Backpacking through Utah’s Canyonlands National Park is a challenge: maps don’t work, trails follow unnerving ‘slickrock’, and you have to lug a lot of water. But, as discovers, it’s all worth it to be immersed in this dreamlike sandstone landscape
Ronald Turnbull
THE JOURNEY STARTS just down the road from my house, about 300 million years ago. Harsh, dry winds raged across a desert landscape, with rusty-coloured sand dunes migrating across what today are damp pastures. A tiny stream, the Linn Burn, has carved down into the 300 millionyear-old red sandstone. It’s made a gorge 30 metres deep, but narrow enough to jump across the top of if you’re brave. Covenanters – religious refugees of the 1680s – hid out in the caves, and Victorian visitors carved their names into a natural sandstone doorway above the stream.
The opening of the Atlantic broke that long-ago desert in half; and now the slow dance of the continents has carried its western edge, now named as Utah in the USA, back into the same sort of climate. Once again the sandstone rocks are lying under a red desert of today. Where our Linn Burn has made one tiny gorge, Utah’s Canyonlands are more gorge than anything else. We have one tiny arch; the Arches National Park has over a thousand, some as big as motorway bridges.
My house in southern Scotland is made of this Permian sandstone, dug out of a quarry in its own back garden. Last week I was shaping the stuff into paving for my parking lot. It was time to visit the red sandstone in its natural, red-desert habitat.
Thelma and Louise (it’s a great film, by the way) aren’t in the Grand Canyon at all. They’re in Utah, at a place called Island in the Sky, in the Canyonlands National Park. These canyons are not as famous, but they certainly are grand; and they’re generally a lot quieter, too.
Backpacking through Utah’s Canyonlands means cliffs layered in pink and beige, above huge curves and hollows of bare red rock. It means wide canyon floors carpeted in purple sage. It also means a gallon of water for every 24 hours. That water has to be carried on your back, all the way. There is one compensation – the US gallon is slightly smaller than our one, so the day’s supply weighs in at 8lb rather than 10lb. Even more usefully, the Salt Creek does flow all year round, and we’ll be following it for our first two days.
That was the plan. Well, you wouldn’t think the dry desert could suffer drought. But they did, and the Salt Creek was dry. Compared with the two gallon water load, the other problems were insignificant.
The rattlesnakes and scorpions: shrug.
The mosquitoes: no mosquitoes, they don’t do droughts either. The bears: well, there would be bears, maybe also a mountain lion.
“Really it gets so boring, all that blue sky,” says Farlane, our intrepid Land Rover driver to the trailhead at Cathedral Butte. (Butte, by the way, is pronounced like the island of Bute. A butt, in America, is your bum.) “It takes this grey rain to bring out the colours of the rocks.”
But we’ve travelled 5000 miles for those blue skies! And we’re carrying all this water because of this three-month drought you’ve been having. Is it fair to also be having the stuff falling on our heads?
She drops us off, and the Land Rover engine fades to a great wide silence, with just the waterdrips off the branches. Peering between the pines, we find a great emptiness. It’s the Salt Creek Canyon; we’ll be walking down if for the next two days.
Purple sage is here, but also grey thornbrush and yellow rabbitbrush – any colour really, so long as it isn’t green. The rock walls a quarter mile away on either side are in pinky beige, like marshmallows. A rock arch shows above the canyon, outlined against pale grey sky.
In a couple of miles, much too close to the start of the walk, is Kirk Spring, the only reliable water. For a half hour we sit beside it, quietly filtering water and loading it into our sacks. Not too quietly, though: we do want the bears to be aware the human beings are the ones at the water just for now. Yes, that was a bear print on the path: the claw marks are clear. And this pile of bear poo: it does look nice and fresh.
“It isn’t bear ‘poo’,” says my son Tom, who lives here in America. “Bear ‘scat’ is what you’re supposed to say.”
The trail heads across to examine two
Looking over Canyonlands from Island in the Sky – or you could just watch the final scene of In Arches National Park, north of Moab