I crave the desert.
Nearly every morning since my most recent Grand Canyon river trip last fall, I wake up before the sunrise, wash my face, and sit on my living room floor for 10 minutes. “Meditate” is the official term for it, but I really just close my eyes and try not to think about anything. A shockingly difficult task. I then make an americano, and read a few chapters from my “happy-morning-desert books”, as I’ve been calling them. Notable recent additions include Red by Terry Tempest Williams, The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin, Melissa L. Sevigny’s Brave the Wild River, and Ellen Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Walz.
These stories and accounts of women in the desert feed my soul and satisfy my cravings for the red rocks of the West, at least while I’m still living on the Front Range. So you can imagine how excited I was to spend a full week in the desert with my best friends. It’s been years since I’ve done a trip like this. What follows is my best attempt at Terry Tempest Williams-style of writing. Praise the desert.
A week spent in the canyon country of the Escalante and I return to myself. My dusty, crusty, desert rat, dirt-loving self. The desert is the ultimate freedom - showing you who you are among bare bones of rock. Stripped all away. An old friend.
This land is holy – with its red buttes and red mud and red rivers and stone. Red – the color of blood, so fierce, so raw, full of power and energy. I’m always re-energized after time in the desert.
That open space is always calling me. Maybe it is meant to be, maybe I’ll live in the land of Red one day. The Colorado Plateau, the Colorado River Basin, is home. It’s always been home.
On the rainy day in the middle of the week, we stopped at the Escalante Visitor Center and had a long chat with one of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area rangers. We initially had questions about hiking to a Glen Canyon formation that has been inundated under Lake Powell for decades, which we thought could have reappeared as the lake levels are the lowest they’ve been since the reservoir was being filled in the 60s. Alas, the ranger informed us that while Lake Powell’s elevation is alarmingly low, it’s not quite low enough for us to be able to hike to the formation, and after hearing about our “ambitious” backpack we had just completed down Hole-in-the-Rock, proceeded to give us some inside tips for an alternate route. We laughed along with him as he said that rangers don’t just give out beta to anyone, you have to prove your worth and be stewards of the land.
We ended up spending our last two days of the trip hiking the Boulder Mail Trail from Boulder, UT to Escalante, as suggested by the ranger. It was incredible. Following the historic mail route and telegraph line between the two remote towns, we descended into Death Hollow, an incredible canyon that reminded us of Zion and Kings Canyon, with a small stream and hidden cutthroat trout. The floor of the canyon was littered with poison ivy, but we didn’t mind, as the sheer cliff walls and massive buttes of stratified sandstone made up for it.
Back at home. I live alone now. It’s quiet. A lot has changed in recent months. A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders with the ending of a relationship, the closing of a chapter, and beginning anew. Feeling a new lightness and freedom in my body and mind. I’m finding myself again. It’s lovely.
I’ve written about this before, but in the desert, it becomes so easy to be the truest, most pure form of yourself. The land is bare, nothing to see here but rock and dust. When you look closely, there’s an abundance of life and signs of water everywhere. It’s hard traveling in this country, it brings out the best and the worst in you.
My skin is dry, my eyelids crusty, my lips chapped, sand in my ears, sand in my hair, sand everywhere. The wind strips you down like it does the land. I love who I become in the desert.
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.”