How my teenaged Grand Canyon adventure directed most of my adult life.
If you haven’t read it already, find out how I got to this point in Part I.
Time went by and life moved on. I went to college and then to work in commercial real estate appraisal and then construction. It was the antithesis of adventure and I never had a bit of passion for any of it. Those eight glorious days of adventure in the Grand Canyon would weigh heavy on my mind at times.
In 1994, at the age of 32, I had had enough. One Friday afternoon after finishing a rather horrendous project, I quit. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I took off the tie and never looked back. Two days later, I was driving west, toward Arizona. It had been 18 years since that trip, I was drawn back to the canyon.
After poking around for a couple of weeks, I managed to score a job driving backcountry tours through the forest to the rim of the canyon with a small, year-old tour company. From day one, I loved everything about guiding and knew I had found my calling. I worked at the canyon for five years. During that time, I met my wife, Julie, and talked her into quitting her corporate job and becoming a guide. We were living the dream in an old 30 foot Prowler travel trailer at the Grand Canyon and we couldn’t have been happier.
We were there in 1996 when President Clinton came to the south rim to sign the proclamation creating Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Because of that, we started exploring the new monument and fell in love with the central Utah canyon country.
Ironically, it was April Fool’s Day 2000, when we pulled a U-Haul into Escalante, Utah, to begin the next adventure in our lives. Escalante is one of the most isolated little towns in the Lower 48 and the stories I have from living there for almost seven years are endless. During that time, we built a business that included canyon guiding, a gear store, and a BBQ carry-out restaurant. I was also volunteering as an EMT for the county.
Garfield County, Utah, is an adventurer’s dream. It includes Bryce Canyon National Park, the north half of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, the south half of Capitol Reef National Park, a big chunk of the Dixie National Forest, the most remote quarter of Canyonlands National Park, a couple of state parks, and very few people. All that in one county.
My favorite place to go explore on my own or to guide clients were the slot canyons. Incredibly narrow, deep, twisting gouges eroded into the soft Navajo Sandstone; as if drunk aliens were taking swipes at the earth with a giant laser beam. Slots can be 50 to 80 feet deep (or more), less than a foot wide at bottom and maybe only five or six feet wide at the top. Traversing a good slot requires hiking, climbing, bouldering, crawling, and sometimes swimming. There’s always an element of danger, not unlike caving.
The slots were formed by massive flash floods that occur primarily in late summer. The sediment rich water erodes the sandstone, displaces large suspended chockstones, moves sand and changes the canyons; the canyons present entirely new challenges after every flood. They will also kill you. Lots of other dangers lurk as well. We’ve all seen James Franco cut his own hand off in 127 Hours. That kind of freaky shit really happens. That’s part of what makes it meaningful experience. That also made my EMT backcountry work pretty exciting as well.
A person could spend a lifetime exploring the canyons of southern Utah. We spent nearly seven years and barely scratched the surface.
We built a good business on half of a block of Main Street in Escalante and sold it at the end of 2006. We never intended on staying, adventurous people always get itchy feet. So, to keep life interesting, two days after leaving the isolation of southern Utah, we landed for an eight month stay in a second floor condo with a balcony on St. Charles in the Garden District of post-Katrina New Orleans and Mardi Gras was only weeks away. I was a little freaked out, there hadn’t been that many people in my viewscape in many, many years. Living in New Orleans is a whole different kind of adventure altogether.
Urban environments are most interesting at night. We wandered all over the French Quarter and the Garden District at all hours and never felt unsafe. People were always amazed at the places we went, on foot, and at what time. I think that all of our time spent in nature gave us an advantage in situational awareness that served us well in the city. After New Orleans, we spent a couple of years in Louisville, but the canyons and the mountains had cast a strong spell on us. We needed more nature…and less people. We had to get back to the Southwest; this time it’s New Mexico.
Through my wife’s job, I was introduced to Cultural Resource Management (CRM) in 2011 which is, basically, private sector archaeology. I signed on as an archaeological technician with the small company my wife was working for in southern New Mexico and although I had no academic experience in archaeology, I always had a strong interest in the subject. Archaeology and history were important components of all my guided trips. I also had the backcountry experience and physical ability to do the job which was mostly backcountry camping and cross country hiking with a crew of three to six people. The kids (I was usually the oldest crew member by far) call it “hiking for dollars”. They’ll need to hike a lot of miles to pay off all the loans for those archaeology degrees and survey work in New Mexico is physically demanding. Most of them wash-out after a year or two. Baristas at Starbucks probably make more money and get to sleep at home. “Shovelbums”, as field archaeologists refer to themselves, are the migrant workers of science.
Most of the projects I have worked on were located on Forest Service or BLM lands and were a component of a clearing project to reduce wildfire fuel loads. Most of these projects were large blocks of land totaling 1,000 to 10,000 acres. To survey we would line up 15 meters apart and all hike parallel either due north/south or east/west trying to stay on an assigned UTM lines with a GPS. Hiking in a straight line over or through whatever was in front of us with crew members roughly 50 feet on either side, looking for artifacts. Artifacts often lead to a site, which is defined as the location of purposeful human activity. Once a site is found, we record, map, photograph and usually flag the site so that it can be avoided by machinery. Then we move on. We usually hike 8-12 miles a day. We worked eight, ten hour days and then had six days off. We generally always camped.
I been involved with the CRM industry and archaeology for the past eight years. I’ve hiked thousands of miles back and forth across New Mexico’s uninhabited places and I’ve seen some incredible, completely untouched archaeological sites that few will get to experience going forward. I’ve become a hiking and camping expert having seen or tried just about every camping product out there. I have spent a total of about two of the past eight years in a tent. In 2017, I spent 103 nights in a tent. In 2018, I only spent 73 nights under nylon as I had a nice gig with a company that put us up in motels.
I’ve had a great run with archaeology, but I’m getting those wandering itchy feet again. I’m ready for a new adventure, a new challenge. What will it be? I’m not sure, but I’ve got some ideas and I’m super excited about the prospects.
In order to jumpstart the brainstorming process, I’ll dig out my dog-eared August 1977 copy of Playboy Magazine, reminding me of that day at Deer Creek Falls in the Grand Canyon, and go back to my 14 year old mind-set where adventure is real and possibilities are endless.
I’ll keep you posted.
