Reflections of a Backpacker

I became a backpacker when I was a young boy, vicariously absorbing the outdoor experiences and love of nature from my father. But I didn't realize I was a backpacker until I was almost 40 years old.

"I had taken today hiking in the alpine meadows along Utah's Wasatch Front, but humping 50 pounds on your back for three days with no bed, no shower, and scorpions? Didn't sound like fun..."

Oh, in retrospect those Anasazi archaeological digs and Environmental Impact Statement surveys in Utah's remote backcountry during my college days were the backpackers trying to get out, but he didn't succeed. Instead, he was repressed, the victim of a driven, intense, frenetic, chaotic, computer nerd-perhaps the antithesis of the backpacker.

For nearly twenty years my backpacking instincts lay dormant--unheeded, unsated, unknown.

Coyote GulchThen, who knows why, a friend told me of his plans to visit Utah's Coyote Gulch, a three-day backpacking venture into the wild, remote, and incomparably scenic red rock regions of Southern Utah. For exercise, not out of passion, I had taken today hiking in the alpine meadows along Utah's Wasatch Front, but humping 50 pounds on your back for three days with no bed, no shower, and scorpions? Didn't sound like fun, but a faint old spark was there. I went.

That first trip was an awakening-but, not a complete one. A second trip quickly followed, this time into the Kolob Canyons area of Zion National Park. Twenty miles in three glorious days. On the third day, it happened. As my friend and I reached the trail's end at Lee Pass, we reveled in our successful trip while soaking down cold Evian, grapes, and yogurt from the picnic cooler, like sun-baked, cracked earth soaks up the drops of an afternoon thunderstorm.

Taking in the scene at Lee Pass, which serves as a paved parking area in addition to the trailhead, I observed the disapproving glances of the car tourists-the Bermuda-shorts crowd, clean-shaven types with pressed clothes and starched hair. In contrast, our physical appearance more closely resembled the sun-baked, cracked earth.

"With frightening intensity, a life centered on nature encircled me..."

At that moment a memory broke through. A memory of an event that took place some twenty years early on that very spot. An otherwise insignificant, unremarkable event. A memory of a young, recently married computer engineer and his wife standing on that very spot, sightseeing after parking their car. A gnarled, bearded backpacker ascends from the bowels of the trail, reaching his destination at Lee Pass. Out of curiosity-fascination? disbelief? scorn? jealousy?-the engineer approaches the dirt-encrusted vagabond to ask a simple and obvious question:

"Where did you come from?"

The answer is reasonable, yet unfathomable. "I spent five days on trails coming up from the Grotto area down in the main part of Zion."

The engineer makes some thoroughly insincere, yet polite, comment and returns to his wife. After waiting for the hiker to get some distance, he asks, "Why would anybody want to do that? Hours of walking, sweating, carrying all that weight on your back. You know, I can't imagine ever doing something like that!"

Quickly the entire event was forgotten. Life centered around work, the work of a computer software engineer, pretty much like the stereotypes we all know-building pyramids from Mountain Dew cans to the light of tubular florescent stars while the earth slept, never noticing the lure of the sparkling night stars waking just outside the window. Or feeding the insatiable appetite of the cavernous recycle bin with cheese-laden cardboard pizza boxes.

The memory of the conversation with the grizzled backpacker disappeared into the shadows of life, into the canyons of the mind, until that day at Lee's Pass twenty years later. Like Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, I had traded places. The tourists were me, and I was the backpacker.

The bubble of a work-centered life burst that day. With frightening intensity, a life centered on nature encircled me. Over the next three years, I fell in love again with the wilderness, especially Southern Utah's slot canyons, and in particular the awe-inspiring, striated sandstone of the Escalante River drainage.

"Such is my story of the creation, or recreation, of a backpacker: the transition of the extreme to the serene..."

The Escalante River's effects on your mind and soul mimic its effects on the land. The river's violent nature quickly takes hold of you. A flash flood of serenity gushes into your mind, carving deep crevasses in the stone-hard patterns of your life, uprooting old habits and needs with tremendous force, grinding them to bits. In the torrent of liquid mud, your sight becomes clouded as the old life fights for survival, surfacing against the current, gasping for life and breath, only to submerge again and again and again, until it surfaces no more.

Kolob Canyon The aftermath of the flood is unexpected-at least at first. In the depths of the painful gashes lie shaded pools of tranquility, Shangri Las of the soul. The slot canyon crevasses themselves expose hidden treasures, feelings long forgotten and previously inaccessible. Forgotten driftwood memories float in the tranquil pools, or perch ramrodded between canyon walls, where they are easily seen, recalled, and examined, like my memory of Lee Pass.

The sight is suddenly clear, but what the eyes behold is fresh, a different reality than seen before the flood and the mud. The mud flushes your wilderness eyes, and you see the canyon with a completely new sight and a new perspective.

Such is my story of the creation, or recreation, of a backpacker: the transition of the extreme to the serene, of the oblivious to the conscious, of the artificial to the natural. I owe much of them thanks to my dad, to my friend, and to my wife, respectively, for teaching me, showing me, and allowing me to experience the clarity of the mud, the psychological renewal of the mental flash floods, the geological wonder of the canyons and rivers, and the emotional tranquility of the pools. If you haven't already seen them, seek out your own reflections in the pools.