Horseshoe Canyon is characterized by motion. The canyon walls themselves were carved and smoothed by erosion beginning five million years ago, but one sip of silty creek water or a windblown spray of sediment to the face will prove to you that the canyon is still actively forming. And like sediments swept up by desert gusts and rippling water, we WRFI students have spent the greater portion of two weeks making our slow journey through Horseshoe from headwaters to the Green River confluence.
We start awkwardly, some of us breaking in new gear, learning to take sure steps, or sinking tentatively into a graceful backcountry routine for the first time. We all descend into Horseshoe with our own distinct shapes. There is a sense of camaraderie, but little unity. But as days and nights pass and we crawl further along the canyon’s flank, our edges dull. Like lithic scatter knocking down the draw, the canyon weathers us. Our clothing begins to take on the same worn orange tinge, our lingo homogenizes, our social airs relax. Everyone’s socks begin to smell the same. What began as a handful of odd stones emerges a conglomerate. We are well-sorted and tumbled smooth. This journey of weathering is usually taken together, but sometimes, in stray moments of independence, alone. For me, it is moments following long days shining with laughter and sun that I choose to remind myself what Horseshoe has to offer me in solitude. After shirking my pack and cooling my sweaty toes under mounds of velvet sand in Campland, I often choose to lace my boots back up and go for an evening jog down the wash. This is usually the only moment of my day witnessed by the canyon alone.
In moments like these, the setting sun turns gold and colors the sloping rock faces of Navajo, Kayenta, and Wingate sandstone. The moon begins to rise. I pick up my feet, slowly, feeling the gentle breeze on the back of my neck, and again I’m a sediment traveling downstream. But the buoyancy, the solace I’m seeking, isn’t earned easily. My desert jog nearly always begins as a desert slog. My sunshirt is too tight around my aching shoulders. My scalp itches. Blisters of damp sand are cementing within the lining of my heavy boots. Why did I leave my deodorant in the trailer? The first mile, one of two, is hard. It always is. I question why I’m not sitting in a circle with my friends, eating trail mix and doing handstands. I like to think that this portion of the run is when I haven’t yet been swept up in the canyon’s flow. A foreign object eager to integrate. I’m a cobble, too heavy now for entrainment. I snag on fractures of rock and flood debris. I don’t quite clear the point bar or pass easily under each rocky overhang. But, it is once I turn around and head back in the direction of camp for the second half of my run, that I feel the canyon begin to carry me. Rocks become obstacles to pass swiftly around, or to leap over. I curve around cut banks like I’m riding white water. I’m sweaty. I’m light. I’m noticing, I’m not always thinking. This is flow.
I wrote about these evening canyon jogs in a poem. It’s a Shakespearean sonnet. Enjoy my journey of deposition:
Canyon Jog<
Dusky pink shadows breathe in the day’s end
Trilling wind torrents ease their suck and swell
Languid sunlight oozes ‘round canyon bends
And sandy wash hums an evening farewell
Reluctant receivers of desert gifts,
My traveling feet sink sweat-slick and slow
But an ancient current surges and shifts
My smoothed bones entrained by Western wind’s flow
Tawny Navajo, Kayenta in flame
Junipers sheltering Canyon Wrens’ jest
Here I’ll lay down to deposit my frame
Cemented in fossiliferous rest
Ripp-ling stones whisper fine silt in my ears
We’ve waited for you for five mill-ion years