Friday
I waited nearly an hour at the entrance of Arches National Park, snacking on Ruffle chips and a banana and envying the Bronco next to me. Half the time passed before I realized there was someone tucked in the backseat. Once inside the gate, I pulled over at the Visitor Center to plan my hikes. Despite the crowds at the entrance, the cars spaced out on the drive. I passed a few crowded hiking pullouts and decided I'd try Devil's Garden, at the very end of the park road. The cul-de-sac was a parking lot, with Jeeps and vans and cars looping around and around, hoping a spot would open up. An elderly couple on a tandem bike shouted to each other above the road noise: “it looks like they let too many people in!” After 15 minutes of crawling around a loop that should have taken thirty seconds, I parked 1/2 mile down from the cul-de-sac and walked up, sucking water the whole time, and arrived at the Devil's Garden plaque at 11:30.
Most people turned left at the trailhead, so I went right down the Primitive Trail, slogging through so much sand and finding shade and solitude in-between small groups of people and couples. I tore at a stick of beef jerky between crunchy bites of sand.
And then I arrived at what looked like a total end, except for a couple who was navigating the rock to my left. The woman snapped at her husband to wait for her as I smiled at them with silent compassion, more on the woman’s side than his, wondering why he would lead his wife (who was very obviously scared of heights) across the steep, slick grade.
And then I realized, with the help of an elderly Asian couple who watched me try to figure it out and then waved and motioned me in the right direction, that the man and woman were, indeed, not on an optional track but THE path. So for what would become the first of many total leaps of faith in my butter-bottomed Reebok tennis shoes, I scampered on the rock and over the cliff, noticing then the tiniest little cairn: inoffensive, except to those who might have missed it.
Not too long after that, I arrived at a big bowl of dark liquid with slick sides on either side. "This looks like fun," I told the young couple who was inching their way toward me, pressing their feet in small divots above the murky pond. “I’m probably making it look wayyy harder than it is,” the young woman laughed as her boyfriend crawled ahead of her and held out his hand. She asked if I needed help just as a large group of people appeared on the other side. It was my turn to go, so I ascended, telling the group I felt like I had an audience. "No, you have a bunch of people here to help if you fall," one of the women said, who then asked if I needed help. I declined but she asked again, and I said, well, my shoes are sort of slippery but I think I have it, and then she said "Yeah, so DO YOU need help" in a way that sounded like she meant business. So I stopped resisting and she sent one of the men, and I said I didn't want to pull him in and the woman laughed and assured me he was 220 pounds and not going anywhere. So I grabbed this man's hand and leaned into him, and the woman at the end held out her hand for my safe descent, and I thanked them profusely and kept walking, nearly teary eyed at the kindness and quickly lost in thought about what I would have done without them (worse case scenario I’d have gotten wet), without the old Asian couple (worse case scenario I’d have turned back), without the comfort of human others. The path had very few markers and many misled footsteps in the sand, evidence that navigating the trail was part trial and error. I walked during morning and midday, but what if I’d started later and misestimated my time? The way would have been dangerous to find at night, even with a headlight, since orienting yourself on the sand meant looking for big markers in the distance and not just at the ground below. Steep drop-offs from climbing slick-rock backbones also meant tumbling would have been imminent.
I walked the rest of the way with this on my mind, my false sense of “independence” as I explored a comparatively safe and well-traversed path of the rugged west, a place that reminds us how perishable we are at extremes, despite our resilience otherwise.
Several miles in, I came to a series of arches, areas where water and erosion has sculpted giant holes in the sandstone. I saw Private Arch first, then trekked an extra half-mile to Dark Angel, a giant column of rock reaching to the blue sky. On the way down, I caught Double O Arch (my favorite!) and the rest of them, too: Navajo Arch, Partition Arch, Landscape Arch (a long thin strip like a stretched rubber band). I misled an older couple on a steep climb down (to be fair, I didn't tell them to follow!) and I said oh, I don't think this is the way, and the man joked with me after passing me later, "So just to confirm, this IS the trail, right?"
Pine Tree and Tunnel Arch felt obligatory since I was there, but I sped-walked to see them (at some point it became clear to me that I was collecting the arches, rather than experiencing them) and then arrived to an increasingly empty parking lot--so CALM, compared to the chaos of the morning--around 3:45 pm. One of the women who'd talked to me on the trail hung out the passenger's window as she passed and told me to have a nice vacation. I slow-walked back to my car and suddenly found myself crying, wishing I could tell Mom about my day, imagining what she'd say: "That's amazing, girl!" I slipped on my sunglasses along the small steep shoulder, looking for lizards and snakes, and then hopped in the car and headed south on Route 191 to Moab.
Moab overflowed with men in Jeeps and RZRs, and I was just as dusty, so I hid in the car for a moment to briefly fix myself up with lotion and deodorant, thank God. I grabbed a house-made Italian sandwich from a local co-op and tore into bites of pesto, cheese and salami on fresh ciabatta, people-watching in the sun outside a coffee house, listening to too-loud engines speed toward the canyon lands. I sipped a chai tea with whipped cream between stores, buying nothing.
A little after 8 pm I arrived at The Grist Mill Inn, an adorable B&B in Monticello (an hour south of Moab) that was my refuge in 2020 after my exhausting snowy hike in Colorado, after the streetlights swung in the dark solitude of Moab and COVID-19 shuttered all the hotels. I found my key for Room 5 on the foyer table and stepped into my room, admiring the rich hues of wallpaper and real wood furniture, the quaintness and charm. And then I returned to a civil state: I showered, lathered, shaved my capris-tanned legs, rinsed, blow-dried, oiled. Walked in clean white socks over a vacuumed blue carpet and fell asleep in the wide warm bed.
Saturday
I left the B&B by 8:30 am, already hungry. Last year, there was the option to order hot breakfast, but this year there was a vending machine with some optional cold goods: parfait, cereal, breakfast sandwich you could heat in the microwave. I briefly considered hanging around the dimly let dens to write, but I knew once I started I wouldn't want to break the flow, so I headed home.
Dad suggested I go to Flagstaff on the way, so I parked for two hours and shopped, getting essentials like a sport top for my HydroFlask and an adorable javelina cap (yes, I said essential), as well as some nice-to-haves, like a black sage bottle of honey from an intoxicatingly delicious-smelling honey boutique, and a robin blue romper, a total splurge. I ate double-smothered housemade biscuits at the Downtown Diner and slowly ventured back to my car. "You looking for a good place to eat?" a man on a phone noticed my wandering; "No, I'm trying to find my car," I said, walking down each street, tracing my steps through sidewalks of people, discovering the Honda where I hadn't expected it to be. Deeply disturbed that I'd spent a week on trails and then got lost in a small, small city.
The temperatures climbed from 50s to 70s to 80s as I drove from Flagstaff to Phoenix, the forests turning to shrubs, the slopes to saguaro. Down the road from Dad's house, I streaked the windshield with what I thought would clean it and then vacuumed the car in the hot garage. "I have a daughter!" Dad exclaimed when he returned home from wherever he was. We ate dinner and then I unpacked, showered and migrated to the wind-swept balcony in my new romper. I wrote until after midnight, listening to the coyote of South Mountain yip and howl against the tap-tap of my keys, their snouts at the great Western sky.
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