begin rant

So... Is there hope for the future?

A moment to think. A pause before battle. I've learned a few more things about myself on this trip. You can't be afraid to jump, and you can't be afraid to love, or to live. You aren't trapped in the position you are standing in so long as you have legs to carry you forward, and arms to pull you higher. And when the time comes that you can reach no higher, and your legs fail and you can't crawl that extra mile? Maybe you'll be lucky enough to have a friend willing to pull you along at their side.

I lean back and boot up the iPod one last time while I wait for my flight to board. It offers up "Learning to Fly" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers in response.

Maybe there is time for tomorrow.

Posted by Derksen at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning begins the same as every other, but I am finally encompassed by a growing sense of distance. The foreknowledge of departure has become our reality. We stop to eat breakfast at a restaurant. As I suspect I will not be eating for the rest of the afternoon, I gorge myself on french toast.

We arrive at the airport shortly thereafter, wending our way through the mysterious caverns of the rental return garage, eventually returning our car with a little less than fifteen minutes to spare on the rental agreement. I hand the young woman at the Thrifty kiosk my keys, and sign my receipt. Dana and I then turn towards the airport proper, anticipating to two or three hours of tedium.

Security is a breeze, but the man in front of me is much slower about redistributing his electronic gadgets and tying his shoes than even me. I find this odd because something about his demeanor tells me that he is a frequent business traveller, and I would expect a person such as this to be better organized and prepared to leap the hurdles that security tosses in our path. Perhaps, like us - he simply has nowhere better to be right now.

We arrive at Dana's gate with more than two hours to spare. Lacking better entertainment, we play Scrabble. I get stuck with some awful tiles, and Dana keeps blocking my big wordscores. This time, Dana trounces me.

And like that, she walks out of my life.

Posted by Derksen at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We turn North for the final time, driving homeward towards Salt Lake and the airport. It is quiet on this trip. Then the rain begins again. This is a hard rain to be proud of - severe thunderstorm warnings and winds upwards of sixty miles per hour sweep the car. Thank heavens for my considerable Texas-based experience at driving in... driving rain.

The rain eventually drizzles away. The storm blows East into Colorado, and we travel North and out from underneath the storm. It leaves us with only a rainbow.

As we arrive in Salt Lake, the wind picks up again, and there is a dust storm. Truly fantastic to watch it blot out the sun, and cast long, muted red shadows across the countryside.

We see Andrew and Marian and Daniel one more time, and reward young Daniel with a colorful plush dinosaur from the Price museum's gift shop. We again find that time flies in their company as the conversation again wanders in that very Grinnellian way from science to religion to art and literature, somehow still managing to keep every beat in course and all of it relevant and connected.

As a result, we leave their home rather later in the evening to begin our search for a cheap motel to spend the night. In most major cities, this would prove no difficulty as the airport is usually surrounded by the things - a deer at bay by wolves. Salt Lake City proves surprising again, and we must hunt along the outer edge of Loop 215 until we finally find a small pack.

When we do pull over, we find that the first motel we enter is literally booked completely solid just as I walk in through the door. The second hotel has a room available, but they ask an unreasonable price for a single night. It is late, and all parties need sleep to rise and fly the next day. It is here that I learn an important lesson in modern commerce: I remove nearly twenty dollars from the woman's quoted price merely by asking if they have a more reduced or reasonable rate, as I am willing to continue searching for their nearby competitors. Haggling is still alive and well in capitalist America, and the only fixed price is the one you are willing to pay.

It is rather more of a hotel room than I had expected. For only a little more than our first night on the edge of SLC, we find wireless internet access, a bed larger than any I have slept in, two televisions, and a living room with a couch and a loveseat. This place lacks only a kitchen, and I would be ready to move on in. Too bad that everyone is too tired and leaving too early the next morning to truly appreciate it.

Posted by Derksen at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was decided that in order to visit the Kenslers again, Island in the Sky would have to be tackled at a dead run, taking the shortest hikes to the best views recommended by the local Park Rangers. This is a shame because there are some truly amazing vistas to be seen, and we would miss some great hikes that lead to a number of native ruins.

We did take the time to stop by a local geological controversy: the infamous "Uplift Dome". One can see from the surface that this strange site contains rock discontinuous with that in the rest of the park: the stone flows have been twisted in concentric rings, and these are the only tilted strata in the area. Geologists disagree whether this appearance was created by a salt dome pushing up from an ancient sea that has since eroded away to reveal only the rising core, or if perhaps these convolutions are the last remains of a heavily eroded meteor crater.

My father, resident geological authority, dismisses the ancient meteor impact-site theory as so much nonsense. Academic controversy thus observed, we continue onwards and spend some time staring over the edges of many sharp cliffs.

It can not be stated enough that this place really is an Island in the Sky - an uplifting of elemental earth into the airy heights - it feels like one is looking down onto the landscape as if from an airplane. Perhaps this was the first chance for many of our pre-flight predecessors to truly feel that they were flying without ever actually leaving the ground.

Posted by Derksen at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we travel towards the ancient granary, it begins to rain. At first, it is a mild drizzle, but then the lightning storm begins. I have no problem with hiking in the rain - it reminds me of my youth and the warm wonder of a Singapore monsoon, but lightning on the open desert is not a pleasant thought. Other than a few twisted and blasted juniper pine, there aren't a lot of tall things out there to help exchange a charge other than your natural salt column. The NPS recommends that the safest action for an individual is for them to return to their vehicle immediately. Failing that, they recommend that one get low and stay low in a sheltered location... but hopefully not in an area low enough to be prone to flash floods.

Zapped if you do, drowned if you don't.

We make a hasty retreat back to the car.

Then it really begins to rain. For that part of Utah to be called 'the high desert', it has to get an average of nine inches of rain per year. In the month of September, it has historically received 0.83 inches of rain. I suspect it may have received four or five of those inches on that afternoon alone.

Thank goodness I brought my travel Scrabble(tm) set. We sat and played a close game for nearly an hour. For the record, I won by a narrow margin.

Posted by Derksen at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On our way into the park, we pass "Newspaper Rock". As these glyphs have been carved into the surface of the rock, it is difficult to impossible to identify how long they have been weathering in the open. Cultural context or meaning has been difficult to determine, as has the significance of any of these carvings because many persons from the time of the earliest settlers to the new-agers of today have contributed to the symbols on the wall. In many ways, this rock wall speaks more to our changing interpretations of indigenous art than it does to any real expression or extension of that art.

As always, we began our journey at the Visitor Center and Ranger station. They had another amazing three-dimensional map of the park. Grabbed a few brochures, another map to carry with us on our travels, and I caved and purchased a book on hiking the geology of the American Southwest.

Posted by Derksen at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Canyonlands is a large enough national park that it actually has three distinct districts: Island in the Sky, The Needles, and the Maze. Highway 313 leads to the Island in the Sky District and is 10 miles north of Moab. Highway 211 leads to the Needles District and is 40 miles south of Moab. The Maze is remote and only accessible by foot - and only when accompanied by a professional guide already familiar with the flood-prone and twisting sandstone canyons of that region.

We have decided to tackle the Needles today.

Was given my tour of modern and classic country music. Turns out that I am more familiar with country music than I expected. Must have something to do with living (and driving!) in Texas all of these years.

We passed Hole "N The Rock gift shop and roadside curiosity. It is allegedly an historic attraction and natural treasure; but it is also unquestionably a roadside curiosity. It is a home (and gift shop, as they so frequently remind you) blasted out of solid rock over a period of twelve years by a man with a dream. There were probably a few other things wrong with him, too. Had they also possessed the world's shortest donkey, or Utah's Largest Ball of Twine, we might have stopped. As it was, they only had a petting zoo full of normal animals and no two-headed mutants, so we had to carry on to our primary destination.

Posted by Derksen at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The trail to the Delicate Arch is only a mile and a half, which is no distance at all to travel - but much of it runs up a steep slickrock slope with only the occasional stunted juniper tree for cover from the face of the sun.

The trailhead begins at Wolfe Ranch. Old man Wolfe came out here to raise a few cattle and to recover from a leg wound he earned during the Civil War. He wintered with his cattle and his demons beside a small creek for years until his children came to visit him, and found conditions "so hellish and primitive" that they forcibly removed John Wesley Wolfe to Pennsylvannia to live out his remaining days in relative rural comfort. Wolfe had other reasons for staying: a short detour away from the main trail and the tiny ranch lies a rock face with a well-preserved set of petroglyphs estimated to be at least four-hundred years old.

This is a relative estimation based on the appearance of horses (absent in North America until the Spaniards released an invasive population) in the image; glyphs are near-impossible to date accurately by non-correlative means. This is because they are carved into the surface of the rock, etching away the thin layer of desert varnish to reveal the more colorful sandstone below. They use no pigment with organic components whose isotopic content or predictable decay might be used as a sort of clock. Even the varnish itself proves an unpredictable clock, the rate of its glacial and irregular growth dependent upon microenvironmental variation.

The first stretch of the hike up to the arch is a half mile across lowlands, and in spite of the growing heat of the day proves merely invigorating. The occasional boulder or sprawling juniper provides a spot of shade every hundred yards . As the second third of our journey begins, our path starts to get vertical. The grade rises precipitously on bare slickrock, and there is no pity from the merciless sun. Depending on how healthy you are, this stretch can prove from fifteen to thirty minutes in hell, but you do get an excellent view of the surrounding plateau. Looking out over the crumbling fossil sand dunes to the East will provide a direct line of sight to the La Sal range of mountains. Should you ever become lost in the high desert of the arches, this is an important landmark - a line of sight to La Sal means that you may be able to get a signal out with your cell phone to call for help before your water runs out.

We follow a trail up the side of the dune where rain has gradually eroded a channel into the side of the stone. Throughout our ascent, we see patches where these cracks have been filled by lichen who continue to break down the rock, releasing minerals and providing small traps for sand and nutrients - and even a little water. These pockets allow for a sandy soil for a few hardy plants to thrust their roots into, and give the incredibly durable and tough desert juniper a chance to grow - casting a little shade, and trapping just a little more moisture. Soon, small bushes and a few grasses grow, providing more nutrients to small herbivores like rabbits and ground squirrels - who provide further nutrients to those plants in decay, and to higher predators such as coyotes and hawks... creating a complete successional ecology on the side of an otherwise barren stone slope.

I am glad that we are not climbing this hill in the rain - as stated yesterday, wet slickrock deserves its name, and this channel is long and deep and water presumably comes pouring down off this hill in a great rushing torrent. Once you approach the top, a path has been carved into the side of the last sand fin before the monument. This trail should remain shaded for most of the day, and the broad path prevents one from falling more than a hundred feet down the sheer edge of the fin to water the desert below.

As you walk around the edge of this final rock wall, you may turn to your right and see what makes this entire climb worthwhile:

An amazing piece of geology.

Take the time to carefully walk around the bowl of the auditorium, and stand at its base.

Revere the awesome elegance of transient nature, slow sculptor of man and stone.

Then leave the irreverent part of me that plays Halo on some weeknights to wonder: "if I ran to the top, would I still find the rocket launcher?"

Posted by Derksen at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the end of the day, we find that we have lived for too long in the flatlands, and believe ourselves too tired out to tackle the 'arduous' trail to the Delicate Arch, and opt to get a taste of tomorrow's fun by previewing it from a distance. Instead of the mile and a half hike up barren rock, we climb to the top of a nearby overlook, and snap a few photos of the unique strand of rock that we will explore in more personal detail first thing tomorrow morning.

After breakfast.

At this point, it is worth mentioning that while hiking all day, we have encountered a large number of German-speaking tourists, red-faced and huffing up the trails. I suspect that they are the advance guard of an invasion force, but they seem friendly... so instead we offer them water and a little advice on the dangers of heat stroke, and let them on their way.

Posted by Derksen at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We make it to the bottom, and almost to the far road nearly a mile and a half away before we finally turn back.

After jumping in the car (and turning on the air conditioning), we look at my blotchy red face and hereby swear to never leave the vehicle without at least one water bottle again.

Posted by Derksen at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Arches is but a hop, a skip, and a jump outside of Moab proper.

Before I begin my discussion of the park, perhaps a short lesson in geology is appropriate. All of Utah was once part of a great sweeping desert in the early Jurassic, an series of steadily rolling dunes great enough to bury our own contemporary Sahel. These endless sandy dunes would form the mottled grey sandstone of the Navajo formation that underlies the park and much of the Colorado Plateau. A broad, shallow river would eventually wend its way between the dunes through the heart of this ancient desert, pushing slow rippled layers of yellowed silt into what would become the sandstone of the lower Entrada. It would be followed by the iron-tainted silica that gave the sandstone of the upper Entrada its warm red tint. Collectively, these strata are known as 'slickrock', and it is within these layers that we find the arches of the eponymous park.

I love slickrock. As it is built of fossilized sand-dunes, it has amazing traction, and I could run and jump carefree up and down their weird slopes all day long. That said, when wet, slickrock can truly earn its name - and it also occasionally peels off of the basal strata in small narrow sheets, like subscription cards falling from a magazine. If one is not careful, you might find yourself suddenly slipping down the hillside as your footing dances out from beneath you, and a spill upon slickrock is akin to dragging oneself along five or six feet of low-grade sandpaper. One learns to listen for a hollow drumming sound as you put your foot down, as this indicates a sheet eroding away from the main body... but frequent visitors bear the broad pink scars of their road rash as a masochistic badge of pride.

On our way into the park, we pass a small group of female and juvenile bighorn sheep grazing on the side of the the road. As the road into the park is surprisingly busy, and as I had expected them to be more prevalent within the park, we did not photograph them. I now regret that we did not stop to photograph the small herd, as they are far more uncommon than presumed. They are rare and secretive animals, usually avoiding the bustle of humanity, and this was to be our only encounter with the ungulates for the whole trip.

Posted by Derksen at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Moab was a dusty little uranium town that just happened to be located in the middle of some of the most spectacular geology on the whole Colorado Plateau. With the end of the cold war, the uranium boom went bust, and Moab continued in the direction it had already been heading. Like Sundance, just two hours to the north, they whole-heartedly embraced the tourist industry, focusing on the stark appeal of the surrounding wilderness and the opportunity for an endless diversity of extreme sports. There are plenty of opportunities for white-water rafting, rock-climbing, mountain-biking, sky-diving, and hiking - and this is just within the city limits.

We pulled into the Lazy Lizard Hostel on the southern edge of town, just off 191 at just past nine. While it initially reminded me of the run-down hippie communes of South Campus at college, it was very comfortable. We were provided with a air-conditioned and clean cabin large enough to sleep five. Not exactly roughing it, but what the hell, why not? They were also unbelievably affordable, and this allowed us to sample some of Moab's finer dining options with impunity.

Posted by Derksen at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our first visit was to the emergency room that once cared for myself and three other travelers, seven long years ago. It was during the return leg of our March 1998 Spring Break road trip to the Western Coast that a careless jackrabbit leapt out into our headlights, and into destiny. It left the four of us suspended upside-down in a ditch: Roy Huggins blind in one eye and bleeding, Elizabeth Tweig concussed with a series of scratches on her head that mysteriously parallel my front teeth, myself concussed with shattered sinuses, and Sarah Olivieri... with a broken fingernail. The Castleview Hospital's emergency room is still right where it used to be, and still ready to take in all visitors at all hours, no matter how far away, or how serious the car wreck.

The second locale was of no less significance, but of greater personal interest. Price, Utah also happens to be home to one of the best dinosaur collections in the world. The College of Eastern Utah maintains a Prehistoric Museum sampling the paleontology and archaeology of the area. This tiny museum in this tiny town is home to some of the richest fossil beds in the world, and as a result, the local natural history museum is better stocked than the collections of many larger cities.

It is unusual returning to this place. The last time I was here, I was still somewhat concussed and using an old pair of glasses that my mother had thought to bring to replace the pair I had lost on the roadside. Between the persistent wooziness and a prescription nearly two years out of date, my memories of the time spent there are a little softer around the edges than usual.

The museum does not appear to have changed substantially in the seven years we have been apart, but many things which were once hidden are now visible. The Utahraptor, once trapped within the matrix of rock that held it, was now free to terrorize the coastal plains running along the Western Interior Sea of North America once more. When last I visited, the Utahraptor had just been revealed to the world in a rare example of science following art: until their discovery, the only members of the Dromeosauridae clan known to be that large hailed from the Steven Spielberg cinematic adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel, Jurassic Park.

In another odd twist of fate, and more proof that the world is a smaller place than one might initially suspect, it turns out that Reese Barrick, a paleontologist I had once hoped would be my advisor at NCSU, had also ended up at this spectacular museum as a curator. As we leave, it occurs to me that I too could settle here and be happy.

Posted by Derksen at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Timpanogos Cave is located but forty-five minutes south of Salt Lake City. One of its claims to fame is that it possesses one of the world's largest "underground lakes". While this might conjure up visions of Moria, the truth is somewhat less impressive. Apparently for one's cave-bound body of water to qualify as an "underground lake", your 'lake' must be at least one foot wide by one foot long by one foot deep. Theirs is some nine feet across, which is somewhat more impressive, but still nothing to compare to most impressively large but surface-bound inland bodies of water. This fact could not deter me from my course: I must still behold this wonder of the natural world.

Noticing the heavy traffic, we park a little ways up from the cave, and hike over a small creek and hill in order to reach the Visitor Center. It is Labour Day, and apparently the National Parks of Utah are a popular attraction for tourists and locals alike. In order to protect the environmental stability of the Timpanogos Cave system, and for reasons of visitor safety, the Park must limit the rate at which persons enter the cave on a guided tour at any one time. We are fortunate, and nab the last pair of available tickets for the twelve-forty tour. After purchasing our tickets for the cave, we realize that it will take us at most an hour and a half to achieve the summit, which will still leave us some considerable time before our appointed tour - and both of us have become hungry.

We trek back over the hill and creek, jump in the car, and head to a grocery store. I know that we should have done this sooner - it is always good to have a little extra energy available on any hike. We look for appropriate foodstuffs, and I suggest something healthy, like donuts from the bakery. While Dana is not entirely opposed to this idea, we eventually decide upon the traditional staple of hikers the world over: granola bars.

Here begins controversy. I like the crunchy ones, and Dana likes the squishy ones.

What the hell... granola bars are less than a couple of bucks a package... and besides - I'm on vacation, so we go wild and get both chewy and crunchy varieties. Everyone is happy, and we return to reclaim our parking space the short mile before the trailhead.

We begin our climb to the summit in good spirits, and with plenty of water. The day is already warm and bright, but the breeze is cool and forgiving, and we are on the shady side of the mountain in the morning. In places where the trees or rocks provide thick or continual cover, it is even chilly. Then the slope begins to rise, and Dana and I find that we have spent far too much time in the flatlands, and almost certainly not enough time out-of-doors hiking. It occurs to me that it would be very healthy to make a daily jog to the cave entrance and back down again every morning, and with some delight, I realize that I would like to fence my way up this mountain. Finding our second wind, we continue upwards.

As one nears the halfway point, you can finally look out and appreciate the scale of the Wasatch Fault, running a clear and open line North and South through the Great Basin Region. The Earth's crust is expanding in an East-West direction in this area, gradually lifting the Wasatch Mountains ever higher - and leaving the valleys within which nearly two-thirds of Utah's population lives and works ever farther beneath them. There are five major segments to the faultline, and while geologists have no idea when or how many of the segments will shift at any one time, they do predict a major earthquake somewhere along that line within the next hundred years. When next the two plates suddenly slip, it will not be a gentle process - the earthquake is predicted to range from at least 7 to 7.5 on the Richter scale.

The earth does not shift for us today, and our footing remains steady as we scale ever higher. The tree-cover on the trail becomes thinner, and our path cuts through the talus pile of several rockfalls. We twist around a few more switchbacks, and finally achieve our destination, the Timpanogos Cave System, just a few hundred feet shy of the summit. The rocks here are littered with fossils from an ancient seafloor. Crinoids and other ancient bivalves peer out from a seabed lifted to summit.

We watch chipmunks scamper nimbly in the talus pile by the door as we wait for our tour to head into the cave system. One of the rangers gets ambitious and offers us the opportunity to join a tour nearly fifteen minutes earlier than our scheduled appointment with the underground, and we accept. We pass through the portal into the underworld, and the door slams shut with incredible finality. Dim light filters in from the original cave entrance carved by erosion nearly fifteen feet above the artificial entrance through which we passed. Our doorway had been built not only as a convenience for visitors, but also to preserve the moist environment of the cave system, and to protect the cave from looters and vandals who might destroy any of the wonders contained within. We pass through another door into a narrow realm of odd angles and lousy headroom. Our guide stops us for a minute, and turns out the lights that had been strung along our pathway, and we find that Timpanogos cave is a very dark place once one is inside. Rather, it would be a dark place but for the dim light shed by numerous cell-phones, digital cameras, and small personal electronics. She turns the lights back on, and we progress further into the depths.

I am disappointed to learn that the 'massive' underground lake is not part of the regular tour - one must come back with crash-helmet and complete their beginner's caving course to witness that particular wonder. I brighten up to learn that this cave does have other lakes, so I will not go away completely unsatisfied. One of the more 'impressive' specimens is pictured above. It is exceptionally cold in the caverns, well below fifty-five degrees F, a direct contrast to the heat on the surface world above. I am glad we came prepared with long-sleeves, but the chill moisture of this dripping place still makes me shiver. That same moisture is the lifesblood of any cave, as it simultaneously dissolves away the minerals of the cavern and redeposits them in the half-melted columns and flows of living stone.

As we travel further into the depths, we hear several charming stories about how people discovered these caves mostly by accident, and were delighted to later learn that all three major systems were in fact connected to one another. I take some pride in only hitting my head on the ceiling twice during our journey, and our path eventually leads to an exit on the surface world nearly two-hundred feet distant from where we began. It is by this gateway that we learn that the Park Ranger who ran our tour of this underground world had a sister living in Conroe and working in the Woodlands. I have filed this away as another piece of evidence proving what an incredibly small world it is we all live in.

The heat of the day is welcome as we head back down the mountain and cross the creek once last time on our way to our parking space, and to our next destination.

Posted by Derksen at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gadgets firmly plugged in and luggage tossed casually in the back seat, we attempt to make contact with old friends from College now living in Salt Lake. A few quick phone calls later, we were reunited with Andrew and Marian Kensler - and meet recent arrival Daniel. Aside from sharing a name with the man, Andrew is a neat guy. While in college, I admired him, and would have listed him as one of my quieter personal heroes. At Grinnell, he majored in computer science, and a wry sense of humor. Now he is in graduate school designing a better real-time ray-tracer, and hopes to go on to work in special effects.

Of course, finding them was not without its difficulties. Salt Lake City is notable for more than the Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats. It is also the heart of a major modern religion, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons. Their city takes much of its spirit from their character. It is remarkably clean, and well laid out on a precise grid whose extensively numbered organizational system is at first a total mystery - until one realizes that the point of origin from which all roads ascend in a Cartesian plane is the central temple of their faith. It is an astonishingly elegant building, and I wish we had taken the time to visit and photograph it.

We feast that night at "Pi Pizza", a comfortable eating establishment that is underground in more ways than one. It is here that we are joined by Dieter the Bold, another Grinnellian of our acquaintance. Another biology major in college, Dieter now works as tech-support for eBay, and they keep him real busy. We are fortunate to capture some of his free time on one of his rare days off. We order two massively thick pizzas heavily laden with toppings, one for the carnivores in our soul and our party, and the other pie is for the vegetarian inclined. As much as I hate to admit it, the vegetarian pizza, with its fresh tomatoes and artichoke hearts, is almost the better of the two.

Dana and I linger for a while, catching up on the simple joys of conversation with old friends and new ideas and find ourselves leaving the Kensler residence late in the evening, heading down the road towards our first true stop of this adventure: Timpanogos Cave - and a motel at which to crash the night. I decide to be clever, and try and find my way to the park in the blackness before searching out a motel. Perhaps I was merely reluctant to return to civilization with the obsidian sky lit up by the endless diamond night above us, but I did manage to get somewhat turned around on the way back to the interstate from the Park's front gate. Dana good-naturedly suggested that we might be lost, but I knew better. We were definitely somewhere - we just didn't know where yet.

Posted by Derksen at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first leg of my flight takes itself through Phoenix, Arizona. I am always horrified by the sudden verdant appearance of green in the otherwise dry desert. It was good to see that the airport gardens were stocked with native plants. These hardier creatures would be more adapted to the local climate and require less maintenance, and more importantly, less water.

As we pass over the Grand Canyon, I am amazed to find myself the only one leaping to raise the shutters and peer out the window at one of North America's greatest geological treasures. Even from fifteen thousand feet up, one can not encompass the whole of it at once, and it is nothing short of amazing to see this vast gash in the landscape. It is as if the earth's skin had become too parched in the hot desert sun and cracked under the heat. That mile-deep chasm reveals the true culprit for its depth: the hard-rushing flow of the Colorado River, which has carved quite a path through the Colorado Plateau for the last ten million years on its way to the Gulf of California.

We sail onward, and leave this canyon behind for the Great Salt Lake, and the eponymous City on its shore. The pilot makes one of the better landings I have experienced in a lifetime full of plane flight. It is soft and even, and there is only a slight jar and screech as rubber meets asphalt and friction bleeds velocity from our craft. I disembark and walk all of two gates and twenty feet to begin my wait for my travel companion, Dana Watson.

It is a surprise, seeing her again after so long. While we have kept in touch via the occasional telephone call and semi-irregular bursts of e-mailed correspondence, I do not believe we had seen one another in the flesh since I watched her walk at her graduation in 2002. It was also a little frightening to recognize a certain electricity between us still.

Interesting.

I provide her with a small gift for the years away, and for the road ahead: a scintillating amethyst... water bottle.

Reunited, we make our way to the travel desks of Thrifty Car Rental. They provided us with an amazing daily rate that beat their nearest competition by more than two dollars per day - as well as an additional ten percent discount for my Sam's Club membership. Their service was excellent, providing maps of the area, a guesstimate on local gasoline costs, and reasonable directions for finding the interstate from the airport.

I only wish I could be as thrilled with the subcompact-chariot they provided us with, a green Ford Focus. Let it be said that I hope to never purchase or own one of these vehicles. While it did receive excellent gas-mileage and I could fit my tall and lanky frame into the driver's seat with some reasonable expectation of comfort, I found the dashboard design and layout inadequate, and the placement of the gear-shift on the steering column disconcerting. Turning on the windshield wipers occasionally resulted in also activating my turn signal. The cup-holders in the center column were not large enough to support our water bottles. It handled well, but I did not feel that it had as tight a turning radius as a small car should have, nor was the control as smooth as that of my own Toyota Camry. That said, it was adequate to our purposes, and served us well on the long road still ahead of us.

It was amusing to note that this rental came with an in-dash compact-disc player, and no sign of a tape-deck anywhere. The world has moved on since I was born - and I can only wonder how many years before a Firewire or USB 2.0 port appears in the dashboard to synch up the local MP3-player with the content of a renter's portable hard-drive. While I did not think to pack any CDs, it is fortunate that in some things, I am ahead of the curve. One end of the iPod was plugged into the cigarette lighter for power (is there actually anyone gauche enough left in the world to actually use these for their originally intended purpose?), and the other end was plugged into Griffin Technology's iTrip FM Transmitter. This is a wonderful addition to complement an already outstanding product. All we had to do was chose an empty section of broadcast spectrum, and we could then listen to most of my CD collection in full stereo sound. While I have noticed a few sound-quality issues with lower notes, and one occasionally encounters a scratchiness and hissing from other strong electrical signals interfering with the broadcast, listening to the iPod was no different than listening to any other station on the road - except that I had considerably more control over the content.

Posted by Derksen at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My journey begins frightfully early in the morning. I am mindful both of Houston traffic, and how the heightened presence of additional security can affect one's travel time. I do not like to rise early, but it can be done - especially when provided the wakefulness of coffee. After staggering from a scalding shower in a semblance of wakefulness, I reach into the fridge, and slide a pair of cold bottles of Frappucino into my baggage before I leave.

Traffic and security are both remarkably light this morning, and my experiences would have been described as uneventful but for a woman who attempted to put her small dog-carrier through the x-ray machine... with the dog still in it. Fortunately the vigilance of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration is not limited to preventing terrorist actions, and the alarm was raised and the conveyor-belt stopped before the hapless yorkshire terrier could be thoroughly irradiated.

Disaster averted, I arrive at my gate in record time.

As I have nothing to do but wait for my flight to board, I turn to a recent acquisition of mine, an Apple iPod to provide the soundtrack for my life. The first three songs summoned for the moment prove to be surprisingly prescient:

"With a little help from my friends" from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

"There is life outside your apartment" from the soundtrack to Avenue Q

"Such great heights" from The Postal Service

Posted by Derksen at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There comes a time in everyone's life when all they need is an escape from reality for a little while. As Karl Marx once pointed out, there is an almost inevitable alienation between a labourer and the products of his or her labours - a disassociation that results in a personal dissonance between the individual and their soul. This desire to break free and regain one's own identity has apparently been present within the human psyche for a long time. The native peoples of Australia even had a term for this quest: walkabout. One would wander into the bush alone, and amidst the solitude and hostility of open wilderness, hopefully find oneself.

While I would not be traveling exclusively through wilderness, and I would not be truly alone, the quest remained the same. Some time taken to find oneself in the winding and painted canyons of Utah.

Some have asked why I chose Utah, land of Mormon settlers and the scenic geological beauty of the high Colorado Plateau. I hope the pages following will help to answer those questions.

DAY 1: Flight from Houston, Arrival in Salt Lake

DAY 2: Timpanogos, the Price Prehistoric Museum, and our arrival at Moab, Utah - and the Lazy Lizard Hostel

DAY 3: The Arches - Park Avenue, the Windows, and a taste of Delicate Arch

DAY 4: Delicate Arch and Dead Horse Point

DAY 5: The Canyonlands - Needles

DAY 6: Island in the Sky, and a Return to Salt Lake

DAY 7: Leaving Salt Lake

Posted by Derksen at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)