And lived to tell about it

The park is opening wilderness areas to hiking, areas that were part of recent park expansion but not accessible to the public until they'd been surveyed for archeological and paleontological evidence. The surveys are done and now the park has a few more hikes that are more challenging than existing ones because they're somewhat longer and are over wide open areas, not on paved paths. They fall under a hike category called Off the Beaten Path. 

One of the areas is called Devil's Playground and access is restricted to five permits a month. Sunday's weather was as perfect as it has been in a long time, so as soon as the Visitor Center opened I headed over to get a permit, only to find out that the allotment had already gone out for April. Bummer. My next choice was a repeat of the Red Basin hike that I went on when the trail was being plotted a while back. I'd already loaded the coordinates into my GPS and this one doesn't need a permit so off I went to Blue Mesa to park near the trailhead. On my way south I spotted four pronghorns not far off the road. Some people here see them frequently but this was only the second time I have. I couldn't get all four in the frame but these two are beauties even though it looks like they're shedding their winter coats.

I parked at Blue Mesa and walked back about a half mile to the start of the trail and almost immediately went off Off the Beaten Path. My track wove here and there, following whatever looked interesting, not much keeping to the directions on the trail flyer, when I found this piece of petrified wood, below. It looked like an arrowhead to me but what usually happens when I find what I think is something good is that it turns out to be just a rock or just a piece of petrified wood. I marked the spot with the GPS even so and took several photos of it to show to the archeologists.

It's not an arrowhead but what they called a biface, a tool used as a knife. It apparently was about twice as big at one time as what's in my hand, being a more symmetrical triangle, but it broke along the edge nearest my fingertips and this is what was left. Score! A real artifact!

The colors and textures here continue to amaze me.

The country is spectacular. If not for my camera, I would have no way to describe what's out there and have anyone believe me. Do you have the vocabulary for this? I don't. There are geometric forms like those in the background, and organic ones like those up front, within yards of each other. How does this happen?

Prickly pear cactus doesn't grow to the huge size here that's seen in the Sonoran desert but it's no less formidable. There was a new bud growing on one paddle and the whole thing was more than protected by a vicious maze of spines. This plant stood about a foot tall.

By now I've seen a good amount of petrified wood but only an occasional knot.

The view behind me, again with the incongruity of shapes, and a snip of serendipity with the lizard sunning on the rock.

 Here he is again. Look at that sleepy eye.

 More petrified wood, in luscious, not-to-be-believed colors.

Off in another direction was this slope slick as ice with tiny stones.

Still more petrified wood. The top edge of this piece is what first caught my eye because it looked like a chunk of charcoal. When I picked it up for a closer look, the translucent white blade, about twice as long as shown here, revealed itself.

This is an interesting conglomerate. Others I've seen have been just rocks glued together, but you can see this one has petrified wood pieces in it as well.

I was dallying and hadn't gotten very far at all on the six-mile trail, but everywhere I looked was something that stopped me in my tracks. These rocks were a foot or two across, not the pebbles they appear to be here.

This is my favorite sighting of the day. Two flat-bread shaped slabs, fitted together like peas in a pod, and elevated off the earth with a few pebble offerings carefully settled between them. It was contemplative perfection.

An endless supply of incongruity. Who thinks up this stuff?

This is more of what I expect a conglomerate to look like. The stones look like it would take just a nudge to break them free, but they're cemented in place.

 A robber's roost or hoodoos in the making?

Getting to the gap in the fence, according to the trail directions, was supposed to be early on in the hike, but because of my wandering I was nowhere near it. I decided I'd better put a hustle on and skipped the coordinate for the gap and inched my way under the wire in another place. As I was about to stand I saw this view from my belly and had to take a picture of it. I did not take a picture of all the little bunny poop inches from my nose. At least they're vegetarians.

Hoo, boy, this was amazing and it just doesn't show as I wish it would. I've been many, many places in the park where bluffs and mesas have shed boulders and I've not really given much thought to standing under them, but this one was sending out danger vibes. There was something so unstable about it. It could have been the accumulation of the boulders close to the base but also tumbled off at a distance or because the very top stones looked as though a breeze would send them down. I couldn't put my finger on what was unsettling about it but it wasn't a place I'd pick out a rock to have a picnic on.

That is, until I saw this shell shape and had to get close just long enough to get a picture. Then I hustled myself away.

This is a close up of the base. Stalactites, right? I've never seen them out of a cave. And look at the river of debris spewing out from within. It's like something out of a fantasy.

The hike leads to clam beds that go back about 200 million years, if I remember right. I showed pictures of them before but not like these. Gorgeous.

This is the sand castle at the entrance to the slot canyon of Red Basin. It was such a beautiful day.

Another view from the opposite direction.

This explains pretty well why it's called Red Basin. There was no standing water in the wash but we'd had some rain a few days earlier; there was a section where my shoes sunk about three or four inches, which immediately made me think of Tarzan movies and people dying in quicksand. The mind is a marvelous thing, isn't it?

 An artist's dream. I wish I could paint.

The turning point for the hike, which takes you back to the start, is right after a gigantic petrified log broken into several pieces, so large it can be seen from way up on Google Earth. The diameter of one of the sections is about shoulder-high on me. I stopped there for a quick lunch and then quickly proceeded to get lost. 

The hike directions say to go north and then go west, and then you should see the fence line that takes you back to the start. Really? How far north? How far west? What freakin' fence line? The only fence I saw was down and in a tangle. I explored out in a few directions but definitely not west because it led directly into badlands (and did it mean west-west or north-west?). East-west made as much sense as anything else. And, joy, I was getting low on water. 

I'd been out about five hours by then and got a text from the HH asking where I was. Oh, lost, I said and when he asked if I need help I immediately shouted, as much as one can shout via text message, NO! I'm well aware when I'm out in the hinterlands that I'm there alone and am very careful as to where I put my feet, but the pain of breaking a bone would be nothing compared to the humiliation of having Dispatch send in the troops to rescue me. I could only imagine the humiliation of having someone drive say a quarter-mile off a road that would be obvious to a blind person to come pick me up on Sunday. No thanks. I have to work here. I see these people every day.

My plan was to navigate back to the gap in the fence that was the first or second coordinate listed for the hike and off I went, very happy to see the GPS say it was only a mile or so away, but at the same time wondering just how much zig-zagging I'd done because it should have been much more than a mile. Well, yes it should because where the coordinate took me was about 100 feet from the sandcastle shown above, nowhere near the start of the trail, more like near the end. It was an incorrect coordinate. Crap-a-mighty. What now?

Did I mark the location of the car when I parked it, as I usually do? How about the trailhead, did I mark that? Nooo!!! I forgot and really thought the directions would work. I will never make that mistake again.

What I did was navigate back to the artifact I found, the thing I thought could be an arrowhead, because I knew the coordinate was right and it was near the start of the trail. I had to go cross-country about a mile and a half, over hill and down dale, through knee-high shrubby grass, all the while looking for snakes because they live here too and it was a warm sunny day, the kind they like. 

It was all I could do to pick up and put down my feet when I came across this jackrabbit which did not move other than to lay its ears flat on its back as I made my way around it.

I was interested, still, in Making Art by taking more photos as I neared the trailhead, but what it really was was an excuse to stop for just a minute. My last shot of the day:

That last half mile or whatever ungodly distance it was from the start of the trail to the car was unending. I saw all kinds of happy park visitors frolicking among the petrified wood and curled my lip at them. Didn't they know I almost died?

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Thought of the day:

I have a deeply hidden and articulate desire for something beyond the daily life.  - Virginia Woolf (thanks, Laura!)