botanizing

A cottonwood idyll

Kane Creek meanders below high cliffs.  We walk out along a road that has been blasted from the cliff.  The view encourages us to look down on the course of the creek.  My gaze is drawn to the cottonwoods, whose upper branches shine feathery and white in the morning sun.  Although this morning is cool—even holding a sharp chill in the dense shade of the cliffs—I imagine the cottonwoods in a warmer season, when they offer a welcome shade beneath their clattering leaves.  There are no leaves on the trees in this season.  The cottonwoods’ leaves lie along the margin of the creek and in the erosional rills of the terraces that stand between the creek and cliffs.  The fallen leaves have mostly blackened, although occasionally I find one that has reddened as if infiltrated by sand.  I find one reddened leaf in a cage of prickly pear spines.   The cage is frosty, and the first light that comes over the eastern cliff gives the spines’ ice a blue glare.  Aside from the bluish ice, the pale, succulent green of the prickly pear skin, the blackened fallen leaves, and the white bark of the cottonwoods, this is a red world. The iron red cliffs erode to red sand, which is compacted in the terraces and relatively loose in the bed and banks of the creek.  Kane Creek appears to run red.  Even the brushy margin of tamarisk that lines the creek has a rubescent cast.

We cross the creek and climb a detrital fan of fallen stones below the cliff.  We look for petroglyphs, finding some on boulders and others that can be seen higher on the cliff face.  There have been hunters here in the past.  I suspect they may also have farmed.  On terraces below the cliffs, I imagine corn, bean and squash fields amid the boulders.  On hot days after a hunt or the cultivation of crops, I think about those people gathering under the cottonwoods along the creek for the cool water and the calming breeze.

Negro Bill Canyon

Water

We cross the creek repeatedly.  The channel meanders in the narrow bottom of the canyon.  Where the creek meets the sandstone wall of the canyon it has carved rounded alcoves.  Some of point bars have been stabilized—at least temporarily—by willows, alders, and oaks.  We walk through these thickets.  We walk up to the edge of the sandstone cliff of the canyon and cross over boulders and step down again among the sedges that line the creek.  We cross the creek.  The repeated crossings are not difficult.  The creek in this season is little more than a stride wide—in some spots it is two strides or even three.  Stones have been placed in the creek bottom to make crossings easy.  The stones are flat-topped and coated well with red sand from steps by many boots.  Neither the water’s width nor the stones matter much for the creek is only two or three inches deep.  I slip once from a stepping stone and plunge the toe of my boot into the water.   It doesn’t matter.

Stone

The color of the stone in this canyon is like the color of a person’s skin—it changes with perspective and light.  It changes with sky and time of day.  The stone’s skin can be beige or pink. Early in the morning or late in the day, the stone may be orange.

I find great delight in this sandstone.  Faces of the stone can weather smoothly and varnish black.  Fractures of the stone can be as sharp as wrinkles in an old face.   Facets of fractures would be cubist paintings—they could be vases or guitars or a nude’s face.  The facets hold different hues—orange, saffron, yellow—and their shades.  The colors seem painted by Picasso’s brush—you can see almost the brush work—the quick parallel strokes of shaded color on one side to lend the hint of form and the less clear strokes on the side of purer color where the facet seems to flatten.

The stone is cold.  We sit on a broad boulder in the amphitheater at Morning Glory bridge, but the chill is too great.  We retreat to a smaller enclosure—a space between a juniper and canyon wall—where we eat slices of summer sausage on savory crackers and gouda cheese on slices of honey crisp apple.  I am soon chilled and stiff from sitting on stone.  I shuffle awkwardly from the cold as we begin to walk down the canyon.

Canyon

This canyon opens to a larger canyon, which belongs to the Colorado River.   Steep, high walls follow the sinuous course of the Colorado.  Negro Bill Canyon is an opening in the Colorado River’s sandstone façade.  I would like to say that Negro Bill Canyon opens to the Colorado River.  Actually, it opens to a bend in busy Utah state highway 128 and a recently “improved” parking lot.  Beyond the highway, a thicket of tamarisk stands between the canyon mouth and the river.

The canyon has a small, narrow bottom. This bottom has lush sedge sweeps broken by boulders or sand bars.  The canyon wall curves to the bottom like a bulging belly.  There are high flat walls of black varnish or streaks of varnish that look like dumped buckets of coral red, salmon pink, maroon and shades between and beyond.  Above all of this is a sinuous rim, where the stone seem twisted around to be topped in turbans.

Sky

The slit of sky in the canyon is elusive.  It is too slim to be portentous.  Yet we watch the sky for signs of rain and time. We watch the sky change through the day.  The morning blue sky is cloudless and hopeful.  Our destination offers a dim gray sky that leaves no shadows, which is not a sign for dalliance.  Later, after we have walked a mile on terrace above the creek and below the alcove-cut walls, we find that blue sky has returned with cirrus fibratus clouds—a sign of rain but not too soon.   The canyon sky, no matter the color or clouds, is crossed by ubiquitous contrails; these serve as umbilici to civilization.

The sky mirrors the creek.  Each is a narrow band.  Each framed by stone.  Each curves along the canyon’s course.  For just a moment, where stone stills the stream and the canyon frames the pool, the water becomes sky.

Thicket

In a box branch of a canyon, we make our way through an oak thicket.  We must crouch to make our way along the faint trail of the thicket.  We hold back branches of the oaks from our faces to pass.

I hear steps across the creek.  Hooves thump.  Two deer.   They are slowed by the intermeshed branches of the oaks.  This would be the perfect spot for a mountain lion to ambush deer. 

When I was first in this canyon in 1978, we found a dead mountain lion.  It was early spring then, and we were exploring for plants on the sides of the canyon.   There was fresh growth of grasses, and their bright green leaves were long and their tips recurved.  Among the grasses we found the matted carcass—yet still with tawny brown fur—of the mountain lion.  It had probably died during the winter and might have lain for a month or more under snow.

Today, we have followed the fresh tracks of another mountain lion into this box branch of the canyon.  As we move slowly through the oak thicket —catching on branches, tripping on tangles of dried grass—I wonder whether the mountain lion watches my stumbles.

Thundering cliff

We’ve rented a house in Moab, Utah, for a few days.  On our first day, we drive up the Colorado River to Professor Valley to hike.  Although there was sun in the morning, clouds have come, and they hang close to the mesa-tops by the time we arrive at the trailhead.   A few raindrops fall as we shoulder our packs.  We walk over the sand and cobble hills and along a creek bed in a light mist.  Blackened cottonwood leaves that are spotted with mold lie like shingles on the creek margin.  Skeletons of last season’s penstemons and blazing stars, weathered to beige and dried to stiffness, stand along the creek.  The Indian rice grass—its leaves curved like scythes—has delicate fruit stalks that hold nothing—its ellipsoidal fruits have long fallen.

I have difficulty finding the trail, and we wander over hills and through ravine bottoms looking to intersect it.  Eventually, I see the ridgetop where I expect the trail. and we work toward it.  It is work to walk up the hills, then down, around junipers that block the ravine bottoms, over the bouldery edges of the ravine, and up the final ridge.  We find the trail.  We follow coyote tracks.  There are large prints and small—perhaps a mother and pup.

We climb among the iron-red hills.  A canyon has deepened below us, and hoodoos stand close on ridges above us.  Clouds have thickened and descended over the mesa-tops to obscure their high faces.  We are perhaps a mile from our destination and have entered the bottom of the cloud, where the mist is more persistent and more chilling. 

I hear a crack of thunder—sharp, then rumbling.  I look toward it—expecting lightning—half expecting the dark face and puffed cheeks of a storm god to look at us from the pass we are trying to reach.  Instead, I see a red cloud.  It expands from a high cliff face across the canyon from us.  The thunder was rock fall.  A slab has broken from the cliff and tumbled into rocks below, raising the loud crack, the cloud of red dust, and the rumble of falling stones. We watch the stones fall down a steep, narrow shoot in the fan of stone below the cliff face. How long does it last?  Long enough for my heart rate to raise and beat hard and fast.  A few seconds.  The dust cloud expands and dissipates in the mist.  We can see the oblong scar where the rock broke loose.  We see also the darker red trail of disturbed stone where the stones tumbled.

We continue to walk upward, but I am now very conscious of the cliffs directly above us.  I look from one detrital shoot to another where rocks have fallen repeatedly over the centuries.  How often do rocks fall?  How often do cliff faces fragment and send room size boulders tumbling down.  I look among the huge boulders that stand along the trail—each has fallen at some time and tumbled from the cliffs above us.  I wonder whether—if I heard another thunderous crack above me and saw stones coming down toward us—we could run for protection behind one of these large boulders.

Cloud driving

We have been driving through days filled by clouds.  Soon after we left home, we reached the margin of the plateau above the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers.  The valley of the rivers was filled with clouds, and the midday sun above them suffused the gauzy cloud body with yellow.  A hard yellow shine reflected from the upper arcs of some cloud billows.  The mill in the valley pumped smoke into the cloud.  The smoke seemed almost the source of the cloud mass, which was most dense and dark around the mill.  The smoke billows had brown shadows, and their sunlight was sulfurous.

We drove through mountains where the clouds lay like seas that spread across the sky to cover all or the peaks and ridgetops.  Among other mountains. the clouds meandered like rivers along the bases of ridges. 

Clouds hung on meadows and stood on willow tips above wetlands.  Old barns sagged it seemed under the mass of cloud.

We drove in and out of fog, slowing as needed or speeding up as allowed by cloud. 

It was nearly the end of our second day of driving before we saw the unobscured tops of mountains.  These were the round-topped peaks of the Black Pine Mountains, which stood on an ochre- and winter green-colored plain amid other nearby clouded ranges.  Their peaks and sinous side ridges caught an orangish-yellow light of the late day that edged through a pass of blue sky between broad, charcoalish clouds. 

Low clouds slept at the foot of the Black Pine Mountains, where the landscape rose between ranges.  We drove toward that rise of land, and soon we were in cloud.  Mist gathered on the windshield and our wipers, set to sweep periodically, made a squeaky scrape as they wiped away the drops of clouds.