Polemic Redux: Tourism & The National Parks

I'm torn, as always.

I want the parks to be accessible. They belong to the people, after all. But dammit, I can't help but feel like the people don't deserve them. I know it's selfish to want this beauty all to myself, but is it selfish to want wilderness to remain... well, wild? The real beauty of it, to me and many others, is in that wildness. We crave the remote, the challenging, the solitary. We don't want to just marvel at nature from a roadside pull-off; we want to feel a part of it, which is what in turn makes us feel more human, more alive.

The Arches National Park I'm sitting in right now is a far cry from Abbey's Place; it's probably the one he saw in his very worst nightmares. Throngs of people crowd every overlook and crosswalk on the highway-speed, fully paved entry road. What I would call a "trail," Arches must call a "primitive trail;" what Arches labels a "trail" is more like a cattle run.

And I can see why they have to do things that way: they're trying to scare people off. On the Devil's Garden Primitive Trail, four separate groups told me they'd lost the trail over the slickrock, one man and his daughter for nearly two hours. Another group told me I had "about ten miles" left on a 7.2 mile loop trail; "we've been walking forever," they lamented. One man, sitting, simply said "it's hotter than I thought it would be out here." I gave him some of my water, since he hadn't brought any with him.

Every trail here feels like a pilgrimage to the shrine of instagram. I say this with no malice. I love social media, and I've taken plenty of photos myself. But my preference is for a wholly different experience--the kind where I have to keep my phone turned off in case I need to make an emergency call three days from now; where I can't always hear the chatter of people bouncing off of the smooth walls of the natural amphitheaters, giant concert halls with phenomenal acoustics echoing back the words for "say cheese!" in every language.

We stand before a flash flood of change right now--no, not a flash flood, something wrought by our own hands--a busted dam, a broken levy. Who can say what kind of world will be left behind, or who among us will be there to see it. And so who am I to deny others this taste of awe, whatever small dose they want to take of the thing that we are all starving for, whether we know it or not?

There are still brief moments of desert solitaire to be found here. I'm on the Windows trail right now--or, rather, off the Windows trail. Where most people stop at the end of the pavement, and the more adventurous scramble up to the belly of Turret Arch, I've gone through the arch and skirted the edge of the large natural bowl behind it. Opposite it, at the top of a smooth panel of gray Navajo sandstone, there's a narrow crack between two high pillars of rock. I bouldered up to take a look. (Slickrock, by the way, is a misnomer. It's the grippiest stuff in the world; like climbing on coarse-grain sandpaper. You just have to learn to trust your feet.) I squeezed myself through the crack, taking my pack off and turning sideways to just barely fit, then stepped down onto a small ledge overlooking the western range of the park.

The breeze is stiff here. It tugs at my baseball cap, but it'll keep me cool on this exposed perch. Before me I can see the rippling layers of the Navajo formation and the short bluffs of the petrified dunes, can imagine the Jurassic beaches stretching out towards the basin where Moab lies today. A castle of red Entrada sandstone to my left; beyond those, past the park boundary, steep red cliffs lined with scrub; velvety light-green valleys of sage. The horizon is the Sierra La Sal. Their triangular peaks and steep couloirs are still completely snow-packed this year. I love looking out at ordinary vistas like this just as much as I enjoy seeing the iconic rock formations of the National Parks. The sweeping vastness of the desert! There's nothing like it.

I can hear the car-alarm caw of a crow behind me, and the wind through the scrubby pipe-like cactus bushes, and occasionally a yell or the roar of a motor in the distance. At least wayfinding is easy here: I just point myself towards the constant thrum of the road. And at the end of a long day--sweaty, windblown, limbs heavy with the comfortable warmth of honest exhaustion--it feels kind of nice to rejoin the herd.

Beneath Bowtie Arch

I'm sitting in an arch.

Bowtie is a pothole arch, and also a nice quiet place to sit and write for a while if you want to avoid the masses at the national parks

An arch, technically, yes. But an arch with its back to the mountain, into which water has trickled for millennia, opening up a wide mouth. I'm sitting beneath a hole in the sandstone ceiling, gazing up at a blue sky.

The clouds scud by quickly overhead. Big, fluffy cumulus for now, but their rate of passage forebodes the kind of swiftly-changing weather you have to expect here in the summer. Afternoon thundershowers.

For now, it's warm and pleasantly dry, with a nice breeze cooling the patch of sweat my backpack has left behind. On my quick jaunt over the layers of slickrock and mudstone I passed wildflowers, purple, yellow, tiny delicate red cups; sweet-smelling juniper and, up here on the higher strata, ponderosa pine. Some of it small and brushy but a few are the nice, conical shape you'd pay eighty bucks for at Christmas.

A lizard approaches me cautiously, his dry belly making tik-tik noises on the pebbles. He's made for this desert: gray-brown at his head and tail, but his midsection is a rust red. Perfectly camouflaged.

I move away from the arch. Who wouldn't be nervous with all those tons of stone balanced so precariously overhead? They could all come crashing down in an instant. Any century now.

Bowtie & Corona Arches

First Night at Kane Creek

It's the desert's M.O., I think, to make you feel small.

First, of course, you have its physical immensity: it stretches outward, from horizon to horizon, but also upward, the vertical vastness of the great cliff and canyon country. Cities can dwarf you, too, of course, but not to this extent. Humans have yet to be able to dominate the landscape like this. This is Mother Nature flexing.

But it's not just a matter of feeling small in space; the desert makes you feel small in time. When you're sitting in a classroom and the teacher is casually dropping phrases like "a billion years ago," the numbers are meaningless. Spans like that are beyond human comprehension. But here, you can feel it. The slow turning of the continent, the ancient barren sand dunes sunken by the roll of fertile seas, long since dried up. You look into those bluer-than-blue skies and can almost see the pliosaurids swimming above you. Things move on geologic time.

I certainly have no use for, or even concept of, human time here. I think the sun set yesterday at around nine. But the sky holds the light long after the sun has retreated beyond the cliff-faces, and so does the white stone, the sand underfoot and the bands of selenite running through the canyon walls seeming to glow from within.

I arrived at Hunter's Canyon when the sun was already dipping towards the western wall of Kane Creek; I had originally intended to go all the way out to the Ledges camping area, but I was worried about getting my tent set up before dark. I needn't have been concerned. I had plenty of time to stake my tent, do a little yoga, and explore my campsite before I even had to turn my headlamp on.

I'm just off the road (empty now, as it has been all evening), but only a few steps from Kane Creek itself--which, despite its diminutive name, has carved out a surprisingly deep canyon for itself over the millennia. The creek itself is a riparian area, lush with big cottonwoods, reeds, rushes. I set off towards it on a deer path and find that here--a ways upcanyon--it's already gone summer-stagnant, the creekbed still full but unmoving, choked by thick ribbons of algae. I hop across some flaky red sandstone slabs. On the other side, yellow seed-stalk grasses cover a small floodplain. They've been flattened out into swirling patterns by this year's high spring runoff.

From that sandy bench, a cliff rises in several distinct ledges. I heave myself up onto the first level of red stone. What are those strange round indentations in the stone called? How are they formed?¹ Sometimes they honeycomb the rock. Here, they make perfect hand- and foot-holds for some real scrambling. One foot goes in deeper than I expect it to. I pull it out quickly. That is occupied, for sure--no self-respecting desert creature would leave such a prime piece of real estate empty. I set my foot back into it, shallow, gingerly; I don't want to disturb a tarantula or scorpion tonight, or, god forbid, a rattlesnake.

The top of the second ledge is about forty or fifty feet up and offers a great view of my campsite. My tent is so small! And my car way too big and shiny for this place. In a day or two it'll be rust-colored with desert dust. No snakes, but plenty of skittering lizards. They run headfirst down the vertical rock faces, fearless. Evening is the reign of the crepuscular birds. One gives two sharp notes followed by a trill; another descends a whole-tone scale. The crickets begin their strumming as well. That sound, along with the high squeak of the fluttering bats, will continue into the night. The gnats are out in force, too. I wonder whether they're a good source of protein; I must inhale about a hundred a minute. I suck them off my teeth like a whale's baleen.

As it finally gets dim, the rock of the canyon walls looks like it's melting, the shadows pooling weirdly in those indentations. The scent of sage is pungent. Last night the moon was so bright I thought I'd forgotten to put the fire out. She's fuller tonight. We'll see if she peeks through the clouds.

---

My god. The moon is so bright. She hasn't risen over the canyon wall yet but she's lit up the opposite side as though a spotlight were pointed at it--though no spotlight on earth is that powerful. The moonward wall of the canyon casts a huge, ominous shadow on the illuminated one. The clouds have parted. I can see the ribbon of the Milky Way.

---

Woke up this morning the the sound of two crows cawing to each other in the canyon. Everything is so loud here, sounds amplified, bouncing between the opposing faces of the high stone walls. It's a nasty sound, but nature doesn't judge. Can't tell whether they're flirting or fighting. One flew over me as I rolled the tent up, its finger-like pinion feathers stretched wide. Beckoning me out towards another day in canyon country.



¹ Tafoni! A word I'd learned and forgotten. They're formed in limestone when rainwater dissolves the calcite that bonds the rock together. The calcite itself is the remnants of ancient shells, a reminder that this arid place was once a vast shallow sea. And when little critters live and die in the tafoni, their decomposition turns the water acidic, causing the calcite to dissolve even faster. So ancient animals are holding the rock together, and modern animals are eroding it away. Life and death are everywhere in the desert.

three cardiectomies

I did not expect the cold.

I expected other things: her voice
On the phone, gritty and overlaid
With the hollow orders of the gps

Threads of frayed phrases
Tugged through a thickened throat
And the bass beat from
Someone else’s rolled-down window.

I didn’t expect it so soon, or so late
But it was not as shocking

As the ice on the asphalt
Or the wind at my back.

---

I imagine my heart is an armadillo

And his a wood frog, frozen
Like a stone and sunken
In the muck of his stomach.

There is something in my gut too

Unwelcome, uncurling
Not a dormant, dying love
But its anxious antithesis.

---

The streets should be silent under the snow
But there is always a generator hum,
A red-eye rocketing
Into Logan, the lonesome notes
Of a wind-chime. I passed a man,
His face familiar but his eyes
Dark and unknowable

(Your eyes were dark too that night
On someone else’s dingy couch
And I could not see my reflection in them)

As every eye is to another
Though I could read in his face that mine
Were wild and colorless,

Milky-clear like the plexiglass window
Of a plane

Only empty space beyond.

Niaux

The charcoal lines begin to dance:
Horned things, monstrous footprints,
Ochre and scarlet
Stained fingers claw at cavern walls,
Flicker in and out of existence.
The echo of the Magdalenian man
Is in my bones


The Pleistocene was only yesterday;
Tomorrow, the mammoth extinction.
The limestone cave glistens with sweat
Like summer skin
Or polished antler points.


The ominous hominin on the wall
Winks under electric torches:
Each flickering trick of the light—
An eyelid’s flutter—
All of human history.


I wink back and ten thousand years go by.

Stella Point, elev. 18,871 ft

The loose scree gives way to scattered snowdrifts as we near Furtwängler glacier. Here they are at last: the snows of Kilimanjaro. There’s no real path now. We pick our way around the rim of the crater, skirting boulders, following Godlisten’s footprints as he packs down the snow.

“How you doing?” Godi asks me.

“Kichizi kama ndizi ndani ya friji,” I reply. He grins. It’s a phrase he taught me: Swahili for cool as a banana in the fridge.

The sky is striated now, black and grey and yellow and red; the earth hidden beneath a sea of black clouds below us. We sit for a moment, snap photos that don’t quite capture the sunrise. The German girls and their guide have fallen off the back, leaving only three of us: me, Godi, and Alex. I pull my gloves off, take a couple of grainy pictures of Alex on his phone. My fingers are numb and clumsy.

“Look,” calls Godi. We turn, look back towards the eastern horizon. The sun has surfaced. It casts the ice in bronze, halos our silhouettes. It feels warmer already.

We’re less than an hour from the summit.

Gilman's Point, 18,640 ft

I’m stepping up into the stars.

They’re so close I could brush them with my fingertips, if only I had the strength to lift my arm. They’re painted on a vaulted ceiling, like an astronomy book from the middle ages, like the Sistine Chapel. Every leaden step, every coppery breath, takes us closer, until we can look out and see stars below us, pinpricks of light outlining the curvature of the earth like an airport runway.

“I’m fuckin’ knackered,” says Alex, his Liverpool accent sticking in his throat. He doesn’t turn around. His jacket is a blinding white in front of me, reflecting the light of my headlamp back into my eyes. There are legends, I think, about ghosts who lead travelers up mountains and over cliffs. Still I follow his boots, cautious of the places where he stumbles on the loose scree, stepping in time with him. We set a rhythm, slow and faltering as a dying man’s heartbeat.

I'm breathing through a snorkeling mask: never quite enough oxygen. For a moment I'm back in the aquarium-blue water of Zanzibar. But here, there is only cold and dark and Alex's boots, one rocky step in front of me. And all around us, the stars.