Hiking with new friends

Today I’m in Escalante, Utah, sharing good times with my intrepid author friend Rae Ellen Lee. This is the first time I’ve been back to Canyon Country since I used it as the setting for my novel Endangered, and as we explore the area, I am reminded of several things.

Slickrock is Slick

Duh! There are very few level surfaces in any canyon, and the rippling multicolored layers of sandstone have been polished to a hard smoothness by water and wind. If you don’t have gripping tread on your shoes and excellent balance while traveling downhill, you could easily end up on your backside. To avoid this embarrassing and painful result, I often start out on my backside in the steepest sections. For my aging knees, hiking on slickrock is much easier when moving uphill.

Sudsie and I climb up the slickrock

There Are Surprises around Every Bend

Hoodoos—the standing rock formations carved out by wind and water—are always interesting. Rae Ellen and I sit for a while to sketch in Devil’s Garden. After drawing for half an hour, I conclude that my hoodoos look more like invading space aliens, and Rae Ellen vows never to attempt pen and ink again. She doesn’t even show me her effort; I’ll have to sneak a look after she goes to bed.

We focus on enjoying the scenery again, and delight in the slickrock paintbrush and claret cactus blossoms we find tucked into crevices along the way. We peer down into slot canyons and naturally I imagine flash floods and other disasters I’ve either read or created in my own books.

Paintbrush in bloom

Desert Country Seems Similar Around the World

I explore one very hot sandy area on my own, looking for the best small example of petrified wood. The crystallized wood pieces litter every square foot of ground in this spot, and they are not protected on BLM land, so I want to take back one small souvenir for a rock-loving friend. As I get further away from Rae Ellen and her dog, I begin to feel a little anxious. For me, this is unusual; although I’m always careful, I often hike alone with great enjoyment.

Hoodoos

Then, looking around, I realize why. This particular part of Utah bears a striking resemblance to some game parks in Zimbabwe that I visited in 2012. Lions abounded there, and anytime we humans were on foot, we might be lunch. Of course, there are lions in the U.S., too, and as a matter of fact cougars are featured in Endangered. Fortunately, our American lions are quite shy (as opposed to their bolder African cousins), but I can’t stop looking for those graceful feline shapes on the high rocks and those intense golden eyes in the shadows under the scrubby trees. I feel relieved but also foolish and a bit disappointed when I don’t spy any sign of a big cat. (People who know suspense writers know our imaginations can easily conjure up a whole range of worst-case scenarios, even for ourselves.) I rejoin Rae Ellen and her dog Sudsie as soon as I’ve found my perfect pocket-sized geologic specimen, complete with crystalline bark and growth rings, now set in stone forever.