Iran has a free election and elects a moderate who says This victory is a victory of wisdom, a victory of moderation, a victory of growth and awareness and a victory of commitment over extremism and ill-temper, while the riot police in Turkey use rubber bullets and teargas to breakup demonstrators in a public park. What is the world coming to?
“there is no there there” is a quote from Gertrude Stein in her Everybody’s Autobiography (although, I have to admit that I thought it was Virginia Wolfe). I often – often being used pretty liberally here – hear it characterized as to mean that, after Paris, Oakland is nothing, but I like Oakland and I think it actually has another meaning. I think that it means that the emotional charge that her home and street carried while Stein was growing up in Oakland is no longer there when she returned.
In 2004, shorty after Michele gave me my first digital camera, I spent an afternoon photographing one or two giant, hybrid, Epiphyllums. I love the pictures from that afternoon. The two pictures above are from then. Over the years, I got more Epiphyllums and, over the years and I have shot more pictures of them. This year was particularly outstanding with lots of orange flowers, a couple of pink flowers, and for the first time, two white flowers. The flowers are better than ever
but the pictures aren’t.
There really is there is no there there and chasing the there doesn’t bring it back. The good news is that there are lots of other theres around.
Meanwhile, back in the Escalante River Basin, at the bottom of Coyote Gulch, just before it enters, the Escalante River, is a waterfall. To get around it, we have to traverse across a sloping face and then climb down a faux semi-Indian ladder. It is a very easy traverse except for two things, it is sandy because everybody who makes it has wet, sand covered, shoes and the traverse has about fifteen feet – or so – of exposure with the bottom being a pile of nasty looking rocks. It is physically easy and psychologically pretty hard.
But, at the bottom, is the Escalante River – probably a stream anyplace east of the Mississippi, but a river here.
In Coyote Gulch, it is easy to step across the stream that has carved the canyon, but the Escalante is a much bigger deal and requires wading in most area.
On the first trip that Michele and I took to this area, we hiked down Little Death Hollow – a spectacular, very narrow, canyon – to the Escalante River and then worked our way down stream to Silver Falls Canyon. It was not very far on the map, but, because of all the wading required, it was an arduous full day of wading and bushwhacking. Another time, while wading down river between Fence Canyon and Twenty Five Mile Wash, we ran into a dead, decomposing, cow in the middle of the river. It was one of those existential moments when logic and emotion collide. We were almost positive that our water filters would allow us to safely drink the water down stream from the cow – we had no choice – and the thought of drinking, even filtered dead cow water was pretty threatening.
In this case, we wandered up river to Stevens Canyon and checked out Stevens Arch.
Then we hiked up a huge – 500 or 600 feet huge! – sand slope almost to the top of the Kaiparowits Plateau.
There we shimmy up through a crack in the top of the wall to the plateau above the canyon.
What I most remember – what I most love – about the Escalante River Basin is the intimacy. The Colorado Plateau is one of the most spectacular places on earth and, in a just world, the whole thing would be turned into an International Park, but it is not uniform. Bryce and The Grand Canyon are great places to hike but a visitor can pretty much see the whole shebang by walking a couple of hundred feet from the car. Bryce, especially, is an one act play. A great one act play, but – still – an one act play. Zion is knockout with lots of hidden nooks and crannies to be explored. But, like Yosemite, it is very busy with over 2.5 million people visiting each year.
Escalante is different. It is really only accessible by walking. Sure, there are a couple of places where one can get a hint from the road but the road is on top of the plateau and it is only by walking down a canyon to the river that the intimacy and complexity can be enjoyed. In the rush to protect the Colorado Plateau, this area was missed: it is way out of the way – it was the last part of the lower 48 to be mapped – it is very rough with almost no roads, and it doesn’t look like much from the top. But, down in it, lies a treasure.
I have so many conflicting thoughts on Edward Snowden and the leaks from from the National Security Agency.
I think, Edward Snowden is a hero whistle blower and we need more people like him. I also think Edward Snowden seems sort of nuts and it is scary that people like him are able to get $200,000 per year jobs – supposedly – to protect us when they can’t even get themselves through Highschool.
I worry that this huge domestic spying regime is threatening our democracy. But I know that the government has been tracing our calls – duh! hasn’t anyone seen The Wire – for a long time, so what else is new? Sure, Snowden broke the law and abused the government’s trust in giving him a Security Clearance. But, he released information that everybody already knows, so No harm, no foul (and, lets face it, Google already knows all this information about me, or anybody who uses the internet for that matter).
And on and on.
Circling around behind all these thoughts – thoughts, bouncing around like a ping pong ball in a garbage disposal – is the awareness that the government is becoming stronger and more invasive and the people in power often puts their own interest above that of the People’s interest. And behind that, is the fear that Obama is worse than Bush in this regard or – atleast – has continued Bush’s polices and is more zealous in going after the whistle blowers. I am afraid that his promise of Transparency – that I so resonated with during the campaign – has been co-opted by the, increasingly, powerful Security State.
I also wonder what good this massive security apparatus is doing if they couldn’t even flush out a couple of amateurs like the Tsarnaev brothers who said they were Chechen and got the plans to their bomb from an internet site published by al-Qaeda in Yemen. Why weren’t their emails and searches picked up?
As my thoughts calm down, I realize that I am less concerned with the fact that we – my country – is wiretapping than the Administration’s reaction to the whistle blower. And that really boils down to What does Obama want to do and what does the Security Establishment want him to do?
When I was photographing on film, I became very good – in my humble opinion – at telling a story with a slide show, especially stories of trips. At some point, I quit making slide shows and concentrated on making just the right art shot. Over the years, I have reverted back to telling stories which, I think, I do much better and which is, really what this blog is about. So now I am trying to get some of those old – mostly trip – stories down here. Michele and my first trip down Coyote Gulch is one of them.
Backpacking in the Escalante River Basin requires a leap of faith bigger than any place I have ever hiked. First, it is a long way from the Bay Area. We have to drive for about sixteen hours, past all kinds of great places to hike and backpack; the Sierras, the Ruby Mountains, Zion, Bryce. When we finally get to the town of Escalante, it seems unremarkable. A small, isolated, farming town in southeastern Utah. The trailhead to Coyote Gulch – the Hurricane Wash cutoff, really – is about 35 miles down a dirt road off of Utah Highway 12. It isn’t dry enough to be called a desert, just Drylands – very red Drylands, it is true – heavily sprinkled with shrub brush, and interlaced with the occasional cattle corral or small water tank.
From the trailhead, on a bench of the Kaiparowits Plateau where the red Drylands – seemingly – go all the way to the horizon, we start walking down Hurricane Wash. We carry enough water to comfortably walk down to Coyote Gulch – about 3.5 miles – where we will find water (if we don’t find water, we will have a very uncomfortable walk back to the car). As we walk, the land slowly, slowly, becomes more wash-like. We pass petrified sand-dunes about – and that is a very big about – 65 to 55 million years old.
We are walking down-section which means that, as we walk downhill, we are also walking back in time. The wash gets deeper, a little rougher, and the sandstone gets older.
When we get to the corner of Hurricane Wash and Coyote Gulch and see water in this dry landscape, it is a little bit of a shock. The green against the red walls of the canyon is almost neon in its intensity. The running water is not big enough to be called a stream or a brook but over time – alot of time – it has carved a canyon that is probably over 300 feet deep. There are Cottonwoods everywhere, the still water areas are covered in Equisetum, and lots of unidentifiable – to me – bushes.
After wandering around – in awe – we cooked dinner under some Cottonwoods, and spent our first night in an covered alcove (feeling very Indian). About mid-night, we were woken by a stealth bomber flying over. It was very loud and very slow: not at all what I would have expected, especially having lived near a B-52 base while stationed in Texas, years ago.
The next morning, we headed deeper into the canyon. It must have been cold because Michele is still wearing her long underwear which makes me wonder what time of year we took this trip. If it had been in the fall, the trees would have been changing color, so it must have been Spring but it also must have been earlier than Memorial Day that we had carried warm clothes. Either way, it was cold in the early morning and Michele had her long underwear on when we started out, following a well worn trail.
I have hiked or walked – dabbled, really – in alot of mountain ranges, but nothing prepared me for hiking in the Escalante Basin. It is like hiking in a miniature Yosemite dyed red. Except that there are small waterfalls and arches. Oh! and ruins. and petroglyphs.
99 to 65 million years ago – according to Hana Doggett – this part of the world was an inland sea running all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic. Eventually that seabed was filled with material washing down from the higher ground both to the east and west and, then, it lifted, becoming a low flatish area with lazy, meandering rivers. It got lifted again, higher this time and the rivers, staying in their meandering beds beds, wore down those beds as the areas around them lifted up. Eventually, it became one of the most stunning places on earth.
Back when we first reached the corner of Hurricane Wash and Coyote Gulch, we dropped our packs and sat by the side of the mini-stream to take a break. As were sitting there in stunned awe, a German – or a guy with a heavy German accent – ran by yelling, YELLING!, Oh my Gott! Oh my Gott!. When he saw us, he stopped and said This is amazing, do you have any idea how amazing this is? and then ran off. We didn’t know where he came from or where is was going, we only knew that we agreed.
Two nights after the German ran by, we camped near a small ruin with petroglyphs, the next night we camped in a grove of Cottonwoods near where Coyote Gulch enters the Escalante River.
To be continued.