After the volume of hunters kept me from hiking yesterday, I went to Fisher Towers today, where I could expect more climbers than hunters. Fisher towers are Gothic spires blown and washed from the fins of a mesa. At near-sighted distance they look like mud—some of the elegant cathedral towers of Europe probably look equally suspect from that distance. As we expect to find near the spires of Old World cathedrals, a priest and nuns are close at hand—here they stand, blown from sandstone, appropriately rigid on a ridge beyond Professor Creek.
I could see the sheen of cars in the parking lot from miles away as I drove down the canyon of the Colorado River. The lot was full, and the first mile of trail was busy. Extended families and groups of young friends. Couples with dogs. Voices fell from the rock spires as if the hoodoo gargoyles narrated exasperated tales. “Right around that knob.” It was only the climbers. A woman resounded: “This is the wrong trail, Earl. Look at that.” She pointed at me. “There’s the trail.” Earl crouched on a slickrock ledge. He had a camera with a long lens at his eye. “Have everybody stop out there so I can get their picture,” Earl called. “No,” the woman shouted back, “they’r’ on their way down.” The people in the group were spread over the rounded layers of slickrock on the way to the wash that connected with the trail. “Yo, baby!” a man with a bandana on his head yelled to Earl and raised his clinched fists overhead in victory when he had reached the wash. Earl was poised for the photograph. “KRAK, kwaak-kwaak-kwaak”—a raven circled on still wings that folded suddenly, fan-like, then just as quickly sprung back to full extension. The raven landed on a high hoodoo where it could oversee the action. “Off belay.”
At the end of the trail, I listened to the falling leaves of Fraxinus anomala—the single-leaf ash. “Flip . . . flap”—as they tumbled and slapped other leaves, then—as they struck the sandstone gravel—a light “phlick.”
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