In the fall months of 1992, 1993, and 1994, Ray Wheeler walked across the wild heart of the Colorado Plateau, in three stages, from Westwater Canyon, Colorado, to Rockville, Utah.
Ray's wife Amy O'Connor joined him for the third leg of the journey. For their honeymoon they spent six weeks walking about 150 miles along the southern escarpments of Utah's high plateaus, traveling southwest from Boulder Mountain near Capitol Reef National Park, to the southern tip of the Paunsagunt Plateau near Bryce Canyon National Park. Along the way, on October 10, 1994, they arrived at a food cache on the southern tip of Table Cliff Plateau.
In this journal entry, composed during a full layover day at Powell Point, Ray describes the field of view from one of the premier "power points" of the Colorado Plateau.
Powell Point is one of those "power points" so quintessential to the landscape of the Colorado Plateau, where one can see almost the entire region in one long sweep of the eye. It appeared as number five on David Rust's list of the finest "Fourteen Points" in the entire region.
Sitting here today in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, it is easy to understand why.
I've spent much of the afternoon staring out into the void, astroprojecting across the landscape through the 8-power, extra-wide-angle Tasco binoculars I foresightfully stashed in our Powell Point food cache box. With this ocular prosthetic I can soar easily over the landscape, wheeling among the megalithic landforms like a condor.
Far off to the extreme right, at a compass bearing of 335 degrees on the northeastern horizon, lie the snow-capped volcanic cones of the Tushar Mountains, which stand at the far western edge of the Colorado plateau, about 60 miles distant. Further south is the volcanic cone called Brian Head, 50 miles distant, and still further, Mount Trumbull in the volcanic Uinkaret Range, 120 miles away to the south on the Arizona Strip.
About 60 miles away to the southeast, the great white stacks of the Navajo power plant in Page, Arizona, poke up rudely and incongruously above the cliff walls of lower Glen Canyon. The plant's plume of toxic brown haze -- spewing forth in perpetual retribution against those Navajo Nation leaders who welcomed its siting on their lands -- is one of the few man-made objects said to be visible, with the naked eye, to orbiting astronauts. Shifting winds have distributed a flat layer of exhaled smoke in several directions. But even through this haze I can make out the San Francisco Peaks, 150 miles away to the south near Flagstaff, Arizona.
Due east, the cone-cluster of the Abajo mountains floats on the horizon about 130 miles distant and just 25 miles shy of the Colorado border. Closer at hand are the "laccolithic" blue domes of the 11,000 foot-high Henry Mountains and 10,000 foot-high Navajo mountain.
One object remains a puzzle. It is a massive stone tower, but dimly visible -- and only through the binoculars -- on the southeastern horizon. It is the only major horizon landmark which I do not recall having visited on foot at some time during the past 15 years. Though it is shown on no map in my possession, I reckon it to be the 2,000 foot-high stone monolith known as Ship Rock, in New Mexico, about 180 miles distant.
The field of view sweeps across 300 degrees of horizon, spans 200 to 250 miles of landscape from east to west, and encompasses parts of 3 states. It has taken an entire afternoon just to inventory the landmarks along the horizon line. It could take several days, working diligently with a telescope and a stack of large scale topographic maps, to identify each of the heroic landforms below the horizon, so many of which I have climbed over, scrambled across, descended into, or camped upon. It seems that my whole adult life is contained within this one field of view.
The sun boils down to the horizon; breeches the horizon; smoothly dials itself down to a single pinprick of light, and is gone.
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The great western wall of Table Cliff Plateau has become a three mile-long mural, curving away to the north and west, glowing like an ember in the dying light, reflecting alpenglow like a mirror. In the lengthening shadows, the clusters of two- and three-hundred-foot pinnacles clinging to the side of the cliff seem strangely alive.
Below us, southern Utah is spread out like a map, a perfect scale model of itself -- the kind of thing you might see in a Park Service visitor's center. Bryce Canyon National Park, a place I am used to thinking of as high, lies a full thousand feet below us, about fifteen miles away on the southwestern horizon.
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The western sky is an iridescent horizontal rainbow, pale orange smoothly graduating to red, pink, violet, indigo. A crescent moon hangs high above the western horizon, framed by the silvery spires of bristlecone pines.
We sit perfectly inert, leaning back into the three-foot thick root-arm of a bristlecone monarch, at the brink of the 1,600-foot cliff wall that encircles and defines Powell Point.
I marvel at our good fortune. It has been an unusually clear and perfectly wind-still day on one of the most exposed landmarks on the entire plateau. It must be extremely unusual to feel no breeze and hear no roar of wind in this place so often blasted by storms, riddled by lightening strikes or consumed by thunderheads.
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There is some poetic justice, I think, some profound moral object lesson in the fact that the lighting-charred, wind-twisted, sand-blasted bristlecone pines clustered here at the brink of eternity where few other plants can survive, are among the world's oldest living things. Some of these trees have been cored and ring-dated at over 3,000 years old. Small metal tags nailed to each tree trunk attest to what E.E. Cummings called "the doting prurience of science."
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Some of these great old pyramids with trunks three or four feet thick at the base, pointing like so many rocket ships up into the evening sky, were 1,000 years old at the dawn of the Christian era. They lived on quietly here through the fall of Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, two Worlds Wars, the first flight of men to the moon.
Slowly panning the binoculars, I discover that the city lights of Henrieville, Tropic, Ruby's Inn, and the motel strip along Highway 12 west of Ruby's Inn are in fact switched on and blazing brightly, though they can't yet be seen with the unaided eye. Just 18 discrete points of light define Henrieville, which remains to this day the classic, perfectly symmetrical frontier Mormon village so eloquently eulogized by Wallace Stegner in Mormon Country.
Spread out across such a vast landscape, the perfect stillness of the evening seems wildly incongruous and somehow ominous. The only audible sound is a small grumble arising from Amy's stomach.
A raven roars by, planning steeply down, then sweeping dramatically up, screaming and scolding, and finally dropping like a bomb below the horizon line and into the oblivion of night, leaving us once again in perfect silence.
Wee points of light mark the progress of two cars laboring up the long grade of Highway 12 as it cuts across the badlands known as the "Blue Hills". The cars are visible but not audible, ghostly and solitary as space ships.
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A planet has entered the orange-red alpenglow zone above the serrated eastern rim of the Paunsagunt Plateau. There is no haze in the western sky this evening to magnify it as with a setting sun over a smog-filled city skyline. As the planet sinks closer to the horizon it appears to turn a fiery, copper-red. The sky behind it is iridescent but the planet blazes against that band of color with the still much fiercer brilliance of a jewel. The superimposition of this finer brilliance over a duller one is for some reason, deeply moving.
Flood-lit with alpenglow, the cream-colored fins and pink-orange towers which buttress the western wall of Table Cliff Plateau remain sharply defined against the gathering gloom. Staring down at them through a telephoto lens, I gradually discern several huge natural windows I hadn't noticed before.
The brighter stars are now visible, though only a few of them. A small breeze begins to stir. Amy is cold. She leaves for our sheltered camp back in the forest.
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I remain in my balcony seat, transfixed by the spectacle.
Through the binoculars I can see the large electric billboard at Ruby's Inn, 2,527 feet below and 14 miles distant. I can in fact see the very post office from which I will mail a copy of this journal entry to High Country News editor Ed Marston, perhaps six days from now.
I can't quite read the scrolling message on the Ruby's Inn marquee. Yet still I stare at it, mindlessly watching it scroll, for several minutes.
After a full day sitting quietly here in the dazzling sunlight of late fall against the root of a three-thousand year old tree -- now, after the hypnotic light-show of the sunset; now in the perfect stillness of this perfect evening; now, and again now and now and now -- my mind has settled into an altered state, a trance-like equilibrium, a profound dream from which it may or may not ever awake. All of the accumulated thoughts, experiences and feelings of a lifetime seem to have dialed themselves down into a single intense laser-point. Soon that too, like the setting sun, like the headlights nearing the top of the long grade where they will soon cut behind a hill -- will silently wink out.
We have been walking in wilderness now for four weeks. There have been so many beautiful lunch stops and campsites. So many power-points. So many lakes and streams and forests and meadows. So many big old trees like this one behind me. It has all been such a beautiful dream.
Or has it been -- an awakening from the dream?
"We are all living," the psychiatrist R.D. Laing famously wrote, "in a post-hypnotic trance, induced in early infancy."
Night has fallen. A small breeze flows gently over the brink into the void.
The polished grey trunks of the bristlecone seem to shine now with a weird combination of alpenglow and moonlight.
I lift the binoculars to the western horizon line. Somewhere within the field of view our Isuzu Trooper is parked in a grove of ponderosa pine. Amy will be heading home from Bryce Canyon National Park, but I will be continuing on alone. I have perhaps a hundred miles yet to walk. Not a long distance, but much of it will be very slow going, cross-country without trails over badlands, sand dunes and slickrock.
Winter will soon begin coming on fast.
But this night, though slightly chilly, still has the balmy feel of summer just turning to fall.
Tonight we will sleep like angels on our balcony in the sky.