As with any of my stories based in reality, it is true and accurate only to the extent that my memory is correct. This is an account of things as I remember them.
Spring Break
Many years ago I felt a strong desire to break free of school and work in order to spend some time tooling around Southern Utah. I had time off, a small pickup truck, and enough money to pay for gas and any incidental expenses that happened to arise, so I made plans to take a bunch of back-roads through the red-rock country. While I might have wanted to spend this time alone, I also had a sister who had just finalized a rather ugly divorce and was struggling to put her life back together. After talking it over with both my sister and my parents, we (my sister and I) agreed to spend spring break together. We threw a tent, sleeping bags, cooler full of food, camera, and a bunch of other gear in the truck and headed out for our first stop on the trip – Moab.
The truck I owned at the time was a small, rickety, rusted-out, 4×4 Chevrolet Luv that was almost as old as I was, and was in much worse condition overall than I was. In spite of being four-wheel-drive, the small street tires it had made it ill suited for substantial off-road driving. It wasn’t particularly well suited for street driving either. The doors were so rusted you could see daylight and passing asphalt through them, and they did nothing to keep the overly loud muffler and other road-noise out. To crown it all off, when loaded down with more than just the driver, the truck had great difficulty maintaining anything above sixty-five miles an hour unless I was on a steep negative incline. But… it was what I had, so we set out for adventure anyway.
In spite of the truck’s limitations, we made good progress up to the point where we were about an hour outside Moab. Through some unexplainable mechanism, the truck had managed to pick up speed to over 70mph on a 60mph road, and a highway patrolman coming the other direction noticed. He flashed his lights at me, so I pulled over to wait for him to make a U-turn and give me a ticket. However, instead of writing a ticket and sending me on my way with the admonition to slow down, he became highly interested in me and my cargo.
Among the first questions he asked was if I had any drugs or alcohol in the car. I answered “No.” Then he asked if I had marijuana. I kind of stared blankly at him, which probably piqued his interest, then responded with something along the lines of “I thought that was an illegal drug…” He asked for the registration papers, and when he saw my mom’s name on them assumed it was my sister’s car. When she replied no, he was instantly suspicious until we explained it was our mom’s. I’m not sure he believed her, but he quit going down that road at that point. Still doubting she was my sister, the officer instead decided to ask me what was in the film canister on the seat between the two of us. It had never occurred to innocent me that someone would use a film canister (something that has become exceedingly rare these days) for something other than film. Again, I hesitated in wonderment over why he would ask such a dumb question before responding blankly “film.”
This line of questioning progressed in a similar fashion until it finally dawned on me the officer was looking for evidence of a pot stash since I was clearly a college age spring breaker headed to Moab to get high. By the time I managed to convince the officer I wasn’t what he was looking for we had been on the side of the road for probably twenty minutes. In the end, he seemingly forgot that I deserved a ticket, gave me a warning, and let me go. I considered myself lucky that he didn’t decide to make me empty out all the crap I had packed under the shell in the bed of the truck. Had he done that, I would have been there for hours playing a roadside version of Tetris to load it up again. Getting off without a ticket (which I felt I deserved) was gravy.
The final point on this interaction came a few minutes later when the CB Radio crackled with someone asking me what I thought about the cop who had me on the side of the road. I looked down and realized I’d tuned it to channel 9, a channel reserved for emergencies, and one that you wouldn’t assume a guy like would be monitoring. The only way someone would have known to call me on that channel was if they had seen the radio. I’m convinced it was the highway patrolman trying to bait me into saying something bad about him. Rather than complain about the incident, I instead replied that he was a good dude, and that the other person shouldn’t be broadcasting on that frequency. We continued on our way without further incident, and spent the next day in Arches national park seeing Delicate Arch and several other spectacular formations. However, the real fun was in Canyonlands the next day.
Canyonlands is in reality two separate parks who’s joint-border is formed by the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. To the north is “Island in the Sky” and the “Needles” to the south. Another unusual aspect of Canyonlands is that the majority of the “roads” in the park require a 4×4 with good ground clearance. From the Island in the Sky, the best scenery is found by taking the Schaefer canyon trail down a 1500 ft vertical cliff face to the White Rim, a ledge half-way between the Island in the Sky and the rivers. A trail (the white rim road) ran from Schaefer canyon along the rim, following the Colorado river to the confluence and back up the Green river to another trail up to the Island in the Sky. The entire trail is near 100 miles start to finish and extremely rough in places.
Undeterred by the bad and steep road, I decided I wanted to head down the canyon to the white rim. No sooner did I start down the canyon road than my sister decided she wasn’t up to it. Being the obliging brother I am, I ignored her and pressed onward down switchback after switchback, having to back up to a wide spot a few times so a jeep coming up could pass. Every turn and steep incline found my sister’s fingers digging deeper and deeper into the dashboard. By the time we hit the bottom of the canyon my sister wouldn’t talk to me other than to insist that she would rather hike out than do that again. Over the course of the day we saw amazing things, but none of it seemed worth it to my sister who found off-roading with me too frightening to continue much longer. Finally, after an aborted attempt at a particularly difficult and steep trail down to the river level, I agreed to head back and get on more friendly terrain.
As we were about to turn up the steep canyon road, we came across a man standing next to his mountain bike staring in dismay at the canyon road. He was obviously in distress, so we asked if he could use a ride. The look of relief in his face was palpable. Even the prospect of fitting three across in my tiny truck wasn’t enough to cause a second thought. We tossed his bike in with the rest of the crap in the back and squeezed into the cab together for the long ride up the canyon.
Along the way, this poor man explained that he had left the visitor’s center early the day prior expecting to complete the white rim loop in a single day. He’d read a guidebook that claimed water could be pumped out of puddles along the trail, and that the distance was eminently doable in a day. He had hit the trail without a tent, anything to make fire with, enough water for the day, or any clear idea for what he was getting into. By the time darkness fell, he was halfway through the loop, out of water, out of food, and out of options.
In the high-desert, temperatures drop rapidly when the sun goes down, and while daytime temperatures were in the mid-seventies, there had been frost on my truck that morning and the wind had howled all night long. This poor man had ultimately resorted to taking shelter overnight in a pit-toilet at an unoccupied primitive campground. Without enough room to lie down, he spent the night squatting over the hole and leaning against the wall. Between the cold, his inadequate clothing and shelter, and the sheer discomfort of having to sleep while sitting up in a smelly outhouse, I doubt he slept more than a few minutes the entire night. When day broke, he set out again, rationing his water and hoping to find help along the way. When we met him along the trail he was dehydrated, exhausted, hungry, and unsure he had the strength to climb up that monster of a trail leading back to the visitor’s center. After a drink, a granola bar, and some conversation, we dropped him off at the top of the trail. He gave us a hearty thanks before heading off to his car and hotel room.
The next day, my sister wanted nothing to do with rough roads, but I really wanted to explore an area in the needles section of the park that included a trail out to an overlook of the Colorado river. My sister and I made a deal… I would go into the ranger station and ask for intel on the trail, and if it wasn’t bad, we could head out to the overlook. After a young (and rather pretty) ranger assured me that the trail was “smooth sailing and only a little rough towards the end” we took off to see what was out there. She was right about the first part of the trail. It was flat and coated with a shallow layer of sand that made for smooth sailing. Unfortunately, the conditions changed radically almost instantly… I was over-confident, and going too fast when I saw the drop-off coming. My truck went airborne and we flew several feet before landing on the down-side of a 2-3 foot near vertical drop in the trail.
Looking back at the obstacle, I didn’t see any way I was going to be able to crawl back up that rock-face. But… since we were already past it, I decided to press onward and deal with this particular problem later. After all… the trail was only supposed to get a “little rough” and maybe that drop was what she meant. I was wrong about that point. The next three miles were highly uneven slickrock sandstone where I rarely had more than three tires on the ground at any given moment, and frequently heard the scrape of the skid-plates under my transmission and oil pans against the rock. My sister swore she would never forgive me.
When we hit the overlook, there was a guy out there with a newer Jeep Wrangler crying over the dents in his oil pan. He looked at me in wonder, openly questioning how I got my short, crappy truck out there. I didn’t have a good answer, and after a few minutes admiring the view, we decided to tackle the trail back to civilization. The ride back is somewhat fuzzy at this point, and to this day, all I can say about how we got over that drop-off is that it helps to have a vehicle you aren’t afraid of scraping up. I’m not sure how I did it, but I’m pretty sure it took a few layers of steel off of the skid plates and a few years off of my sister.
The rest of the trip was uneventful but amazingly fun as we visited several state parks and remote areas across southeast Utah. In the end, it was a great time for both me and my sister, and I believe she did eventually forgive me for the stress and fear I put her through. To this day, I want to repeat that experience with my family, but lack the 4×4 and the time. Maybe in a few years…