botanizing

The Bighorn of Escalante Canyon

In Escalante Canyon of western Colorado, signs for ‘no trespassing,’ ‘no hunting,’ and ‘private property’ are prominent.  I appreciate the clear signage—it’s far too easy in some parts of the West to get onto private property by mistake, and I wouldn’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy. The canyon bottom over the course of many miles is occupied by Escalante Ranch.  I drive through the canyon to the region managed by Bureau of Land Management.  Here the land rises fairly quickly into a thickly forested pinyon pine and juniper community.  I walk up-slope through the conifer woodland.  There is a low penstemon that has blue, trumpet-like flowers as well as Fendler’s sandwort, which has wiry stems topped by a small cluster of pale yellow flowers.  There are biting gnats that swarm me.  The bites sting, and I slap at the small, black insects.  When I spend more time swatting and stinging than looking at plants, I head back to the truck.

The canyon has a high rounded lip, below which the red Entrada sandstone is shaped in sharp facets where huge fragments have fallen away.  The boulder field of these fragments lies on the gentle slope above the road, where the pinyon pines and junipers grow among the large rocks.  Between the boulder field and the sandstone escarpment are gray toes that spread into the center of the canyon from half-way up the cliff.  I stop on my drive down canyon to explore the toe-like slopes that poke from the red cliffs on the north side of the canyon.  The gray slopes have little vegetation on them, and I assume that their soil has low fertility.  It’s a harsh place for plants, but those that manage to grow on the largely sterile, unvegetated slopes are sometimes very interesting, sometimes diverging from other populations that grow in more fertile, less marginal environments. 

I continue the drive down canyon, going back through the fenced and irrigated pasture lands of the Escalante Ranch.  In one of these dark green pastures, where leaves of the plush grass sway in the breeze, a bighorn sheep grazes.  The image is strange, even out-of-place.  I expect bighorns on bouldery slopes and stone ledges, not in irrigated meadows. I had not expected to find this day something so emblematic of wild accepting easy life in a ranch pasture.

Green River Camp

We camp in sand above the extra fat Green River.  Tamarisk at the river’s margin have water flowing among their stems.  Between us and the river stand not only a band of tamarisk but also a thick shield of skunkbush, a Rhus, which is densely branched and covered in dark green leaves. On the other side of our campsite stand chest-high cottonwood saplings, and, among them, there is a wispy legume that has long runners that sweep in gentle arcs over the sand, but I fail to identify it.

Flycatchers fly over the river and into a tall cottonwood.  I watch them for several minutes until I’m distracted by a Bullock’s Oriole, which is much showier.

The river is the color of chocolate.  It is as smooth and thick as a milkshake.  As the evening goes along, the river loses its brownness to shadow, but bands of yellowy sheen remain.  This light seems to trip over the low parts of the canyon wall and to slide over the surface of the river.

After dinner, we sit facing the river and the wall of the canyon on the river’s far side.  The canyon wall is also shadowed, except for high facets of promontories, which ripen to a sharp orange as sunset approaches.  I watch jets pass overhead and anticipate the dissipation of their contrails among the clouds.

When we settle in the night, I listen to the flow of the river, a massive continuous whir, and also to the gentler, repeating clatter and squish of waves among the stones that line the shore.

*

In the earliest light of morning, we hear geese honk as they fly upriver.  A hummingbird, attracted by Adrian’s orange sleeping bag, buzzes at the back of the truck.

I sit in the shade of the truck to toast bagels in a frying pan while the tea water heats. A Great Blue Heron flies upriver.

Tracks

The old jeep trail appears to be pressed into the white sandstone.  Its hummocks of stone are separated by stretches of sand.  It would have been a rough ride in the jeep, although no jeep has probably traversed the trail in 40 years. The jeep trail into Horseshoe Canyon is now part of Canyonlands National Park, which limits its use to foot travel.  The lower part of the jeep trail has washed-out, and it is blocked by a locked gate.

One steps lightly and quickly over the bulging white stone of the trail.  Going down the trail, my feet angle up and down with steps on the rounded outcrops of stone.  Between the stones, the sand snares each step.  Beyond the locked gate, the trail is entirely sand.  It is a narrow path lined by whisk-like clumps of peppergrass and broom snakeweed.

The canyon bottom is a broad wash in which a single channel snakes around point bars.  The round-shouldered bars that rise a few feet above the wash bottom are held by rice grass, willow, and cottonwood.  They are brightened by luminescent yellow cryptanthas, purple sage, and firecracker penstemons.

Between the clumps of rice grass, we see the tracks of lizards and other animals that scuttled close to the grain.  Lizard tracks are like the wash bed. They are channeled by dragged tail and are marked along the sides by the bars of feet.  Like the water channel, the lizard tracks are seldom straight long.  Wash and lizard seem each to have a natural distance of straight travel, before turning a few degrees of arc against some natural obstruction or the influence of an unseen force, then they move straight again before finding a new curve.

Some animal, possibly a lizard, has made a track that especially catches our attention.  It looks like the impression of a tank’s single-track but is only two centimeters or so wide.  Its margins have series of rounded depressions and between them run depressed bars; there may be the light touch of a tail amid the track.

There are old tracks.  On the jeep trail and a stone outcrop on a bar in the canyon bottom we find the impressions of dinosaur feet.  People have ringed each of these with small stones to catch our attention and keep us from stepping on them.

Our steps sink in the sand.  Walking tasks one’s sense of effort, which I feel in the muscles of my legs and even in a tug at my shoulders.  Our steps reach for harder surfaces—for the stability of vegetation, for cobbled stretches, and for hard pan in the wash bottom—but we walk mostly in sand.

People have been walking through this canyon for thousands of years.  Rock art has been painted and pecked into the canyon walls.  Archaic people left images of broad shouldered anthropomorphic figures.  Some figures are wide-eyed.  Some figures appear adorned in elaborate tunics.  Other figures are more like shadows.

Shadows gather my attention.  Rice grass fruits dapple the sand with shadows that look like raindrops.  The shadows of cottonwoods draw me.  As we walk down canyon on our return, I set my path to cross cottonwood shadows and the shade of canyon wall.  My course would surely appear erratic if it persisted for thousands of years.  My steps go straight then angle to another line in a way that would surely draw the wonder of viewers to question why such a trajectory would be taken.

The rice grass leaves weep.  They stand from the straw-like stalks to curve out and over, extending tips to the sand, where the leaves trace arcs in the bars.  I like to think about the rice grass etchings lasting thousands of years in the sand edges of point bars; but they do not last.  The fine curves swept in the sand by rice grass leaves are ephemeral--soon wiped away by wind.  The repetition is soothing.  A delicate mark is made.  Wind wipes it away.  Our steps are the same. Our steps repeat, one after another, tracing an eccentric path from shade to shade.  The wind, unconcerned about shade or path, presence or absence, will soon wipe away our tracks.

[Photograph by Adrian Aumen]

Lake Fork, Idaho