adam overland

It’s been a wild few days. Yesterday I left White House Campground at Paria Canyon/Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area, one of the more beautiful campgrounds I’ve ever stayed at. Before I did though, I drove through 30 miles of dirt and mud desert-crossing known as Cottonwood Canyon Road, a shortcut that will take you—if you have 4-wheel-drive—from Vermilion Cliffs and Grand Staircase in the south to Kodachrome Basin State Park and Bryce Canyon in the north. I didn’t make the full 50 miles, turning around at Grosvenor Arch, a magnificent monster at 100 feet wide and 150 feet high. 

And then I took one last hike at another slot canyon called Wire Pass, which arcs into Buckskin Gulch, the longest slot in the world with 150 foot walls, cut by water over millions of years. When you’re walking through and looking up, it’s like a tear in the earth opening up to the sun, your own escape after a Journey to the Center of the Earth. 

Eventually the canyon became impassable for those unwilling to wade in water, and I turned back. But the sounds of the water running in the canyon were beautiful. It was nice to be able to focus on just one thing: water trickling over stones at the base of those high canyon walls. Alone, I even sang to myself, a tune amplified and so much more resonant than my own barely passable voice. 

And then I met David and Emily, a retired couple who pulled into the campground on Weds. They were chatty and invited me over for beers, and then David broke out the bourbon, and soon I was nicely toasted and having about the 4th cigar of my life. We traded stories, though I mostly listened, and it was nice to have an extended conversation with someone. 

Last weekend I wrote a little humor essay I was going to post to the blog here about the weather in the Twin Cities and in Minnesota being so mild while I’ve been away. I liked it enough that I decided to submit it to the Star Tribune as a commentary (kind of a long letter to the editor/opinion piece). To my surprise they published it with hardly any editing (they added a lede that didn’t sound right and changed the title slightly, and paired it with a golf photo, which makes no sense, but otherwise it was great!). 

Yesterday I drove through Navajo Nation on my way to Canyonlands National Park. Navajo Nation is the largest Indian reservation in the United States, and within it is Monument Valley, located on the border of Arizona and Utah. I drove through it on a whim and can’t believe I’d never heard of it. The towering sandstone formations, the mesas and buttes and rainbow colored rocks, wind-warped and rain battered for millennia, jutting from the desert like layer cakes of history, entire epochs revealing themselves for the fork of your famished mind. It’s all too much to even comprehend and left me speechless and wishing I had more time.

I stopped every few miles to take pictures and never did make it to my destination, finally pulling over and sleeping on a gravel road in a national forest 80 miles short of Canyonlands National Park, which I drove into this morning. Here, in this lesser known park, I’ll finish out my trip before returning home next weekend.