Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself Read Free Page A

needed them, but I was of the mind that if the next obstacle I reached presented too much of a challenge, I’d call it a day and turn around. At some point, the lure of what’s around the next corner is cancelled out by the trouble it’s going to take to get back, but whenever I stop for the day, it’s generally not with a sense of disappointment, but more with one of accomplishment. It’s that point when you think, “I’ve come this far alone safely; don’t push it.”
    I walked about fifty yards down to where the canyon narrowed, the walls only a few yards apart, rising perhaps three hundred feet above me, though they curved and leaned and I couldn’t see the top. The sun was no longer directly overhead. It was noticeably cooler as I passed through shadows dark enough that I occasionally had to turn on my headlamp to see the smaller details. The streambed underfoot was sandy for the most part but, in the low depressions that held standing water before eventual evaporation, the sand had caked into tiles of mud that curled at the edges and crunched with each step I took. The sound brought me back to winters and springs, growing up in Wisconsin. I found it pleasing, similar to stomping on the ice crusted at the edge of the snow banks lining the streets in my hometown.
    Ahead, I saw daylight where the canyon opened up again. I looked up. The walls loomed above me, as if threatening to collapse. I estimated that from where I started my day, I’d come about two miles, horizontal.
    I regarded the sweep of the striated sandstone walls, red and brown, tan and yellow. It was beautiful, and I was glad I came. For a moment, I pretended I was the first man who ever set foot here. I chose this canyon from an old out-of-print guidebook because the description made it sound like a place too difficult to visit, meaning it would be untrammeled by day-tourists in flip-flops. I’d read where they’ve found large amounts of human garbage washed up on the beaches of deserted islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. For me, finding a candy wrapper or a soda can in a canyon I’m exploring was always more than disappointing—it felt like falling off the wagon, in a way, a setback in my ongoing struggle to be more optimistic about people.
    A brief and admittedly amateur accounting of the geology of Utah can explain how the slot canyons of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona formed. At various times over the eons, the mountains in the northern part of the state, including the Wasatch, Raft River, and Uinta ranges, were the only part above sea level, and the rest was submerged. The warm seas encroached and receded over a relatively flat topography to the west of the Wasatch line and left thick deposits of sediments, including shale, sandstone, and limestone up to three miles thick. Much of that rock contains marine fossils. Eventually, around the time of the dinosaurs, the seas dried up, turning southern Utah into a vast sandy desert, and that sand became the red rock formations found today in the national parks. Land masses compressed and crashed into each other, creating faults and uplifts and folds and eventually the Rocky Mountains, with swamps and large, lazy rivers draining the coastal plains. Uplifts formed basins, which became lakes and lake beds. Then, about forty million years ago, widespread volcanic activity erupted, leaving thick blankets of volcanic rocks and lava and ash. About twenty million years ago, the part of North America west of the Rockies lifted up out of the sea to present-day elevations, land flowing east and west from the Continental Divide, and the water that had before flowed slowly in lazy rivers now flowed rapidly down steeper slopes, carving into the landforms and refilling the basins. In the high mountains, glaciers formed to sculpt the topography, and then the climate warmed up, the ice receded, and most of the lakes evaporated. Great Salt Lake is one of the last to do so.
    The slot canyons of southern