The path led us right into the needles we had admired from the stony observation
deck the afternoon before. The sandy path was smooth and loose for
quite some time, thick with tall grass and yellow flowers on all sides.
A solid carpet of cheat grass on one part of the trail sent hundreds of
sharp seed heads into our socks. Soon the trail sloped sharply up, the
path weaving in and out and over boulders and sandstone slabs. A
brisk climb that really brought out the sweat brought us to a notch in
the wall of needles, and we hiked through the shadowy passage as if entering
another realm. In a sense, we were. Needles of all shapes and
sizes littered the horizon in all directions. It was a very busy
scene. How in the world did the first explorer negotiate this terrain
to blaze a trail? Quite a feat.
The rest of the hike was more of the same: up a canyon and back down, weaving in and out of cracks and boulders. Lunch was served under a shady wall with a convenient sitting ledge right by the trail. The cheese and crackers went well with jerky and tea. The layman’s luxuries. After the lunch stop, the temperature became very hot and the sun hit everything with a powerful solar blaze.
We
encountered a man who was lost, spoke no English, and had at most one quart
of water. He was six miles from the trailhead. He was looking
for Druid Arch. We pointed him in the right direction, and the last
we saw of him was a Fox Party of Five T-shirt. I wonder if he made
it out okay. I wonder how well they dub in foreign translations for
Fox prime-time dramas.
After walking in the dry riverbed of flat, hard slate that is Elephant Canyon for nearly a mile, we found UE2 and wearily trudged up to the camp, and straight past it to the five-foot strip of shade behind it. It was 2:40 p.m.
The sun beat down so hard that motivation for any physical activity was difficult to muster. We spotted an interesting cavern on the wall opposite our camp and decided to go check it out in hopes of finding respite from the heat in its cool depths. We found that and more. The cavern was immense in girth, and stretched back over a hundred feet. Each end was open to the scenery beyond, making the cool rock especially pleasant in view of the baking red rock outside. The tunnel was about 60-70 feet high and
30-40
feet in width, with masses of sandstone flaking off everywhere. When
we first arrived, a thin streak of brilliant sun sliced through the cool
darkness to highlight the intricate potholes and wind carvings on the wall,
like miniature cliff dwellings. As we sat on the cool rock, airing
out feet propped up on the other rocks, reading, the afternoon waned and
the strip of light floated up the wall and out of sight.
Feeling bored, we moved on back to camp. The sun had sunk low enough for the rocks above camp to cast a comfortable shadow large enough to move around in. We lethargically cooked up a dinner of Lipton Instant Rice ‘n’ Spice, which tasted great but didn’t set well. An evening of digestive nightmares followed, no doubt catalyzed by the inescapable heat and hard day’s hike. Despite this, Dave and I managed to climb up on top of the limestone above the cavern we had spent the afternoon in. Here we just sat and watched the canyon, interesting in its stillness, awe-inspiring in its sheer size.
One never could imagine silence so complete as that in the canyon country, in late afternoon when the wind and sun have gone away for the afternoon. A fly can be heard at twenty feet, the flap of a raven’s wings at a hundred feet. The unmistakable drone of a hummingbird alerts you like a low flying airplane, and the birdcalls echo off canyon walls and reverberate like bells chiming. One bird in
particular
made its call wherever we went. I likened it to a firecracker, the
screaming kind, starting on a high note and skipping down quickly note
by note a full octave, finishing the call with a rather unflattering squawk.
It is the most distinctive birdcall I’ve ever heard. I never spotted
the bird.
We watched the canyon for half an hour. How do you watch a motionless landscape for half an hour you ask? Try it sometime. It takes at least that long just to run one’s eyes over every needle, mushroom, crack, fin, cavern, strata, and tree in sight. Amazing. Dave pointed out several areas where the history of the rocks was clear : a hunk of primeval limestone on the canyon floor fit the ledge 100 feet above like a puzzle piece; one could see that a slab of stone slid off an incline in a long ago geologic age and lay where it fell to this day. Things change slowly here, making the erosion of strata thousands of feet thick even more amazing.
The anticipated colroful sunset did not occur; we settled for the full moon rising bright over a massive formation to the east. We headed down and went to bed at dark in an extremely hot tent.