Post Cards from the Edge

This is the story of a road trip we took back in May of 1991 — to Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon — as told through post cards and letters to friends. A trip both awe-inspiring and life-threatening.

SUNDAY
From Carson City, our first overnight stop, we drive straight through the high, flat desert to Ely. On the horizon all around us are mountains dusted with snow. The only shadows are cast by fluffy white clouds with flat, dark bottoms. Very surreal. They look so close, like just a high ceiling. I guess it has something to do with our altitude, which is somewhere around 7,000 feet. Anyway the shadows leave the plain streaked black. It’s beautiful but my butt hurts. At least we have cruise control.

MONDAY
Here at last. The Nevada desert was just a prelude, the casinos a weak attempt to distract us. This is what we came for — the red rock canyons of Utah — and we’re in awe. As we drove along the Virgin River this afternoon, we had to hunker down and peer up through the windshield to find the tops of the canyon walls all around us — as much as 4,000 feet straight up. Joanne said, “Too bad we don’t have a sun roof or a convertible.” Then she thought better of it. Falling rocks, you know.

TUESDAY
Zion is like Yosemite with color. I might have made that up but Joanne assures me she read it to me from a guidebook before we ever left California. It’s true, though. In fact, Zion makes Yosemite look like a rough draft. We ran into a bit of a rainy patch on the trail to Hidden Canyon this morning. It’s really coming down now, but we’re back in our cabin and there’s a fireplace, so everything is just fine.

WEDNESDAY
“Just because the trail’s there doesn’t mean it’s safe.” That bit of advice came from a friendly waiter at breakfast when he found out we’d been hiking in Hidden Canyon in the rain yesterday. “If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have warned against it. We had a helicopter rescue out there Saturday. We lost a park ranger out there last year when it was dry.” Not to worry. The weather appears to be improving, and we promise to be careful.

THURSDAY
One of the first things you notice here — aside from how much bluer the sky is than you’ve ever known it to be — is how much the sound of wind or running water is amplified in a canyon. Here at Bryce, the Paria River is dry now, but the wind can be very strong and there are other sounds — this morning we were in a narrow canyon photographing two natural bridges, and the sound of a raven’s wings beating the thin, dry air startled and amazed us. The bird flew from one wall to the other and back again in search of a comfortable perch, and if you saw the same thing in a movie you’d say the sound technician got it wrong. It was too loud to be real. But there we were.

The old photos in the lodge are really something. Tourists used to arrive in long touring limousines, often with open roofs, that brought them straight from the railway station in Cedar City. (Union Pacific built the lodge in 1924.) The women wore raccoon coats. The place still has a sort of rustic grandeur, but the staff no longer gathers to sing to departing guests as they did in the thirties, forties, and fifties.

Saw five deer grazing in the field at dusk. They let us get close enough to hear them tear clumps of grass from the ground.

FRIDAY
I don’t know what it is about the dining room here, but I always feel happy when we sit down for a meal. We’re not ourselves anymore. We’re some couple from the twenties, I suppose, since that’s when the lodge was built, and we’ve just come out on the Union Pacific, all the way from Connecticut or New Hampshire.

The food is quite good — especially the Southwest chicken breasts they serve at dinner — and we always pay with traveler’s cheques, which seems to add to the illusion that we came from far, far away in the days before credit cards.

Maybe it’s the exposed beams of the ceiling, the two stone fireplaces, the big windows with their small rectangular panes. Even from a distance the imperfections of the glass are visible — the uneven thickness of the panes. Up close, you can see that some have tiny air bubbles in them.

Or maybe it’s the uniforms. Waitresses wear white aprons over salmon-colored dresses with white cuffs on their short sleeves. Waiters wear bow ties, suspenders, and aprons.

Navajo rugs hang on the wood-paneled walls, and the overhead lights are wrapped in wrought iron with a pine-tree motif. The chairs are made of tree branches with the bark still on them.

It all combines to take you back. In our case, to a time before we were born.

SATURDAY
When we arrived at the North Rim, the park had only been open three days, and it was easy to see why: there were still huge snow drifts along the road. That, along with the white and leafless aspens in among the pines, really gives the place the look of winter rather than spring. The man at the registration desk said, “You’re staying four days? What are you going to do here for four days?” Well, laundry, for one thing. There’s just no getting away from dirty socks.

SUNDAY
Hiked to Widforss Point today, a ten-mile round-trip through forest with numerous canyon overlooks, the most striking view being at Widforss, naturally. It took us three hours to get there, but it was worth it. Didn’t see any of the Kaibab squirrels that live on the North Rim (and nowhere else), but we did spot a screech owl, a deer, and several short-horned lizards.

WEDNESDAY
If I’m calm in emergencies, it’s because I never believe anything bad can happen to me. But later, sometimes, I see how, if we’d done just one thing differently — if we’d made one more mistake — things could have been really bad instead of merely miserable.

Yesterday we hiked down into the Grand Canyon, all the way to Roaring Springs — a drop in elevation of between three and four thousand feet, which of course we had to make up on the return trip.

It took us two hours and twenty-five minutes going down, and they say you should allow twice as long to get back. Not a pleasant thought. We had already drunk half our water supply.

Joanne at least had a hat. I rigged something up with a handkerchief as a headband.

After lunch we decided, to be safe, we’d better fill our water bottles at the pump house. (We didn’t want to take water from the stream because we had no purification tablets.) But there was no trail.

We tried going up the bank. We tried following the water pipe along the stream. We were getting nowhere and expending a lot of energy in the process. Finally, we sat down again and Joanne started drinking long greedy drinks from her water bottle.

“I feel like we’re going to die,” she said.

We started up the trail, but didn’t get far before Joanne found a rock to sit on in a small patch of shade and started guzzling what was left of her water.

“We’re not going to make it. I can’t go on. I feel like we’re going to die,” she said.

My first thought: We’d be fine if you’d just go easy on the water. But I didn’t say that, and I’m glad I didn’t because it could have been our undoing. Instead, I said, “We’ve got two choices: We can go back and get more water from the stream, or we can go on with what we have left.”

“I can’t go on. I don’t feel well, Al.”

We put all the water we had into two bottles, and I took the other two down to the stream. Giardia was the least of my concerns at this point. In about 20 minutes, I was back. Joanne had drunk most of one bottle already, but was feeling better. In fact, I had trouble keeping up with her. We made it to the top in only three and a half hours. We even had time for a shower and a nap before our dinner reservation. All seemed well.

Then, as we finished our meal, Joanne started to feel feverish and then chilled in turns.

The medics came to our room, took her vital signs, and conferred with a doctor by phone. The diagnosis: sinus infection. The treatment: rest, take aspirin, and drink lots of water. The irony: her sinus trouble was probably caused or at least aggrevated by our rapid rise from the canyon.

In any case, to this day, Joanne carries water with her wherever she goes.