Slickrock Paradox Read Free Page A

tired and thirsty and numb.
    Hunger soon won out over fatigue, and he stepped from the car, carrying as much of his gear as he could to the front door. The house was hot and airless. He went first to the kitchen and opened the fridge to let its cool air spill out. He took the last cold can of beer from the fridge and opened it. Without stopping for a breath, he downed half of it, then put the new case in the nearly empty icebox. He tucked the dozen frozen dinners, save one, into the freezer, and popped the remaining meal into the microwave. The four water bottles from his dusty day pack he rinsed and refilled, then placed in the freezer next to the dinners.
    Silas closed the fridge door, went into the living room and turned on the central air conditioner. He carried the rest of the gear to the second bedroom, which he had turned into a gear room, and plugged in his GPS . Next he went to his bedroom. A small chest of drawers sat against one wall next to the open closet. Beside the bed stood a nightstand with a lamp, a clock radio, and a single framed picture, and on the walls hung half a dozen large-scale road maps of the region.
    At the back of the house, next to the bathroom, was the utility room, with a back door that led to a picnic table and hammock beneath a thatched pergola. With the lights off, he stripped naked next to the washing machine and put his sweat-stained, dusty clothing directly into the wash. He padded to the bathroom and took a cold shower.
    By the time Silas was finished, dressed, and had dinner ready, the house had begun to cool. He sat in the darkness at a small, square table at the center of the room and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the world beyond. His view was dominated by the conical form of Round Mountain, and beyond that the steep precipice of the Adobe Mesa. In the faint light cast by the stars he could just make out the mesa’s edge, its forested crown looking like the bristles on a wire brush.
    He ate half of the cardboard meal and finished the beer and sat back in his chair and regarded the darkness. There was one more task to complete and then he could fall into bed, perchance to sleep.
    He turned on the lights in the living room. The walls were filled from floor to ceiling with a series of topographic maps. The 7.5 minute quadrangles were arranged end to end: the entirety of the Canyonlands and Arches National Parks; the Manti-La Sal National Forest, stretching south to Natural Bridges National Monument; and farther south still through the Vermilion Cliffs and the Grand Canyon. Then west to Glen Canyon, Dark Canyon, and Paria Canyon; the Arizona Strip; and then, on another wall, the vast expanse of the Kaiparowits Plateau and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On a third wall were trail maps of various national monuments, state parks and national forests scattered across the American Southwest.
    Silas moved to the sheet that showed the vast tableland called the Island in the Sky, spread out over several maps pinned next to one another. He took a colored pencil from a box on the floor and found the location of his day’s exploration. Carefully he hatched in the five-mile-long and half-mile-wide section of terrain he had traversed. He indicated on the map, with a black pencil, the narrow defile he had explored with a dashed line. He stepped back and regarded his progress.
    Much of the Island in the Sky area had now been hatched to indicate he had searched the area once. Other sections, more easily accessible, had been shaded in, indicating a second exploration. Large areas of the vast region along the Green River and down through the more remote sections of the Needles district and the Maze still required examination. He looked up and to the right, where he had indicated that most of Arches National Park had been searched, as had much of the La Sal Mountains. Looking around the room he could plainly see that despite his tiresome tromping of three years, so