. If that coating had contained an iron compound, as most rock cements hereabouts do, it would have oxidized, on exposure to the air, into some shade of red. But there was no iron in these converted dunes, and the layer stayed the color of bleached cow bones.

The whiteness shows only along the edges of the terrace and of the canyons that have been chewed far back into it—hence the name White Rim. Elsewhere the platform is covered by a chocolatey soil washed down from the steep slopes and high-rising cliffs of the Island in the Sky. This meager covering provides sustenance for a few Utah junipers, some scattered bunches of shadscale and blackbrush, and feather stands of Indian ricegrass. Where mounds of dust have collected in and around the base of the bushes, handsome clumps of Indian paintbrush sometimes flourish, competing with their hosts for whatever food is within reach.

The Park Service has established 20 campsites along the White Rim Trail, hoping to limit environmental damage. Nothing can be done about natural erosion, of course. Rain, sand-laden wind, frost, and penetrating roots have clawed the Colorado Plateau, home of Canyonlands Park, into pieces and have dumped the rubble into countless side canyons. More banded rock, thousands of feet thick, once covered the area. It, too, has been stripped away and sent toward the Gulf of California. The denudation involves immensities of time that elude comprehension.

Other processes are speedier. The recent rain had deposited a few inches of water in potholes, providing joy for sweaty arms and feet. It also brought frenzy to dormant forms of life (including a species of fairy shrimp) that lay unseen in the earth at the bottom of the pools. Before the merciless sun and wind could suck the potholes dry, the awakened organisms had to hatch, grow mature, mate, and lay new eggs in the moist bottom muck.

More spectacular than potholes are the networks of cracks that in places cleave the White Rim sandstone from top to bottom. We encountered our first cluster of them while banging along in our vehicles close to a wide swatch of pallid slickrock. A sign at the end of the wheel tracks ahead of us read “Walking Rocks.”

“A good name,” I said. “From here on we walk to the edge of the rim, not drive.” We dismounted and soon were stepping across cracks ranging from a few inches to a foot and a half wide. At first we peered down them into darkness. Then, alarmingly, I glimpsed daylight below. Clearly the cliff we were approaching had been undercut by one of the tributary gorges diving toward the Colorado River, and the slab we were on had no more support than the geologic cement binding it at either end to the main mass of stone. The steep slope beneath the cracks was littered with house-size boulders whose glue had failed to hold.

But who wanted to be the first chicken? We edged on and reached a surprise—a crevice equipped with an eight-foot ladder that enabled us to descend into a cool lunch spot some enterprising tour operator had temporarily fixed up for his patrons.

The tendency of the White Rim’s sandstone to crack is also responsible, where the cliffs have not been undercut, for sculptures of great beauty. Water draining through the crevices hews the underlying red shale into free-standing pillars, each wearing a protective, mushroom-shaped cap of hard White Rim stone.

Out here the columns are called hoodoos. A choice collection of them prickles Monument Basin, which we reached on the third day by parking our vans and scrambling down a steep rock draw. We walked by and between spires and narrow fins, some of them 300 feet high. One stately specimen, standing well out into the basin, has lost its white cap. Soon, geologically speaking, it will crumble into a pile of drab red earth.

As a reward for forcing our vehicles along the rugged track of the White Rim Trail, we absorbed a medley of views. Farthest away, giving bulk to the horizon, were knots of mountains—the handsome 13,000-foot La Sal range, east of Moab; the Abajos and their satellite ridges, farther south; and, dim in the southwest, the erosion-scarred Henrys. Closer by, but still a “fur piece off,” as the locals say, were broad, flat-topped mesas and jutting promontories, all chopped off near the park boundaries by cliffs of Wingate sandstone. Hundreds of feet high, their reddish hues sometimes tinged with orange and streaked with dark tapestries of desert varnish, those bands of rock and their occasional crenellations seemed to glow with inner fire as sunset touched them.

The Wingate cliffs rose up out of steep, talus-littered slopes of softer stone. At the base of the slopes, the land flattened. Riven by mostly dry gulches, the cliffs pressed as close to the deep river canyons as they could before being chopped off in their own turn by the implacable forces of erosion.

West of the engorged confluence, more jumbles of colored stone rose up between slit gorges. The pinnacles of the strangely named Doll House, looking much like the spires of the Needles, stood close to the western brink of Cataract Canyon.

But the best was yet to be. For the next three nights we camped at the southern end of the White Rim, at a place called White Crack. We arrived at sunset. As we hung solar water bags on juniper limbs for showers, set up collapsible stoves, pitched tents, spread sleeping bags, and opened icy cans of beer, the last water in nearby potholes shone like red beads under a paintpot sky. The glow flowed south to the Needles, turning them into jets of flame, and washed as far as the upper reaches of Davis and Lavender Canyons.

What’s in a name? Every spring, long before there was a Canyonlands National Park, my stepfather would buy several hundred yearling steers from the huge Scorup-Somerville Cattle Company on Indian Creek to drive to our ranch in southwestern Colorado. The Scorup riders gathered the animals and corralled them in a serpentine red canyon whose mouth could be sealed with a short log fence. The gulch’s identification—the place where Ed Lavender’s cattle were held—soon shrank to plain Lavender Canyon.

And that’s how, as a youth following Al Scorup’s cowboys around, I first saw the great arches of Lavender and Davis Canyons, the grabens, the caves, and the flats of sage where the pink-and-white Needles sprout. Tonight, from our campsite at White Crack, I could only gaze across the canyons into the Needles and remember those long-ago cow-herding days.

The White Crack is an alley-wide space between a break in the rim and a hoodoo. Someone—I assume it was a uranium prospector—had run a bulldozer through the gap and gouged a steep road down into a red fan of dry streambeds. Since then, fallen boulders, washes, and cave-ins have blocked the passage to vehicles.

We took a warm-up hike down the road and along the fan’s serrated ridge to a stunning overlook of the crazily looping Green and the Maze beyond it. The next day we set out on foot for the confluence, following the remnants of the road around cliff-sided gulches. Chips and nodules of lovely red jasper lay scattered along the way. Twice we spotted groups of desert bighorn sheep bounding daintily along airy ledges.

The road ended, and we worked our way onto a rumpled flat that was thick with low, tight columns of black sage. Our ankles wobbling with weariness, we dropped at last over a low hill and reached the Colorado’s rim a short distance up from the junction.

Both rivers, tan colored, were running bank-full. Silence was total except for thin, dry whispers when a breeze scraped around the corners of the cliffs. What was overpowering, for me, was a sense of the monumental patience with which those two rivers, 1,200 feet below us, were working out the patterns of the land.

After leaving White Crack, the road gradually curves north. The land is more ponderous, the driving harder, with hogbacks (steep, spiny ridges) and rough washes to cross. On the sixth day we parked where we could look out at a meander in the Green River that describes almost a full circle. In the middle of the meander, called Fort Bottom, is a tall conical hill that wears an Indian ruin like a crown. We walked carefully across a narrow neck of land to visit it and then slid down the slop to investigate a deteriorating cabin reputedly built by the outlaw Butch Cassidy.

Then back to the vehicles, back to a four-wheel crawl up hair-raising ridges, only to spiral down their back sides into more river bottoms. And that was about the end of it, except for the breath-stopping switchbacks of the Horsethief Trail that took us out of the canyon and back to Moab. For a week we had been immersed in the long, slow flow of geologic time. Now, richer for the experience, we were ready to take our quickly ticking watches out of our duffel bags and let them again measure our days.

David Lavender lives in Ojai, California, and travels throughout the American West. His latest book, on the Lewis and Clark expedition, will be published this fall.

The information in this article was last verified in Autumn 1988.