Scrambling down the dusty orange Navajo sandstone into the open body of Horseshoe Canyon for the first time will be intimidating, exhilarating and even a hint nerve-racking. If you have never done anything like this before, and with such a wide berth of knowledge still to be unlocked, you will find yourself feeling a tad underprepared, despite the 50 pounds of food, water, and gear you have strapped to your back. Not to worry, because there is no time like the present to get your bighorn sheep and burros in a row. Here are three important things to keep in mind – as your legs shake and sweat beads form on your temple – during your next descent into this canyon.
When Rain Pants Turn Into Snow Pants
It may snow in the desert. Dare I say it might even blizzard. On your second day ever within the canyon, you may awaken to frost on your sleeping bag, inches of blinding pure white snow on the ground and more falling down from above. You’ll don your rain pants and hike four cold, slushy miles contemplating the strangeness of the canyon you are just beginning to know, hiking alongside the strangers you entered this place with. At the end of your 14-day trek, however, you will feel familiar with both. The cold and snow will seem less daunting once your feet are dry again; you remember to thank the canyon for her incredible, unapologetic, and unforgiving show of strength. Once dinner has been made, and your rain pants are no longer snow pants, you and your new companions will fill the canyon with echoes of laughter as you tell tales of the day you have just endured.
Backcountry Hunger: How to Feed a Soul
All the trail mix, oatmeal, and dried fruit in the world is not up for this particular task. Instead, deep inside the great belly of the canyon you must learn to receive what is fed to you. You must let yourself consume the light as it spills over the edges and into the canyon each morning, allow the songs of the Pinyon Jays to flow through you as they converse, and feel the unmovable but crumbling rock walls holding you tight. You must absorb the cottonwoods into every fiber of your being. You must taste the sand when it blows into your face and beckons for your attention. You must drink from springs, and algae-plagued puddles. You must breathe in the perfume of the mysteriously open primrose flowers in the middle of the day. You must or you will starve.
Sand: The Glitter of the Desert
Speaking of sand, you will most likely try, in vain, to keep it out. Out of your tent, out of your boots, and especially out of your mouth. You will shake it from your clothes before you enter your tent, keep belongings secure in tightly sealed ziplock bags, and lace your shoes extra tight in the morning. But it will not work. You will find sand in your hair, your food, and every empty crevice of your person, and it will do what it does best: erode. It will erode your senses and make it so the taste of a desert morning becomes the sweetest thing to date. It will chafe at your opinions and ideas of who the desert is, and instead build a reality of juniper trees, crystal clear springs, and chittering wildlife around every corner. It will beckon you awake each morning as it is lifted in the gusts of canyon winds, and will be there waiting for you to lay your weary body to rest upon each night. It will grind you down. I do not say may, because it will; that is fact. It will turn your defiance to dust, eat away at your pride and churn your nerves until nothing remains. Fear not, because there is more. Where sand falls it also collects, and eventually, swells. It cements into dunes of strength, of grit, or resilience. It will become a part of you as much as you are of it. And one day you’ll sit and watch the grains fall through the cracks of your open palm like running water and wonder when it began to feel so soft.
