I first arrived at Zion this way:
After spending the first 29 years of my life as an often unhappy (and occasionally unhinged) southerner, I decided to go somewhere else. Somewhere west. So I took a leisurely 16,000-mile drive to places I had never been. It was a trip without a plan or a timetable to wherever the next place was on the map. Or maybe somewhere else. That's the kind of trip it was.
Zion was supposed to be a stopover on the way back to Santa Fe to close the western loop of the trip. One night, then hit the road. But it became much more than a stopover. I fell in love with the place. I ended up spending a week there on the trails - short ones, long ones, easy ones, not so easy ones, flat ones along the valley floor, wet ones up the Virgin River and steep ones up the sides of the canyon. The last hike I took was to Angels Landing.
But before that there was a treacherous long-closed trail to the top of Lady Mountain. An old guy from Arkansas who had visited the park years before told me about it and told me where he thought it was. Park rangers said the trail had been closed for years because it was so dangerous. That was all the encouragement I needed. I searched out the unmarked trail. I started up. It was more than a hike. A couple of ladders and a chain cable to hang onto while scaling the cliff were part of it, but I made it, stayed long enough to view the 360-degree view (the only one in the park), peel and eat one last orange and head down in the late afternoon.
The ladders and the chain cable are gone now due to what the Park Service describes as "deaths and bothersome rescues" on Lady Mountain. Both ladders and 2,000 feet of hand chain cable were removed in 1978. Obviously bad things happened up there in those four years after I made it to the top. But not to me.
I was invincible.
I was not quite 30 and already had a long trail of wreckage (what I would later learn to tidy up and call "experience"), human and otherwise, behind me in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I had a very good job (with a future). I come from a long line of dedicated employees. My father thought quitting a perfectly good job in Atlanta and going for a drive with no plan for the future was too dumb a thing for a grown man to do. But I was not a very mature 29-year-old and I certainly was not a dedicated employee.
Besides, I was in great shape after traveling, hiking and sleeping in a small green tent for months on end. My hair was long, my eyes were blue, I had a great tan, I had a cowboy hat and expensive Italian hiking boots, I had walked on glaciers, been to the top of Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming (John Denver was there the day before), driven over Beartooth Pass in Montana in a late July snowstorm, been swimming in the cold Pacific Ocean, drunk beer and mai-tais with the crew of a salmon boat at the the Sea Hag bar in Ilwaco, WA (while one of their crewmates, an Apache guy named Ernie who was going home because his grandmother was dying, played drunken boogie-woogie piano until his midnight bus to the Arizona desert arrived), been to San Francisco, Big Sur, Disneyland, sailed the Santa Ana Wind from San Diego to Mexico and back on a teak-decked sloop, saw whales and a nuclear submarine, driven the Mojave Desert at night, been inside Hoover Dam. I had been to Mexico and Canada. I had been places and done things.
And just the day before I had been to the top of Lady Mountain.
I was so ready for Angels Landing that I never gave the hike a second thought. Up I went. Invincibility on the move. A long way up, through 21 switchbacks called Walter's Wiggles and out along the narrow rocky spine to the end. After Lady Mountain it was a bit anticlimactic. But standing there nearly 1,500 feet above the valley floor with sheer drops all around seemed like the place I belonged.
Now it simply seems like the appropriate place for a man in his 70th year to go. Again.
My wife loves the beautiful cliffs and canyons in southern Utah, but she does not like hiking to high, narrow places. There are other Zion trails for the two of us and we will hike them before and after Angels Landing. I had hoped to make the hike with my sons Eric and Nick, but Nick can't make the trip. Eric will be hiking with me. He agreed to go months ago. He called the other night and asked me if I knew people have died hiking to Angels Landing. It's true. The Park Service says five people have fallen to their deaths over the past several decades. I told him we will be careful, we will consider the wind and the weather, we will turn around if we need to. He knows and I know we have been dangerous situations before and come home safely. Angels Landing will be a test in more ways than one. But we will not hike it like we are invincible.
I have nothing to prove by doing this, but the one thing I know is that I will be hiking up the trail to a place I have been before, but not back in time. Nostalgia is a crippling disease. I have no desire to relive those old days because a lot of them were bad old days and there were more bad days to come after I hiked down from Angels Landing in 1974. My good old days started years after I last climbed the trail and they have gone on being good days for more than 26 years now. At the age of nearly 70 I finally have acquired some good old days and they keep accumulating. I like that.
I don't feel as invincible as I did 40 years ago, but I feel pretty good. So I am getting ready. Getting in shape. Making plans. Booking rooms. Counting days.
By the time I came down from my sneaky trip up Lady Mountain and returned to camp back in 1974 it was dark and the old guy from Arkansas was nervously apologizing to the rangers for telling me about the hidden trail and asking them to organize a search party. When I walked in the rangers were angry, the old guy was relieved, I was smiling. I suppose I could have died up there that day, but what kind of life would it be without a hidden trail to a high, narrow place and a search party in it from time to time?
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| SUNSET OUTSIDE ZION PARK, OCT. 2013 |
Great coming of age story and keep on coming!
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