A Slot Canyon

Utah 2025 #4

2025-06-13

Sometimes, there are too many photos of a wonderful fun place to choose from and perhaps too many for the text. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. This will be one of those stories.

We’ve found our way back to a lonely sign on the side of a graded dirt road in the middle of host of geologic surprises.

We park, cross the road and find a trail leading down a slippery steep slope into a wall of rock and brush.

As we make our way, other routes appear like fingers to choose from. This leads to a sandy bed with walls on each side. We must choose the one route downstream, or the one up. We take the one with the straighter walls and leave the other for later.

Within a couple of hundred feet, we are standing in another worldly sense of place.

This is a narrows. The walls face each other, no more than twelve to fifteen feet apart, here.

The mid-morning sun is casting refreshing shadows, illuminating color and giving definition to form.

There is no true darkness. Here is a pleasant light breeze, funneling through, gently bathing our bodies.

Immediately, the sound changes into echoes, the resonance that one might find in a shower stall. That trick that you might find in a crooners voice on an old record. There is no crooner, only intense silence and the sound, the amplifying vibrating echoes of our shoes on sandstone.

Color constantly changes here as we walk, all earth tones, a plethora of texture and form.

The walk has been flat, a sandy bed deposited during a flooding rain. There are occasional errant rocks and wavy bedrock climbing out of it.

Now, we stand before the first of several obstructions.

Each of these is not insurmountable. This first requires lifting some body weight and twisting a leg up. I can feel the stretch in my lower back, which has been giving me trouble from time to time the last month, or so. Getting through the pain, after I’ve accomplished the pull, I actually feel better for it. My concerns of any injury disappear and my confidence returns.

The textures change moment to moment.

Generally, it is relatively solid sandstone. We have to be careful, testing each foothold for slip. Between our toe shoes and the grit, it is generally safe.

I find a toehold in most of the climbs , even though I might have to cross my legs to propel myself up.

At one point, there is a little cliff that has been worn smooth with little to grip to crawl up. Fortunately, my feet grip the wall, as I take weight off of them pulling up with arms and still climbing. To put all of my weight on the one foot would be risky. A slip might be sandpaper on bare skin.

We usually have to strip off our belongings.

Cameras can bang into the hard rock surfaces.

Straps can catch on the corners of the rock forms. At one spot, the slot to climb is just too small to twist through with any equipment. I make like a key engineered for the slot. I bend just so, and suck in my belly. Naked with awareness works out well. There are no scrapes. I just move consciously and slowly, until I pass out of the shoot to stand up straight. With any weight, or girth more than what we are, I’d think that the tight passage would be impossible, clothing caught, or buttons scraped away.

It looks like a spider web entombs a boulder. It is not from an arachnid, but the rock itself has that quality.

It isn’t sticky, but solid, dry, the work of ages.

There is more occasional webbing as we travel on, until finally I climb out of the last of it.

To be Continued…Soon:

I am on the forum of FreeRangeNaturism.com often, if you would like to converse.

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