Bears Ears XXXI
2024-06-03
We have a tip that a good stay might be White Canyon or Farley Canyon, which are out and off of the highway to Lake Powell. The distance is just far enough to risk the drive and still get back, if things don’t work out. The dice rolled, we’ll see if adventure is afoot.
The drive reveals a vast darker red landscape of buttes and occasional hoodoos. It is desolate. The burgundy soil yields only a green plant only every several feet in contrasting greens.
There are a few landmarks. Jacobs chair is falsely identified by us and then a even more obvious mammoth statue peeks out behind a distant hill. As the road passes, the naked monolithic peak is revealed. A broken butte, a gargantuan chair fit for a gigantic king, or a maybe a God.
The road is lonely. Very few cars, maybe five in total pass us. Lone compadres on a lonely Mars-like planet wave back shared humanity. A pack of three motorcycles, roar freely across “America.” Easy rider custom Harleys replaced by outfitted Japanese cycles and awaiting hotel rooms.
Down a long long hill, a spot in the road becomes a lone sit-on bicycle. It has small flag to remind fellow voyagers that they are not the only ones out here and to watch out. It is slow going for the pedalist up the seemingly endless hill, then two more are seen climbing the same incline.
When we cross a bridge over the Colorado River canyon, we know that we have come too far and missed our turnoff. I turn the SUV around and we slowly go back across the old steel bridge, looking down into the depth of the canyon below.
Heavy rains are welcome down in thirsty Arizona, Nevada and the California farms. We can see light rain fall from threatening clouds in the distance, but it doesn’t appear to be making the descent to the ground, only misty trails hang out of the cloud’s base. There is still a chance that this could build up and roaring thunder storms could change all of this. The dammed Lake Powell we’ve read is at pitifully low levels.
We find the turnoff on the way back. There are signs this way, but none coming from the other direction. We now know how we missed our turn. The turnoffs are all just dusty little dirt roads through a parched desert. We are trying for Farley Boat Landing. At the end of this graded dirty trail there are facilities and offered camping, but there is no longer water in sight! Water is nowhere for miles! It is all closed down. We get out. Might we go ahead and camp here anyway? It appears that it could be all ours, a nude campground.
We wander across the sandy fields of a former time.
There is a serine spiritual sense to this place. We decide to wander with only cameras in hand. Naked, we feel this place. There is a special flow of form, the still quiet, the sense of the infinity and mystery, even hidden presences. There is solitude and safety in the bare world’s order and our skin reflects that, an interface.
Someone had collected various “special” rocks and laid them in a circle on a hill. They felt this sense too.
There is overcast, rain is falling but not meeting the ground, but for a handful of pleasant drops on bare shoulders, refreshing, sparse, a polite tap to remind us how special it is to walk in the these bodies in the world, as generations through millennia. “I felt two. No, three, now.”
She has yet to be hit, and then reports two for herself. We have no forecast far out here on this dry boat launch, no cell phone, no weather report, just sight, speculation and luck.
We consider that it will likely be hot here tomorrow and decide to camp closer to tomorrows hike. The trail to the legendary House of Fire and then off the beaten path into the canyon passed it.
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