Bread in the Desert

On the road for weeks in the Utah desert, I've noticed how my normal routine gets whittled down. I'm stocked with essentials: water, sunscreen, a layer. I don't have a cooler so am eating mostly dry goods. It's temporary, and a worthwhile sacrifice when a trip to the grocery store means going a couple hours off-course. It's an attitude accrued from greed, an insatiability for the wonder around you, to take a piece of it while you can.

Following a waiter's recommendation for a Capitol Reef hike I realize I've bitten off, oh, let's say a little too much. Do other people start a twelve mile hike after lunch? It's rugged, stunning even, but I'm feeling it. On the out-and-back, I finally shortcut the endeavor by reaching an outer trailhead and hitchhiking back to my start. But the campsite is still far away.

Driving north, the twisting landscape of towering red rock, sage and slickrock turns to desert grey, from cracked, ashen earth to tawny mountain buttes, naked of any vegetation, stark mineral against blue sky. In springtime, its redemption is a carpet of bee-plant yellow blooms, a glow that hovers over the valley floor. Emptiness surrounds. Not where you would expect to find a farm stand.

I pull up to Mesa Farm Market, herded in by a grinning Aussie shepherd whose name I'll learn is Zeke. There I meet Randy, a farmer whose idea for a sustainable lifestyle brought him to this unlikely fifty-acre patch of earth. His greenhouse produces organic lettuce and vegetables, an outdoor oven fires up whole grain loaves and goats produce French-style chevre and the harder, buttery tomme. The transaction isn't just commerce, we exchange history, ideas on fencing and goat laments. All to say, the desert is not empty, and for the creative and hardworking, it can even provide, and gloriously so.

At Randy's suggestion, I skip my faraway destination and make camp on BLM land by Factory Butte. Dinner is a heap of greens mixed with mandarins, bread and cheeses, a meal, that even after weeks of restaurant research for a guidebook, is the most satisfying I could imagine.

It seems no lark that I've been reading The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen. It tells the story of Daniel Suelo, a man who gave up money in 2009, lives in caves around Moab, and leads a rich life. As a friend said, "it brings all sorts of questions on religion, commerce and happiness." How possible is it to go back to the essential, and live as our ancestors did? To some degree, very. But modern problems--like dentistry, and aging, put a snarl in the simple life.

Few would go this far, though by Suelo's blog, it seems the appeal is growing. Spend any length of time in the desert and your needs will adapt, simplify and ultimately respond to the elemental. Bread and cheese.

Canyonlands Run

Faced with few days and many trails to cover for an upcoming guidebook, I laced my sneaks to run some trails. One of the best places for trail running (provided you've got a Camelback) is Canyonland's Needles. A park ranger recommended the 7-mile loop from Big Springs Canyon to Squaw Canyon. She said the route is mostly flat, save for the middle.

In hindsight, it's a little like saying Colorado is mostly flat, except for the middle. The first three miles are perfect, easy-does-it sandy singletrack with open views. Then the climb starts and soon running is not an option, as you zigzag up steep slickrock hunting for cairns to guide the way (they are there). Each cairn perched higher. No. Really?

Yes. And the views up top are sick. Plan a long pause there, just be careful with the scramble down to the next canyon. You might lose running momentum for a bit, but it's unlikely that your pulse will flag.

No caution here. The ranger proved to have an excellent sense of humor, or sense of adventure (often one and the same). Her pick has become one of my favorites--and you won't see in the guidebooks.

To make it hiking, just plan for 3-4 hours, bring a picnic and hat, because you'll probably want to strech it out.

In the Words of Edward Abbey

"Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the...cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."

It's been 42 years since Abbey published the book and today it's more apropos than ever. If you go, take Desert Solitaire, it's indispensable as water in canyon country.

On the Road: Utah

The gas stations on I-70 get more magnificent the further you get from civilization. Far from Colorado’s ski condos, these barren flats slipped between the big ranges are trucker territory. I stop for gas.

I spend so much time on the road abroad that America still feels fresh. It's easy to get taken with strangeness and specificity of her subcultures. Here there's more than candy, maps and sodas (the road is for sugar highs and getting lost). There's both chip dip and lip dip—chewing tobacco. But also thirty kinds of jerky and new short-sleeve white collar shirts, the kind that one can embroider Ray across the breast pocket. Even more than the salted, processed meat, these shirts inspire a kind of sadness in me. Ray can’t go home to get a clean shirt.

He’s bound to the highway, not the back roads, on the run or making time coast to coast. He’s just spilled an 18-ounce coffee all over his lapel, or urged by optimism, buys fresh togs for the promise of a shower or female company. Like me, he’s passing through. In three minutes he’s gone. Ten minutes later I’ll pass him, oblivious to the fresh shirt.

My Favorite Desert

Maybe it's the redness. Or its bigness. Or its shapes which ripple, arch and collapse into sage and sand, snaking rivers, deep slotted canyons, orange mesas and fissured towers. The Utah desert is a wild place. After traveling nearly half the world, I still find it secretive, strange and otherworldly.

That’s the thing about the desert: it absorbs and engulfs you. Tells you who you are.

There's power here. It gave John Wesley Powell courage, Joseph Smith divine inspiration and Edward Abbey words. You imagine that--if here long enough--you too could write whole books, invent a religion or fling yourself one-armed into the unknown.

The desert tells me that I'm a firefly on the face of things, a speck in geological time flitting briefly through this world.

We set out on the Narrows in Zion National Park early. The Narrows isn't a hard hike, but it does require you to tread a river all day, always "seeking refuge on higher ground" in case of a flash flood (which they say most likely off you anyway). After a night of heavy thunderstorms the water flowed clear and cold. We waded to our waists and forged up canyon over slippery boulders, through sculpted walls pocked with tiny scorpions. We admired the columns of light and peered at the blue slice of sky a thousand feet above. Mere specks.

America's national parks are not only amazing. They are popular. I did not realize how much so until we started to make our exit. It was a mass of humanity. Throngs of hikers forged up canyon. They were midwesterners, Italians, retirees and Koreans. Only a few had walking sticks to steady them in the current. Some wore bathing suits. Others carried designer leather purses or small, soaked children. There were flip flops and aqua shoes. Three divas wore nothing on their feet except perfect pedicures.

Bravo to those brave people. By not reading the free NP leaflet, they had found adventure on the scale of Powell or Lewis & Clark.

Abbey would have scowled. He had the right, the home court advantage. I do not put myself above them--the outdoors may be the only place I can properly organize myself. Otherwise I too am woefully unprepared.

Yet the moment helped me imagine the desert both with us and without us. The solitude of the morning contrasted sharply with the chaos of that afternoon. The desert tells us who we are. Collectively, we were not fireflies but circus fleas careening through some greater majesty, sometimes in RVs, sometimes in plastic sandals. At the end of my visit, I decided that the desert remained otherworldly and even more impenetrable than before.

But I was glad that I'd gotten up early.