Wanderings:
Reflections of a Wilderness Nomad
By
David Gafney
Cover Photo: “Tennessee” John Ethridge photographed in the backcountry of Zion.
John died in a hiking accident at the age of 40. He had spent 12 seasons as a
law enforcement and interpretive ranger in Zion National Park. He was a true friend.
Cover Photo by: David Gafney
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010 David Gafney
Cover Photo by: David Gafney
Chapter Photos by: David Gafney
Cover Design by: Laura Shinn
Formatted by: Laura Shinn
ISBN: 978-1-4523-8608-9
Other books available by this author:
Zion National Park, an Interpretive Guide (eBook $3.95)
Yellowstone National Park, an Interpretive Guide (eBook $3.95)
A Free Short Course, 50 Tips to Great Outdoor Photography (absolutely free!)
Visit my blog site at: http://www.gafneyphoto.com/blog
Wanderings: Reflections of a Wilderness Nomad is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be copied or reproduced in any manner without express written permission of the author. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy or copies. If you did not purchase this book or it was not purchased for your use, please go to www.Smashwords.com to purchase your personal copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Of Mangrove, Cypress and Gumbo-Limbo
Through the Mountains of Dixie
Summer Sojourn on a Northern Wilderness Island
* * * * *
To the memory of my parents, Harry and Ruth (Fitzgerald) Gafney
“There are two lasting gifts you can give your child.
One is roots, the other wings.”
African Proverb
West Temple from Watchman Trail, Zion National Park, Utah
“We now no longer camp as for a night, but have
settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”
H.D. Thoreau (from Walden; or, Life in the Woods)
In the early morning hours the air above the high plateau surrounding Zion Canyon cools and becomes heavier than the warmer air below. It begins to flow off the forested highlands and down through the great red-rock canyon, creating strong winds that rock the canopies of the cottonwoods and box elder maples that grow along the banks of the Virgin River. At three in the morning it was quite a show to observe from the comfort of my sleeping bag spread out on the ground beneath the violently swaying cottonwoods. I had arrived at Zion National Park in Utah about an hour before, after a sprint across the country from my home state of Massachusetts.
Three days before, it was as if God had called and asked if I would like to try out heaven for a few months. But it wasn't really God; it was the chief naturalist at Zion National Park on the phone offering me a five-month seasonal position. At the time I was 27 years old and my recently acquired bachelor’s degree in forestry did not appear to be worth a whole lot in terms of allowing me to find something rare during that time of recession known as “a job in your field.” So I was working in a residential school for delinquent and disturbed teenage boys in western Massachusetts and being fairly miserable at it. “So let's see,” I thought, “exactly how should I respond to the Chief regarding this job offer?” How about: “Oh God, yes! Thank you God, yes!” The only caveat was that I had to be there in less than three days for the start of a week of training. No problem. Two hours notice to my employer, some beers with my buddies in a local tavern, a quick packing job and then two days of almost continuous driving across two thousand miles of the North American continent and here I was, watching the winds sway the cottonwoods above me as I lay in Watchman Campground on the floor of Zion Canyon.
I had been too excited to sleep that night. It was an excitement caused by anticipation and tinged with a bit of anxiety and fear of the unknown. I was concerned with the possibility of failing to perform well at this new job and at this new chapter in my life. Little did I know what lay before me. The coming years would be an adventure that now, with the benefit of age and hindsight, I look back upon with great nostalgia and an almost dreamlike sense of wonder that the incredible experiences of that time were really what constituted my life for almost fifteen years. Those years included summer and winter seasonal positions in eight different national parks and two national forests, interspersed with graduate school and a couple of long-distance hikes on the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails.
These days, I find myself office-bound and living a more typical American life – indoors. But that was a time of outdoor adventures and the development of great friendships that I now remember as the high watermark of my life. I think that I can honestly say that I loved just about every minute of my years as a “seasonal” with the National Park Service. Through this book, I hope to share with you something of those experiences and of these remarkably beautiful places that the American people have set aside.
During my time as a seasonal park ranger, I certainly was not rich or even middle-class by modern American economic standards. The best you can do as a seasonal is “GS-5,” a government pay scale presently equivalent to approximately thirteen dollars an hour. The benefits are nonexistent and the housing is, more often than not, substandard. But my God, the backyards! I wouldn't trade a single minute of it for all the money in Donald Trump's bank account.
And those backyards really were something else. During my years as a seasonal I would come to intimately know the majestic red-rock canyon country of southwestern Utah (Zion National Park), the wild and expansive swamps of southern Florida (Everglades National Park), a moose- and wolf-inhabited wilderness island in the northern waters of Lake Superior (Isle Royale National Park) and an ancient southeastern mountain range blanketed by some of the most extensive old growth forests in the East (Great Smoky Mountains National Park). I would also spend two seasons on a wilderness plateau born of fire and containing the greatest concentration of geothermal features found anywhere on earth, not to mention the greatest populations of “charismatic megafauna” (otherwise known as “big mammals” – the language of bureaucracy can be exquisite) in the contiguous United States (Yellowstone National Park). Interspersed with these many seasons with the National Park Service, I spent two summers working for the U.S. Forest Service immersed in some profoundly beautiful wild country in the Rocky Mountains (Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest and Colorado’s White River National Forest). It was a period also graced by the development of deep friendships with some truly incredible people.
I knew none of this as I lay in an anxious state in my sleeping bag watching the wind blow through the cottonwood trees of Zion Canyon on that warm first night thirty years ago. I would like to go back and tell that young guy not to worry so much. I would like to tell him that what lay ahead is fifteen years of experiences and adventures that will mostly be one hell of a lot of fun.
Hiker in slot canyon, Zion National Park, Utah
* * * * *
View from Cougar Mountain, Zion National Park, Utah
“I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on
this earth is not a hardship but a pastime if we will live simply and wisely.”
H.D. Thoreau (from Walden; or, Life in the Woods)
The man entered the park via the East Entrance following the twisting, turning road through the slickrock of red and white mesas, dry washes and pillars of rock known as “hoodoos.” As the road meandered for a number of miles through this strange and beautiful fantasyland, he saw the dark green of the ponderosa pines scattered in a savanna-like manner across the weirdly eroded sandstone and then he entered the mile-long Mt. Carmel Tunnel. On the far end of the tunnel he emerged hundreds of feet above the confluence of Zion and Pine Creek Canyons, with towering sedimentary rock walls all around – colorful cliffs of Navajo Sandstone rising 2000 feet above the slanting pinyon and juniper-covered slopes of Kayenta Shale. The road’s switchbacks brought the man and his vehicle down off the steep slopes and to the canyon floor where he drove along beside the Virgin River and through the shaded riparian world of cottonwood, box elder maple and velvet ash trees. By the time he reached the visitor center, he could not restrain himself any longer. He entered the building, saw me standing behind the information desk in my gray and green uniform, and yelled across the crowded room: “Man, you've got the greatest job in the universe!”
I look back now and realize that I should have taken that man and his words more seriously than I did at the time. I was in love with Zion National Park and the life that I was living there, but that still was not enough to keep me there forever or at least keep me forever with the National Park Service. Some years later, while sitting on a mountain top, Satan crept up behind me and whispered, “Go to law school; you’ll be even happier if you go to law school.” I listened to him. Blind ambition, the grass always being greener elsewhere, getting older and the prospect of never acquiring a permanent position with the federal government knowing that I am guilty of committing the egregious, unmitigated and unforgivable crime of being born a white, non-handicapped, non-veteran male, caused me to pursue an office-bound legal career.
I must admit that that career has not gone as I hoped. I decided to go to law school during the Ronald Reagan era when a strange little cretin named James Watt had been appointed Secretary of Interior, the department that oversees the National Park Service, and weird things were beginning to happen. Watt had been a lobbyist for a timber and mineral extraction-sponsored group called the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Suddenly, the number of interpretive hikes and other such activities were being reduced as seasonals were assigned something new called “roving duty.” In Zion, this amounted to standing near a heavily used trail that was being repaved. The subtle suggestion was that we were there to inform the public of the great improvements being made under the new regime in Washington. Most of us failed miserably at this task, knowing that, except for a few highly visible projects, funding for maintenance, interpretation, wildlife restoration and other programs – programs that we did believe in – was being slashed. I hated seeing an agency that I loved (and the greatest land protection/preservation entity on Earth) being politicized, and I truly did not want to be a part of it, so law school entered my mind. My goal was to emerge a legal warrior and go to work for an environmental group fighting for wilderness preservation and against environmentally destructive government policies. These plans never materialized for there was a recession on when I graduated and the first legal work to dry up was environmental work. Ironically, the debt that I incurred paying for law school meant I needed a job – any job – that would help pay down that debt. My first such job would therefore be with a medium-size law firm that mostly represented the interests of insurance companies. Most of the partners were staunch Republicans. It’s funny how life works out sometimes, or maybe "pathetic" would be a better word to use here.
After a few years of legal work and realizing that I truly missed the “rangering” life, I put my legal career on hold and returned to the National Park Service. During the 1990’s, I spent four more years working seasonally - at Yellowstone National Park, Lake Mead National Recreation Area and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But during my time with the National Park Service Zion was a high point, a peak experience where the combination of wild and indescribably beautiful landscapes fused with a community of people that felt like a family – or maybe “tribal clan” would be a better description. I would spend five seasons there hiking, exploring, developing my understanding of geology and natural science, and jabbering away with my cohorts about politics (we were almost all eco-lefties), evolutionary biology and the all-consuming topic of the exhilaration of wilderness experience and exploration. My time in this park would be nothing less than transformational.
During my first day at Zion, I was told that I would be sharing a house with ten other people. It was a disturbing thought for a guy who believed that he had outgrown college dormitory life. But the men's dorm was a magnificent old sandstone structure built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s in a cottonwood-shaded side canyon. It stood at the base of the Temples and Towers of the Virgin, colorful rock monoliths that towered nearly 4000 feet above us. The dorm housed a population of people who all shared approximately the same cerebral wavelengths regarding what was and was not important in life. And what was most important for us was a desire to explore and understand every nook and cranny of Zion National Park.
My new “roomies” would turn out to be an interesting bunch. Gary Williams was from California and had a master's degree in invertebrate zoology from San Francisco State and had been an undergraduate at – as he described it – “Berzerkly.” Kevin Holliday grew up in Kansas, the son of a physician. His dad, a conservative Republican, made the mistake of taking his family on vacations in various western national parks every summer, so despite his father’s best efforts at encouraging the reading of conservative books by conservative authors, Kevin and each of his numerous siblings grew up to be rabid environmentalists. After his time at Zion, Kevin would hitchhike across part of Africa. In Botswana he came to a village where he was asked if he had a college education. When he responded “yes,” he was asked to stay and teach the children of the village. He did this for more than a year, living in a thatched hut and off of the food and small change that the villagers could afford to pay him.
Kevin Holliday was not atypical. My fellow seasonals would prove to be an intelligent and free-spirited lot. Most, like myself, were fresh off of university campuses that had been recently rocked by the revolutionary fervor unleashed by the events of the 1960’s. While most of us had not been too deeply immersed in the radical political movements of the day, nor had we spent much time munching on bean sprouts at counter-culture communes, we had been deeply affected by the atmosphere of that tumultuous time. Perhaps it was a generational characteristic that we were searching for something different – something away from the stifling social mores of 1950’s suburbia. We certainly were hell-bent on escaping the conformities of the corporate workplace.
I was hired as an “interpretive ranger,” meaning that I would be interpreting the natural and human history of the park through leading the public on guided hikes, providing slide-illustrated programs at two campground amphitheaters and the auditorium at Zion Lodge and manning the information desk at that visitors center. The interpretive hikes at Zion really were exceptional. They included half-day hikes into “the Narrows” of the North Fork of the Virgin River. We would wade up the river to a place where the towering walls of the canyon narrow to within thirty feet of each other, allowing for a beautiful but claustrophobic hiking experience. I also would lead hikes to the top of Angel’s Landing, a knife-edge sandstone ridge that jutted perpendicularly into Zion Canyon. From here, there was an eagle-eye view up and down the canyon.
Your first season as an interpreter at any park tends to make you feel that you have landed in the middle of a crash course. You quickly discover that to do this job well you will need to rapidly accumulate a foundational knowledge of the park’s natural and human history. You also will need to become effective in relating this newly acquired knowledge to the public in an entertaining and interesting manner. It can all feel a little overwhelming. The foundation of everything in Zion National Park is the underlying geology. Zion is part of a great geologic province known as the Colorado Plateau. Its 150,000 square miles cover a large part of four western states: Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. I came to think of and explain the plateau as a huge layer cake of sedimentary rock. Powerful forces within the Earth are pushing this layer cake upward – the plateau is uplifting – while simultaneously, rivers are carving down into it creating the greatest collection of canyons found anywhere in the world. The national parks of the Colorado Plateau include Zion, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches, Canyonlands and the recently established 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante Desert National Monument.
The great horizontal layers of sedimentary rock that make up the walls of Zion Canyon are made of wind- and water-borne sediments deposited over the course of tens of millions of years. These loose sediments were, at some point in geologic history, “lithified” or turned to stone. A closer look at one of the landforms, such as the West Temple towering over the southern end of the canyon, reveals four of the seven rock formations that comprise the Zion portion of the 16,000-foot rock sequence that we call the Colorado Plateau. It is remarkable to think that each of these rock layers represents the remains of an ancient environment that existed here for many millions of years and that each of these environments was very different from the semi-arid canyon and plateau country that exists today.
During the late Jurassic Period, about 160 million years ago, a shallow sea moved in and covered the land. It left behind the Carmel Formation that now caps Zion Canyon. In places this formation is more than 800 feet thick and is made up mostly of limestone, the result of the death and decomposition of millions of shelled animals whose remains mixed in with the mud on the floor of that Jurassic sea. The Carmel limestone is rich in fossils of clams, oysters, and other oceanic creatures. A layer of rock laid down on the floor of an ancient ocean has since been uplifted to more than 7000 feet above the present level of the sea. For ten million years before this sea encroached, there existed a huge Sahara-like desert of windblown sand. Dissolved calcium carbonate or lime deposited in the ancient sea has since percolated through porous spaces between the sand particles. Lime is the primary cement that now holds quartz sand particles together to form the dominant rock of the canyon: Navajo Sandstone. This massive sandstone formation reaches a thickness within the park of 2400 feet and the cliffs that it forms are spectacular. Look beneath the vertical walls of the Navajo Sandstone and you’ll see the slope-forming Kayenta Formation, made of fine-grained sandstones and siltstones. Rivers flowing across a broad tropical plain deposited these sediments. There is a place in the backcountry were a slab of this rock has broken away from, and now lies tilted against, a canyon wall. Across its surface are the footprints of a dinosaur that roamed here nearly 200 million years ago.
What is the source of such a force powerful enough to uplift a plateau 150,000 square miles in size? For a long time geologists were mystified by the question of how landforms such as plateaus or mountains are created. In recent decades a holistic or global theory has come into prominence that logically explains many previously unsolved geologic mysteries. Known as plate tectonics, it holds that continents ride on plates that “drift,” being pushed by convection currents within the Earth’s semi-molten mantle. North America, in its westward drift, has overridden the plate that underlies the Pacific Ocean. Could it be that the Pacific Plate’s subduction beneath the North American Plate is causing its leading edge to melt and rise and it is this upwelling magma that provides the force responsible for the plateau’s uplift?
My introduction to Zion National Park came the year before my first season of working there. At that time, I was traveling around the country with two friends. As we entered the park, we were caught off guard by the wild beauty of the surrounding countryside and the unexpected majesty of Zion Canyon. One look at the relief map in the lobby of the park's visitor center and my mind solidified into a plan of action. I was going to hike the West Rim Trail and that was all there was to it. The white line designating the trail on the relief map showed it climbing up switchbacks blasted into the canyon wall and then passing through an elevated side canyon called Refrigerator Canyon. I would later learn that it was called that because while out in the blazing sun of the switchbacks you might be subjected to 100° temperatures, once within the canyon, shaded by canyon walls and a grove of bigtooth maples and Douglas-fir trees, the temperature can be a pleasant 95°. After passing through Refrigerator Canyon, the white line meandered up and over the canyon rim and crossed a high plateau and then ran along the rims of what appeared to be majestic backcountry areas with mystifying names like Phantom Valley and the Great West Canyon. This was a trail that absolutely begged to be hiked!
One of my two traveling companions, Dan Gaherty, agreed to join me. I love relief maps and as beautiful as the one in the Zion Visitors Center was, it failed miserably to relay the true grandeur and wild beauty that would be revealed to us along the West Rim Trail. Above the switchbacks that brought us out of Zion Canyon, above the shade of Refrigerator Canyon, and above a rapid sequence of 23 narrow switchbacks called Walters Wiggles is Scout’s Lookout. From here you can look out on the half-mile spur trail to the top of Angels Landing, a spectacular knife-edge ridge jutting perpendicularly into Zion Canyon. In places this spur trail was only a few feet across, with sheer drop-offs of 800 feet or more on each side. From the top, there is a dizzying vertical drop of 1500 feet to the Virgin River and the floor of Zion Canyon, as well as a magnificent view up and down the canyon.
After making the side trip to the top of Angels Landing, Dan and I returned to Scout’s Lookout and continued our climb up the West Rim Trail as it passed through sculpted slickrock. At 3000 feet above the floor of Zion Canyon the steady uphill haul came to an end as we went over the canyon rim. Here we could finally breathe a sigh of relief, for what spread out before us was the gently rolling terrain of Horse Pasture Plateau. For the next two miles the trail passed through a virgin forest of vanilla-scented ponderosa pines with groves of red-barked manzanita in the understory. It then came to the rim of Phantom Valley, a beautiful and nearly inaccessible backcountry basin surrounded by vertical cliffs and, therefore, visited rarely and only by those well skilled in technical canyoneering. We camped that evening beneath a grove of ponderosa pines on the rim of the Great West Canyon where we watched as the setting sun cast its hues over the rugged mosaic of canyons and red-rock ridges that spread out below us. Adding to the majesty of the view was the backdrop of the Pine Valley Mountains, with its snow-clad heights and evergreen-covered slopes. After dining on chunky soup and before retiring that evening, we formally christened that spot “the finest campsite in America.”
The West Rim Trail climbs 3500 feet between its start on the floor of Zion Canyon and its end on the summit of a volcanic ridge in the northern part of the park aptly named Lava Point. Dan and I made it as far as Potato Hollow, a depression in the plateau where moisture collects and the dry forest of ponderosa pines gives way to lush, grassy meadows and groves of quaking aspen trees. We watched as two mule deer bucks, with impressive racks of antlers still covered in springtime velvet, played among the aspens before we began our long hike back down to the canyon floor.
During the nineteenth century, a naturalist named C. Hart Merriam studied the plant life of this region. It was Merriam who came up with the observation that plants live in communities which he called “zones of life.” He saw that these life zones change as you climb in elevation and that these elevational changes are analogous to latitudinal changes. In fact, on a 60-mile drive in southwestern Utah it is possible to gain 8000 feet in elevation and pass through all six of Merriam’s life zones – from true desert to arctic-alpine tundra. Botanically, it is equivalent to traveling from Mexico to Alaska. A hiker who has gone the whole fourteen miles of the West Rim Trail would have passed through three of Merriam’s six life zones. On the lower slopes of the canyon, he would be in the Upper Sonoran Life Zone, where Indian paintbrush, western wallflower and Zion milkvetch bloom among pinyon pine and Utah juniper. This “pigmy forest” is the most widespread forest community of the American West. Next would come Merriam’s “Transitional Zone” of ponderosa pines, trees that can live for 500 years and grow to an impressive six feet in diameter when left alone. Continuing on to the summit of Lava Point, the hiker would find him or herself in a lush “Canadian Zone” forest of Douglas-fir, white fir and quaking aspen.
I have hiked the West Rim Trail many times since that first ascent with Dan. At some point I figured out that hiking downhill is easier than hiking uphill, so during my time at Zion, I would catch rides with various park employees who were driving up to the primitive campground and fire lookout located at Lava Point. From there I would make the long downhill walk to the Virgin River on the floor of Zion Canyon. On one such hike, my friend John Ethridge and I made the 40-mile drive up the Kolob Terrace Road to Lava Point. This road swings through the western side of the park where red sandstone landforms, such as Tabernacle Dome and Squaw Peak, rise above grasslands and woodlands of pinyon pine, Utah juniper and ponderosa pine. On this particular fall day strong winds were blowing dust and sand into the air from the overgrazed private ranch lands to the west of the park. The atmosphere was eerie as we made our way down the trail with crisp autumn winds combining with a strange crimson glow in the sky created by the dust storms to the west.
During my time at Zion I would have the opportunity to explore much of the incredibly diverse backcountry of the park, as well as, the beautiful wilderness country of the national forest and Bureau of Land Management lands surrounding Zion. Five five-to-eight month seasons is a significant amount of time to spend for the purpose of learning about a 147,000-acre national park. I'm happy to report that I put that time to good use. During the spring, I would often hike into the lower areas such as Coalpits Wash to photograph the sometimes explosive wildflower displays – desert ephemerals that take advantage of late winter and early spring rains to germinate, grow, flower, be pollinated and send out seeds, all in a matter of three weeks or so. In April, there were also the large and beautiful red, purple and yellow blossoms of prickly pear, cholla, claret cup and other cacti. As the lower elevations become excessively hot with the approach of summer, I would hike the East or West Rim Trails to the cooler, higher plateaus or sometimes drive up to the lofty Markagunt Plateau to the north of Zion. Here, the land “stair-steps” up to elevations of ten and eleven thousand feet and lush forests of Engelmann Spruce and subalpine fir grow along the edges of mountain meadows graced in July with the blue flowers of lupine and the red of Indian paintbrush, a natural paradise that is contained within the two million acres of the Dixie National Forest.
Sadly, the great majority of the more than two million people who visit Zion National Park each year never truly comprehend what this park is all about. Most congregate on the floor of Zion Canyon where there is a scenic drive, a lodge, campgrounds, a visitor center and some hiking trails. It is true that the very reason that this national park exists is Zion Canyon itself, which is a spectacular place where towering walls of sedimentary rock surround you conveying simultaneously contradictory feelings of intimacy and overwhelming grandeur. But what most visitors probably don’t realize is that this front country area comprises only about six percent of the total land area of the park. Most of Zion is backcountry where elevations range from 3500 feet in desert-like Coalpits Wash in the park’s southwestern corner to 8700 feet on the summit of Horseranch Mountain in the Kolob Canyons District or northwest corner of the park. To leave the main canyon and head into the backcountry is to experience an incredible world of buttes, mesas and high forested plateaus and everywhere, cutting into these plateaus, are networks of deep canyons and inaccessible sandstone basins – isolated places where mountain lions hunt mule deer beneath towering cliff walls, while golden eagles and prairie falcons soar above the sculptured surfaces of slickrock.
Many years ago, for a college English course, I was required to read Thoreau’s Walden. As a nineteen-year-old, most of what Henry David was saying flew well over my head. Like a fine wine, it sometimes takes years of mellowing before there can be a true appreciation. For me it has been a number of decades of bouncing back and forth between a more traditional life involving the practice of law and the atypical and far more Thoreauean existence of a seasonal ranger that has allowed me to develop a true appreciation for the teachings of Concord’s “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms.” I may not have been consciously emulating H.D. Thoreau in going to the woods “to live deliberately,” but in seeking the opportunity to work and live in a wild, beautiful and protected place, I had also inadvertently landed in a tiny subculture of like-minded people and the gradual realization of this was exhilarating. I had found a niche. I look back on those five seasons in Zion National Park and realize now that they were transformational, a peak experience that changed the way that I view the world.
* * * * *
The Subway, Left Fork of North Creek Canyon
“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and
mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously
coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
H.D. Thoreau (from Walden; or, Life in the Woods)
There is a magical canyon on the west side of Zion National Park with an unassuming name. The Left Fork of North Creek is not an easy place to get into for the route requires that you leave the established Wildcat Canyon Trail, bushwhack through the pine-studded slickrock basin of Russell Gulch and then, after finding the right spot on the rim, make a quasi-technical descent into the upper reaches of the canyon. While not a true rappel, the route is steep enough to require the use of a rope as a hand-line. Like other backcountry canyons there are cold pools to swim through and waterfalls to finagle your way over. In the Left Fork there is also the “subway,” a place where the lower canyon walls curve in and around the stream to almost form a tunnel. The light, color and isolated beauty of the Left Fork of North Creek, once experienced, can keep drawing you back.
For me, this canyon also represents something that is aesthetically unique about the backcountry of Zion National Park. In the other “red-rock” national parks and preserves scattered across the canyon and plateau country of southern Utah – Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Rainbow Bridge, Grand Staircase, Arches – it is possible to experience a colorful world of canyons, narrows, mesas, arches and wildly eroded slickrock. Conversely, it is possible to travel up into the high country of the Dixie and Manti-La Sal National Forests and experience a lush green world of Douglas-fir, white fir, subalpine fir, quaking aspen and Englemann spruce. These high sprawling forested pieces of the public domain contain plateaus that stair-step up to elevations of nine and ten thousand feet, as well as neatly spaced mountain ranges that rise here and there above the broken surface of the Colorado Plateau. It is within the backcountry of Zion, however, where these two opposite worlds come together so beautifully. In narrow back canyons high rock walls block the sun and for most of the day the canyon depths remain in shade. There is enough moisture falling on the surrounding high plateau and finding its way into the canyons as to allow streams, such as North Creek, to flow perennially and it is these elements of abundant shade and moisture that provide the opportunity for Douglas-fir, a tree typically found above 8000 feet, to grow at much lower elevations. Their evergreen canopies provide a striking contrast against the orange-red backdrop of Navajo Sandstone. This visual impact is further enhanced by streaks of color, a canyon wall tapestry made of the reds of iron oxide, whites of calcium carbonate and the shiny black of manganese oxide, otherwise known as “desert varnish.” At least once or twice each season, I felt the need to make the hike through the Left Fork of North Creek and immerse myself in the beauty and serenity of this incredible place.
On one particular day I would find myself unexpectedly in a mad rush, scrambling up the canyon from its southern entry point. I was participating in one of my first backcountry rescues. That morning, I had gone to work expecting a number of hours of mundane duty behind the visitor center information desk. This was the least exciting of my interpretive chores and it had the tendency, after too many hours, of becoming excruciatingly boring. Approximately ninety-five percent of the questions asked by the visiting public could be answered with the phrase “outside and to the right.” That was where the restrooms, pay phones and administrative offices were. On this day a report came into park headquarters that a hiker had fallen in Left Fork Canyon and was now unconscious and possibly suffering from a severe head injury. We would later learn that he had, for whatever reason, edged his way out onto a log that extended for a number of feet out over the lip of a small waterfall near the mouth of the subway. From this precarious position he had slipped and fallen about six feet to strike his head on the rock below.
I was employed in Zion National Park as an interpretive naturalist and my duties revolved around leading naturalist-guided hikes, presenting campground slide programs and dispensing information at the visitor center. Busy parks now have specialized divisions and employees tend to work either in law enforcement, resource management, maintenance or interpretation; rescues definitely fall within the realm of Zion’s Law Enforcement Division. But in most parks each division has only a limited number of personnel and so, when warm bodies are needed to carry an injured individual out of the backcountry, anyone who happens to be handy is recruited into the effort. To escape the boredom of the information desk, I was more than happy to go.
The rendezvous point for the gathering rescue team was the first aid cache that was located in the park’s maintenance yard. There, Gary Williams and I were given first aid backpacks and instructed to take a government truck and proceed nine miles south to the Virgin Café. This was the only business, and almost the only building, in the flyspeck of a town called Virgin, Utah. There, we were to pick up the hiker who was a friend of the accident victim and who had reported the accident. He had agreed over the phone to guide the rescue party to the victim's location.
From the Virgin Café, we proceeded up Kolob Terrace Road to a place where there is a rugged route down into the southern end of the canyon. Soon after we arrived at the entry point, Ranger Jon Dick arrived and the four of us began the boulder-hopping descent into the southern end of the Left Fork of North Creek. From my point of view as a novice park ranger, Jon Dick appeared to be a bit of a “super ranger.” He had acquired his first aid experience as an army medic during the Vietnam era and through his park service career had honed his technical climbing and mountain rescue skills. He was usually first on the scene of dangerous rescue operations and during my time at Zion I often found myself awed as I watched him work: rappelling into a slot canyon to haul out the remains of a deceased climbing accident victim or climbing a slickrock dome to rescue a visitor who had scrambled high up onto a very steep slope and had become stranded there after discovering that going down steep slickrock is far more difficult and life-threatening than going up.
As usual, Jon would be in charge of this rescue effort. Once on the floor of the canyon we began our sprint through its lower reaches. At one point, we stopped long enough for Jon to instruct Gary Williams to use his axe to clear the brush from what appeared to be the last flat area where a helicopter might land, before continuing our fast-paced trek up the canyon. As we approached the entrance to the subway Jon stopped again, this time to briefly prepare the injured hiker's friend for the possibility that his buddy may no longer be alive. As Jon signaled me to continue up the canyon on my own, the unnerving thought occurred to me that I was about to be the first member of the rescue team on the scene! With panic starting to set in, I approached the mouth of the subway, where I observed a handful of hikers standing in a small grotto elevated a little above the canyon floor and to the right of a small waterfall. After climbing into the grotto I saw the injured man lying unconscious among the hikers. No sooner had I arrived than he began to vomit blood. That week of first aid training that I had participated in at the beginning of the season paid off as the words “airway, breathing and circulation” rose from my unconscious to my conscious mind. These had been pounded into us as the ABC's of the “first responder.” I asked the nearby hikers if any had had first aid training and, as one man stepped forward, I explained that we needed to keep the injured man’s airway clear. With the assistance of the hiker I counted to three and we turned the victim onto his side with me holding his head while my assistant simultaneously lifted his body. When the vomiting stopped I counted to three again and we returned the hiker to the prone position. At this point, thankfully, Jon Dick arrived with other members of the rescue team coming up the rear. I assisted as Jon bandaged the victim's head and with the help of the others we lifted the man into a “litter” or basket-shaped stretcher. The “womp, womp, womp” of a helicopter could now be heard above the canyon as I heard Jon yell to the pilot through his radio “this is totally your call!” The helicopter was from the St. George office of the Bureau of Land Management and its pilot would prove to be remarkably skilled. I would later learn that he had acquired this skill in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. As he lowered his craft beneath the rim of the canyon it seemed to me that its whirling blades were coming to within just feet of the surrounding sandstone walls. The great machine landed on the streambed that was a flat area of water-smoothed shale bounded both upstream and downstream by small waterfalls, an extremely tight spot. With the unconscious hiker safely on board, the chopper lifted up and out of the narrow canyon and was soon on its way to a hospital in Cedar City, about thirty miles away. Perhaps more than anything else, that hiker’s life had been saved by the skill and courage of that BLM helicopter pilot. From where I was standing it truly appeared to be a miraculous landing and lift-off.
In most of the parks where I have worked I was employed as an interpretive naturalist where my duties revolved primarily around trying to inspire the public through interpretive hikes and slide programs. I would be asked to participate in rescues and first aid emergencies perhaps once or twice each season. I now recall these rescues as some of the most intense experiences that I would have in my perhaps ridiculously varied career. In fact, I grew to love participating in backcountry rescues – certainly not because I liked dealing with people who were often injured horrifically in climbing and hiking accidents – but because the experience was so intense! There was a truly powerful sense of purpose in racing through some rugged backcountry area with a group of people whose collective, adrenaline-driven goal was to save a human life. I can’t think of anything else that I have done as a ranger, naturalist, teacher or lawyer that comes close to having the deep sense of meaning that is associated with wilderness rescue work. The feeling that came over me was that there was absolutely nothing else that I could possibly be doing at this moment that was more important that what I was doing.
During my early seasons at Zion I was inspired by a highly competent district ranger named Tony Bonano who, despite my being in another division and not being part of his law enforcement staff, encouraged me to participate in whatever first aid and law enforcement training was available. He further helped to make it happen by pressuring and cajoling my boss, the chief of interpretation – a man who hated the thought of having, in any way, shape or manner, his interpretive schedule disturbed – into allowing me to attend such training. I once even participated in hostage rescue training provided by two F.B.I agents who came to the park after the American Embassy in Iran had been stormed and fifty hostages seized by Islamic militants. The government had become concerned that a national park might become the target of terrorist activity.
A few years after that rescue, I drove a couple of hours south to the Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness. This is a 122,000-acre wilderness area managed by the Bureau of land Management that abuts an even larger wild area just over the state line in Arizona called the Vermillion Cliffs National Preserve. My plan was to hike through Buckskin Gulch, one of the longest stretches of narrows in the Southwest. For twelve miles intermittent Buckskin Creek meanders through a serpentine corridor before reaching its confluence with Paria Canyon. The gulch deepens to over 500 feet as you approach that confluence, a breathtaking place where the Paria River has carved itself into a colorful canyon with sandstone walls that approach heights of 800 feet.
As I made my way down Buckskin Gulch its walls quickly closed in on me, the canyon averages about five-to-ten feet in width. At one place, there is a rock jam and dry falls whose twenty-foot descent required the use of a rope as a hand-line. But most of the hike was a gradual downhill walk that included wades through three-to-four-foot deep pools of mud and water. At the confluence of the two canyons, I had the option of turning south and hiking another thirty miles down Paria Canyon to Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River. This is a hike that I have been told is spectacular with a flowing river and sheer, smooth walls of red sandstone all around. But I had only two days off and would be expected back at Zion the next day. Therefore, I turned north for the approximately seven-mile hike to the Paria Canyon Trailhead on Utah's Route 89.
I was hoping to meet other hikers traveling in my direction for I was in need of a ride to my car, parked at the Buckskin Gulch Trailhead perhaps seven or eight miles away. It was a happy occurrence when I met and fell in with two amicable young guys backpacking up the canyon. After some friendly chatter they agreed to provide me with the needed ride. As we hiked through the stunning beauty of Paria Canyon we continued our conversation and, at one point, they asked where I was from. I explained that I was presently living and working in Zion National Park and this elicited great interest as well as a story of how they had a friend who, a few years back, had suffered a serious head injury after a fall in the Left Fork of North Creek. It’s a small world. I mentioned that I had been involved in that rescue and they then went on to explain that their friend had been air transported to a crisis unit in a Salt Lake City hospital. It had been touch and go for a number of months as to whether he would recover and if he did, whether he would recover fully and without permanent brain damage. At this point in time, they could report that their friend had made great progress and the prognosis was that he was on his way to achieving either a full or a nearly-full recovery. Those guys made my day. It was the first information that I had received since the days immediately following the rescue effort and it left me feeling absolutely elated.
Hikers in Paria Canyon, Utah
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Olympic National Park, Washington
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
H.D. Thoreau (from Walden; or, Life in the Woods)
I have been in love with the idea of wilderness for as long as I can remember. While growing up in small mill towns in heavily populated Massachusetts, my daydreams frequently carried me away to Maine’s wild Allagash River or the granite crags of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains; or at least to these places as I envisioned them from the photographs I had seen in books and magazines. When I was about twelve, I kept a cardboard box under my bed filled with every possible booklet, map and brochure that I could send away for or get my hands on. It was a treasure trove of beautiful places: national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, state parks and preserves. When the dark side of living in a kid’s world – of repressive nuns and school yard bullies – became too much, I could retreat into the world found within that overflowing box. It was a place of majestic mountains, vast undisturbed forests, pristine deserts and red-rock canyons. Walt Disney also helped with occasional films about Olympic Elk and Yellowstone Cubs, as did the writings of Jack London. In high school I read John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie and that was it – at some point I was simply going to have to spend some time as a wandering bum.
In the days of my childhood that box may have served as escape, filling my head with dreams of drifting around the country, camping and hiking along the way. In adult life traveling into wild places, either literally or metaphysically, feels more like leaving what is artificial and returning into what is truly real. It wasn’t until I reached my early twenties, after graduating from college and spending nine months working in a paper factory, that I was able to begin my exploration of America’s wild reaches. With the purchase of a second-hand car and some new camping gear I began my travels, always veering toward the green places on the map designating national parks and national forests. My journey that summer and fall would take me from the hardwood-covered hills of the Northeast, across the checkerboard farmlands of the Central Plains and into the Dakota badlands and rolling prairies of the Great Plains. I would be swept away by wilderness regions as different as the rugged, forested mountains of central Idaho and the broad creosote-covered deserts of Nevada. The majestic diversity of this country’s landscapes was far more awe-inspiring than anything I had conjured up in my fertile childhood imagination. It was a life-changing experience. To paraphrase George M. Cohan, ‘How ya gonna keep em in the mill town after they’ve seen the High Sierra?’ Accepting that first seasonal position at Zion National Park was, therefore, a natural progression. Perhaps I was predestined for the rangering life.
Early, during my first season at Zion, I came to the exhilarating realization that I had found a respectable way of fulfilling my nomadic childhood fantasies. I could be a wandering hobo experiencing the freedom of the open road for at least part of the year, while also having the opportunity to live – for five-to-eight month periods – in some of the most splendid reaches of the American outback. Being a seasonal would suit my temperament and desired life-style quite well.
In every national park there are two categories of park employee: “permanent” and “seasonal.” The permanent staff includes many exceptional people but is, for the most part, a different population. They tend to be a little older and have different concerns. At the time, they appeared to me to be more in tune with the “realities” of modern American life – at least more in tune than I personally wanted to be. While the seasonals were unattached, most permanents had spouses and children and, therefore, felt the need to be more settled. With stable careers to worry about they had to be more concerned with the opinions and judgments of park superintendents, divisional chiefs and others higher up on the bureaucratic food chain. We seasonals also had to be conscious of such things, but somehow these concerns seemed less weighty knowing that we would be able to drift next season to a new park should the need arise. I suppose some might allege a desire for prolonging adolescence, but at the time I thought that being a seasonal provided me with a unique opportunity to spend a period of my life living a freer life-style, more Thoreauean in its perspective and less tethered to corporate or bureaucratic conformities. I had found a professional place where I wished to reside for a while.
At the end of my first season at Zion, a friend appeared on his way to San Francisco. Tim Darbe was on a circuit selling ski care products at trade shows around the country and his arrival could not have been more timely. I was about to be out of work and was considering what exactly my options were for the coming winter. Tim was traveling with a friend, Lynn Van Dyne, and their suggestion that I joined them seemed like a good idea. The park service seasonal workforce becomes greatly constricted as the “summer parks” lay off a significant portion of their staffs during the fall. There is then a fiercely competitive scramble for the seasonal jobs available in the far fewer “winter parks.” In later years, having put my time in and thereby having increased my score in the civil service system, I was able to acquire winter positions at such locations as Death Valley National Park and Lake Mead National Recreation Area. But with just one season under my belt, I knew my chances for the coming winter were scanty at best.
So I joined Tim and Lynn in a two-car caravan that would take us first to Las Vegas and then San Francisco. In those days, there was almost no development in the approximately 120 miles between the town of St. George in southwestern Utah and Las Vegas. Far from city lights, the desert was pitch black on that moonless night, the heavens radiant with what appeared to be a billion stars. Lynn passed back and forth between the two vehicles intending to keep both Tim and I company and keep us awake. She was seated in my passenger seat when we came over a rise on Interstate 15 and suddenly before us the darkness gave way to an incredible splash of bright lights sprawled across a desert valley. I doubt that this is what Woody Guthrie had in mind when he sang of “silver diamond deserts” but the sudden appearance of that explosion of light was enough to cause both Lynn and I to simultaneously exclaim “Holy Cow!” (we may have used a word other than “cow.” It was a while ago and my memory is now vague). I wish someone could convince the federal government and the Nevada state legislature to keep the public lands along Interstate 15 public so as to preserve the dramatic effect of that first view of the nightlights of Las Vegas. But all indications are that things are heading entirely in a different direction. In the Las Vegas region there is a recent history of federal land sales to private developers.
Actually there has been a frenzy of such land sales, prompted by a 1998 federal law called the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act. The original intent of this was to allow the sale of publicly owned land within or near the edge of booming Las Vegas and to use the proceeds to purchase environmentally sensitive land elsewhere. But this intent has been warped by subsequent amendments and legislation. The powerful Nevada congressional delegation has forced a number of stipulations through Congress including one requiring that the funds from these land sales be spent almost exclusively in Nevada. According to the New York Times (Nevada Learns to Cash In on Sale of Federal Land by Jesse McKinley and Griffin Palmer, December 3, 2007), only about fifteen percent of the three billion dollars thus far brought in has been spent for land conservation purposes. Proceeds from these federal land sales have been used to help fund local fire and police departments and transportation infrastructure. Clark County schools – the county that contains the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson – received $150 million. Tennis courts, dog runs, parking lots, BBQ pits and a $64 million “shooting park” have all been funded by the sale of land that once belonged to all of us. While in other places these amenities and services are often underwritten through property taxes, the billions being received by Nevada allowed the state (at least prior to the recent real estate boom turning to bust) to draw in new residents and businesses by presenting itself as a low tax haven.
The original amount of federal land available for sale under the statute was 52,000 acres but a subsequent amendment increased that to 74,000 acres. When counties in eastern Nevada wanted in on the largesse, 135,000 acres were authorized for sale in that part of the state. Now counties in Utah and Idaho are making the same demands. The sad thing is that had the original intent of the legislation been followed it might not have quickly devolved into a pork-like feeding frenzy and – with land within the city of Las Vegas selling for $500,000 an acre during the recent real estate boom – significant funds might actually have been raised for the cause of land conservation (Imagine what could have been done if a portion of this money had been spent, for example, to protect the northwoods of Maine – an area of approximately ten million acres of paper company-owned forest lands. Conservation easements might have been purchased and one of the last great wilderness regions in the East would have received a degree of protection). Had we had an enlightened federal government during these recent years this legislation might even have been used to leverage some decent regional planning for Las Vegas that in turn might have allowed the kind of development that emphasizes community. My guess is that what will come of all this will be just more horrifyingly ugly strip malls and leapfrogging, soulless tract developments for this has been the trend in recent decades with the explosive growth of cities and towns across the Southwest. Regarding the dearth of regional and community planning, it makes me wonder what’s wrong with us in that we allow them to do this to our communities and our country. But then, I have digressed from the wanderings of that fall and winter and we should get back to them.