Reflections | Canyonlands, Utah

Hiking Canyonlands in Utah

Hiking the Sandstone Plateaus of Canyonlands

My partner’s cousin took this shot, to show the perspective as we hiked over rocks in Canyonlands (Utah). Here, the youngest layer of geologic deposits is a million years old — built on shales, sandstones and clays in plateaus and stair steps. These geologic slabs survived epochs of winds, rains and the grit of sand erosion. 

The sandstone grips my hiking boots, and for just a few hours, I feel the sticky power of collared lizard scaling walls. I’m an acrophobe feeling invincible on near vertical grades. Well, they seem like vertical grades to me, probably a class 0.01 if that could even exist.

There are dinosaur tracks still, or so we’re told, some coated in living, cryptobiotic soil crusts. The crusts are everywhere, spongy looking, blackening the red dirt. They look touchable but I know better or, rather, I was taught better by signs and rangers. The signs tell you that cryptobiotic soils nourish the grasslands and junipers. The soil contains tiny organisms — bacteria and others that hold water. They also create a protective matrix. They fix nitrogen and help desert plants grow, and they’ve done this for thousands of years.  A single human footstep or tire track on the cryptobiotic crust can crush that soil for five years, ten, sometimes actually millennia, rendering this life force a lifeless dune. 

On the cusp of spring, the heat hasn’t yet choked the air. But it’s dry. And the stillness — the stillness! It’s so quiet I imagine I hear the footsteps of millipedes marching through the scrub. I finally understand what it means to be deafened by silence.

As the sun sets, the rangers treat us campers to a nature chat. Sitting on logs by an overlook, we listen for owls and watch the moon rise above Moab. At least I think it’s Moab but I’ve lost all sense of direction on this landscape where I’m just a speck. But, the Pinyon Jays and bighorn sheep and leopard frogs all seem to know where they are.

A plane passes over as dusk darkens the sandstone plateaus. I’m jolted into a memory I lost for only a day — the memory of being a plodding human almost suffocated by noise and neon. Here, I feel more kinship to the lizards and lichens than I do to my own opposable thumbs.

At our campsite later, I open and heat a can of Wolfgang Puck canned soup. It activates taste buds I probably never had … because I’m a lizard now, so I can pull scent particles from the air. When I return home, I keep buying the same can of soup over and over, trying to relive my lizard life, and all I taste is gruel.
We tuck into sleeping bags that I wish were under the stars, but it’s a good idea to zip up in the desert … even if the rattlesnakes are still asleep for the winter. The tent fly the cousin brought reeks of maybe a decade or two of wetness packed in his damp Seattle garage. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.