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This feature in
USA: Trekking through the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness

In Search of the Wave

Text: © Paul Smit
Photos: © Paul Smit & Mick Palarczyk

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Deep in the heart of the Colorado plateau the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area begins. An unknown, inaccessible and breathtakingly beautiful area, farther from human civilisation than any other region in the United States. This is where you find the Wave: the best-kept trekking secret of the USA.

Mick and I have to make our way through the Cockscomb Fault, an 80-kilometre-long ridge that cuts through the earth's crust like an open wound. It saves us a 150-kilometre roundtrip. While the Kodachrome Basin still had tarmac, we've now been driving along a dirt road for the last twenty kilometres. The holes are getting deeper, the washboard steeper. A dust cloud approaches on the horizon. Ten minutes later a green SUV stops beside us. Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument is written on its side, which is the name of the vast expanse we are driving through.

What's up?" We explain to the park ranger that we are on our way to Paria Canyon in the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area; 65 more bumpy kilometres to go. "Will the road ahead be okay for our car?" He walks around the Sedan, tugging at his beard as he considers the matter. Then he lovingly places his hand on the bonnet. "If it's your own car, don't do it. If it's a rental, beat it up!"

Paria Canyon

The following morning when I zip open the tent, I am greeted by a view of a curious pink and white landscape close to the entrance of Paria Canyon (pronounced à la 'Mariah' Carey). We are the only ones staying at the Whitehouse Campground. Silence pours over the land like a tonic. Here in the heart of the Colorado Plateau, also home to the Grand Canyon, Bryce and the Arches, the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area begins. The Paria Canyon is one of the access points into this unknown, badly accessible and breathtakingly beautiful area. We shrug on our backpacks, with their added burden of two litres of water per person per day! We filled up on water at the Ranger Station five kilometres back, where we also picked up our permits, that we had arranged over the Internet from home. We need them for the last part of our trip, which runs through the highly protected area Coyote Buttes. Only twenty people per day are allowed in.

The footpath ends five hundred metres from the campground and will not reappear again for the next five days. According to our Hiker's Guide, we should now walk along the dry riverbed, but there is a river running through it. No matter. We were expecting water, but a few kilometres farther up. The hiking shoes go off, the old tennis shoes back on, and except for at night by the tent, that's how it stays for the next four days. The valley soon narrows and on all sides there are shapes and colours you would sooner expect in dainty fairyland than in rough backcountry. The first kilometre is predominantly pink and white, then pale rose takes over, with red and yellow horizontal bands chiming in. It looks like a group of crazy sculptors have been at work here, slightly disturbed characters with a strange sense of humour. Overhanging cliffs lean on crooked pillars. Some walls are decorated with complicated patterns of indentations, holes and caves, again sometimes interspersed with pillars. Here and there giant teepees stand next to the river, named for their similarity to wigwams. But they actually look more like a woman's breast, nipple and all. The pink and yellow layers look so like cake that you could bite right into them. If you were to put one of these out in front of an art museum, it would soon become more famous than the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre. Dozens of these are scattered around the landscape.

Seven teepees form the backdrop to our first wild camping spot, the Seven Sisters. Our second spot, an in-between plateau above the Paria, is even more magical. The table on which we eat our dry dinner comes straight off a Seventies album cover of the symphonic rock group Yes. All around us rocks are balancing on needle thin pillars, other rocks have an immaculate circular shape, ranging in diameter from marble-size to half a meter, and petrified dunes please the eye with their layered elegance. Literally everything is made of the same material: not coloured sugar but sandstone.

 

That evening our imagination, already overstimulated, plays tricks on us. We are checking out the entrance of the narrows, into which the Paria Canyon disappears, when we see two sandstone figurines come wobbling out of the gorge. They walk straight towards us and speak perfect American: "Don't do it! Just don't do it!"

Underneath all the crusty sand we can discern two backpackers, a man and woman. "It's hell there. We've been trekking through the Wild West all our lives, we're used to this, but for a second here we thought our trail had come to an end…" "We were stuck in quicksand all afternoon, up to our chests. Thank God I could slowly work my way towards Susie and push her up onto a sandbar, working myself deeper into the bog as I did so. Once Susie had solid ground under her feet she was able to lever me out with a stick. Do yourself a favour and wait at least a day before you go in. The water is sinking now, the stream lessening; the sand will quiet down."

The rain that had been falling before we got here caused too much water to stream through the narrows and carried along lots of sludge and sand. Under and behind all the swirling and thundering water - wall to wall in the narrows - the sand is not able to settle into sturdy ground because of all the vibration. It is no hardship to stay in the magical scenery for one more day. Especially now that we know tomorrow we enter Hell.

It turns out to be merely the gates of Hell. The water level has fallen and is no longer a swirling mass. We can recognise Susie's foothold, now a pronounced sandbar, and can feel the riverbed with our sticks. We sink only knee-deep into the sludge. Another half metre of water makes us wet up to the bottom of our backpacks. And so we reach the Buckskin Gulch, a side-branch of the Paria Canyon.

Buckskin Gulch

"Hell of a place!" whispers my hiking buddy Mick, looking around uncertainly. Not a hell filled with fire but with darkness. The underworld, full of curious colourful reflections and deadly silence. The longest slot canyon in the world - so narrow that our packs have to be squeezed through here and there - blows its cold unclean breath in our faces.

After three kilometres of this a six-metre-high landslide, the Boulder Jam, blocks our way. We came prepared for this climbing job, but a rope left behind by previous hikers makes it even easier for us. It won't be there for long, as the rangers resolutely remove all climbing gear. If they didn't, the state of any equipment would be unknowable. A couple of flash floods is all it takes to make any rope unreliable.

We keep going. The only sound is the splashing and squishing in the countless and unpredictably deep pools. Suddenly we hear a soft whistling. It's mentioned in all the books, and the ranger told us about it too: the greatest fear of any hiker in the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area is presaged by a whistling sound, high and deep at the same time. In our thoughts we already can picture the ten-metre-high wall of water, sludge and stones coming straight at us. If it doesn't drown you, it will smash you against the canyon wall. Or you'll get smashed in the head by one of the football-sized rocks that are swept along by the current. We look at each other in terror: flash flood!!! Nowhere to hide, the desert floor is 120 metres above our heads. No one has ever survived a flash flood in Buckskin Gulch.

Then we see a crow appearing around the corner, acrobatically wending his way between the curving rock walls, the rustle of his wings resounding everywhere. He swoops into a hollow above our heads and fixes us with an intent stare. He will fly with us the rest of the day. The light becomes ever more mysterious and the flash-flood sculpted and polished walls become ever more distorted. In the blue-grey dusk we see the scaly back plates of a Stegosaurus loom. Many turns later, a gracefully bowed sail appears, woven of the most delicate satin. We let the ship from the underworld pass.

"Do you smell that?" "What, the dragon with halitosis breathing down on us?" The crow flies ahead to investigate. He reappears at the edge of the Cesspool where he is pulling out something indefinable. A large pool full of stagnant water, rotting plant material and the carcasses of unfortunate animals that have tumbled down the ravine. We don't see them, we feel them, as we have to wade through the stinking mass, deeper still than in the Narrows. Holding our backpacks above our heads, we try not to gag or trip as we make our way through the slime. Luckily there is a pool of clear water ahead, and we can at least rinse ourselves.

We don't take much of a break, the Gulch still continues and there are no camping spots ahead. When the Gulch finally widens dusk has set in and we pitch our tent. We much prefer this darkness to that of the bowels of the underworld. We savour the pure, spicy desert air. In the fireworks of the stars we can make out Andromeda, our neighbouring star system, with the naked eye. In this vast deserted area, there are no city lights anywhere to interfere with the night skies.

The Wave

Today is the day of our permit for Coyote Buttes. This is where the Wave is, the best-kept trekking secret in the States. It seems like the VCWA organisation does not want to give up its secret either. This natural wonder is not described in any of the guides and we have not received any directions. The ranger did show us some pictures of landmarks to memorise when we picked up our permits, to help us find our way. The Wave was missing on the photocopied map he gave us, as well as on the topographical map. "Don't pin all your hopes on the Wave," he said, "Have a good look around the area, you won't believe anything you see all along the Coyote Buttes."

At the crack of dawn we climb the Sand Hills. The sun rises as we reach the top, and indeed we do not believe our eyes. In front of us, a landscape of chocolate-coloured breasts unfolds. To the right, in the direction the ranger pointed us, an area of mathematically precise conical hills waits for us, bright red with white bands. Maybe our hormones are leading us to the sensuous chocolate landscape, off the straight and narrow, as they do. And of course, under the spell of all this beauty we lose all sense of direction.

We walk all morning. No Wave. But the ranger is right: it doesn't matter. We cross a plain two kilometres long, paved with pentagonal orange stones, each a full meter across. We feel like archaeologists in a long-lost world of giants.

Mick hopes to find the Wave in the red mountains to our right while I think an emptiness in the landscape up ahead could indicate the large wash the ranger spoke to us about. We each go our own way and agree that whoever finds the Wave will repeatedly shout three times at intervals.

While expecting Mick's yells any moment, I cross the valley. The hills on the other side look rather tame after the recent miracles. Suddenly overcome with tiredness from all the walking and the burning sun, I enter a narrow ravine, in search of some shade for a lunch break. Behind the ravine's entrance a giant wave of sticky red fluid with white stripes runs. Like sour cream stirred into pumpkin soup.

It overwhelms me so that I forget all about my sandwiches, and about the agreement to yell three times. I walk on over a side wave, a whole network of waves, some narrow and some half submerged. Climbing upwards, I find myself on crocodile skin that's been magnified 100x. Abruptly I stumble across a herd of ochre-yellow giant turtles, or are they the roofs of the mud huts of an as of yet undiscovered people?

I stop my excited chasing around and sit down. I think of Mick and want to yell out, but I feel too choked up. All alone in a desert as large as France I sit there, probably lost, because where is the road back? Not a brain cell gives it a thought. They are too busy. In full choral harmony, a little St. Matthew Passion of a million voices, they are singing out their happiness.

Finally three heartrending yells break the silence. Repeated every five minutes. First four trekkers appear. The hollering dragon they were expecting is instantly forgotten when they see the Wave. Then Mick arrives. He takes a seat near me, looking out over the giant turtles, the wave and the conical red mountains in the distance, and is silent.

 

Translated from the Dutch by Elise Reynolds

 

Got the taste of it? Now have a look at all the other photos.

 


All rights reserved. No permission for reproduction, including copying or saving of digital image files or text, is granted without prior written authorisation from the author.

This feature has been published in OP PAD and VIVRE L'AVENTURE, leading outdoor magazines of the Netherlands and France. Later followed the Belgian travel magazine TOURING EXPLORER and the Italian glossy VOYAGE.

 

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