Finding Peace in an Unexpected Place
It was July 2nd, 2013, 9:45 in the morning and already 95 degrees. I pulled into a makeshift parking lot in the middle of the Utah high desert on a gorgeous, bluebird day. There were three other cars in the lot, one family already packing up to leave. The cooler in the trunk of my rental car, full of ice, housed my snacks and water. Into my taxi yellow North Face backpack, went four Nalgene bottles full of ice, water, and Gatorade, and a 100 ounce Camelbak pouch full of ice and water. A ham and cheese sandwich, an apple, a banana, and some beef jerky rounded out my snacks. Grabbing my 100 spf sunscreen, I locked the car up and walked off. At the trailhead, a sign read “Minimum 1 gallon of water required” which I laughed off, having nearly twice that amount. Down I went into that canyon, on that fateful day.
How did I get there? How did I come to be out in the middle of the desert in the heat of July?
I was always a very lazy child, opting for Donkey Kong Country over outdoor country. Growing up in a pretty urban area, my options were fairly limited. My mother, wonderful as she always is, saw my sloth as a liability and forced me into Boy Scouts. Boy, did I hate that! I never really liked being dirty or sweaty, classic city kid.
Over time however, I found myself on these forced camping trips, doing difficult things; things the other kids didn’t much care for. I would go for the more difficult merit badges over the easy basket weaving kind. One time, on a camping trip in northeastern Pennsylvania on a frigid February day, the troop leaders ran out of room in the cabin and needed a volunteer to sleep outside in a tent. I jumped at the opportunity. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, what kind of twelve year old kid does that? Let me tell you, having to use the bathroom, at 2 in the morning, outdoors, in February, in the middle of the woods = fun times!
And so it went, every time something new came up in life, I always chose the harder path. Why hike easy trails? Try hiking harder trails in harsher conditions. Adding in extra levels of challenge to life became my mantra.
It was winter time in New York when I decided to hike in Utah, one of those polar vortex type of days. Back then, I normally hit the gym at lunch time and managed to have a little extra time during the middle of the day rather than in the mornings or evenings. Having that extra time, I began to add in a little heat training regimen. It was weird at first, doing air squats, jumping jacks, push-ups, crunches, and planks in the gym sauna to weird and puzzled looks. But pretty quickly, the lunch time crowd in the FiDi New York Sports Club got used to my antics and were cheering me on, cheering for Utah. By June of 2013, I was able to knock out 100 of each exercise, in 160 degrees in the dry sauna. This would give me the baseline for hiking the desert in July.
At the time, I was working for a very large, well known bank and it was the wake of the financial crisis. There were a lot of highly technical projects to make the bank compliant with all the new regulations, one of which I was leading in the spring of 2013. It was mentally taxing, so by the time June rolled around, I was fried. I needed to escape.
I visited the Chicago office in order to meet the head of another, adjacent team. Quick coffee, new job secured, I took a flight out to Denver. Car rented, I hopped over to REI to pick up some hiking supplies, and off on i70 I drove. Watching the soft rolling green hills turn into giant mountains and slowly into blood orange desert, I drove west into the sunset as I crossed the border into Utah.
My mission was to see some of the national parks but also, I had read about these paintings that were thousands of years old splattered all over the walls of the Horseshoe Canyon. Wall paintings were dispersed all over Utah, remnants from the time of Paleo-Indians hunting mastodons and mammoths across the southwest. I had to see this history for myself.
I drove from Arches National Park in Moab, past Green River, and down toward the Horseshoe Canyon. I took things a bit too easy during that first day in Utah. Exhausted from the work I had in the spring, I figured, this was my vacation. I’ll get up whenever I get up, I’ll get there whenever I get there. Well, I finally arrived at the trailhead parking lot at 9:45 in the morning, just as people were already leaving to avoid the heat of summer.
It was already over 95 degrees. I don’t know if you know anything physics or heat dispersion, but canyons tend to behave like convection ovens: the deeper you go, the hotter it gets, as the air continues to cycle down toward the canyon floor. That was an important lesson I learned that day, one of many. By the time I reached the canyon floor, it felt a whole heck of a lot hotter than 95, maybe 110 degrees, that’s over 40 degrees Celsius for you non-American readers, but who’s counting? I was glad I spent all that time acting like a weirdo in the downtown NYSC sauna throughout the spring. I was wearing light clothing, tons of sunscreen, and drinking ice cold water. Even with that, I was still hot. Not long after I reached the floor, I saw the last couple hikers leaving. Now I was alone at the bottom.
There was hardly any vegetation. A couple of lone trees a few hundred yards away were the only shade along the entire eight mile round trip hike. I nicknamed those two trees “the Double Tree Hotel” appropriately so. They provided glorious shade. Out in the desert, shade is your best friend, your lover, your confidant, your one and only. You’ll grow to love it and long for it when it is gone.
The guidebook said it was about a 3 mile walk to the Great Gallery once you reached the bottom of the canyon. It was hot and getting hotter. I trudged along, not wanting to miss these paintings. Then I saw one little painting of a man, in brownish red paint, faded by the dust of time. It was about the size of a sheet of computer paper. What a jip! That sucks! I felt cheated by such a small figure! Yes, cheated by free ancient art, how arrogant of me. Nature would slowly humble me over time. Yet, frustrated, I continued along the seemingly endless death march in the desert. Hugging the canyon wall as I walked along, I tried to catch whatever shade I could get.
That’s when it happened. It came out of nowhere. Quick as lightning.
I put my right hand on the canyon wall to rest, gulp some water. I closed my eyes. Thinking about how I was the lone hiker in that canyon. I was the only human being, within 40 miles, in every direction. Suddenly, a wave of peace enveloped the core of my soul. I had never known peace until that moment. I never knew what it actually felt like. To be at peace with yourself, with the world. Alone, at peace, one with the universe. It was a truly surreal experience.
I kept walking along the Horseshoe Canyon floor, and somehow, the heat didn’t bother me, my muscles were light as puffy clouds. I began to admire this place I was now connected to. This must’ve been a beautiful place to live 8,000 years ago, I thought. And then I saw it, the Great Gallery. This was not the size of a sheet of paper. It was a sight to behold. Gigantic figures, ten feet tall, strewn across the canyon wall, across about 70 feet. They told the story across the epochs to me. Careening forward through time from the distant past, to the present, to the here and now, to me.
Taking in the sight and turning right around to make the 4 mile hike back to the car, I stopped only once, at the Double Tree Hotel for some shade and what seemed to be my rapidly dwindling supply of life-giving water. Climbing back out of the canyon, I finally ran out of water 200 yards away from my car. So much for minimums. I’m glad I over-packed. Eyes stinging from sweat, I dove right into that cooler, ice now melted into cold water. I am forever thankful for that day, down in that canyon, to experience true peace, for the first time, but hopefully, certainly not the last.
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