My campground at The Needles in Canyonlands National Park is surrounded by high-rising sandstone formations of varying layers of pinks and whites and smoky reds, if red is a color that can be smoky. One massive formation looks like that big part of a submarine that is the first to emerge from water—the sail if you’re like me and had to look it up—except on a scale no submarine can match.
In the distance are mesas and buttes similarly colored, and farther beyond, legitimate snow capped mountains. One thing I’ve learned on this trip is that this country has a lot of mountains. It’s not just the Rockies and the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevadas. No, there are near me now the La Sal Mountains, just southeast of Moab, Utah, which rise as high as 12,721 feet—more than 12,715 feet taller than me. And in Big Bend I saw the Chisos Mountains—nearly 8,000 feet, also nothing to shake a stick at. Texas alone has nearly a dozen mountain ranges: Texas, a state so huge you can’t even find the mountains. In fact, there are more than 200 mountain ranges in the United States! Who knew this? Geographers, for starters, I suppose, but also those who are well-traveled or who love mountains and mountain trivia.
And then there are the aforementioned mesas and buttes, seemingly everywhere around this part of the southwest, rising like ships from an ocean long receded, where the only waves are of red dust and give rise to the itchy-eyed question: when does a butte become a mesa, and vice versa? Both are flat-topped extrusions of earth that inspire awe and sometimes snickers among children and immature middle-aged men who think the word butte is funny. But a butte, Wikipedia tells me, has a top that is narrower than its height, while a mesa’s top goes on and on, like that song American Pie, or, if I were with the times, that song All Too Well (Taylor’s Version), by Taylor Swift.
The rock formations bordering my campsite have the unfortunate effect (at least in the cool, early spring) of causing the sun to set before its time as it ducks behind the 150 foot walls of stone and casts its luring light into the distance. And so last evening, not done with the sun, I grabbed a book and climbed to where the sun still shone. I read for a bit there, then realized there were cairns atop the stone formations, implying a trail, and so I followed. Stone, then dirt, then stone, leading higher up the formations until you could see the side the sun was setting on, and the needles in the distance, tall, spiky stone formations for which this section of Canyonlands is named.
The park is divided into three sections, The Needles in the southeast, where I am; Island in the Sky in the north, where there is another established campground; and a rugged area of unpaved roads necessitating four-wheel-drive known as The Maze in the southwest; all divided as they are by the crisscrossing of the Colorado and Green rivers, each of which played a part in forming the deep canyons from where the park takes its name. I think you could spend two weeks within each section of the park and still not see it all.
And so I wandered on the ridges of sandstone high above the campground in the late evening, every direction a vista worthy of awe, and a nearly full moon rising even as the sun set. In the distance falling darkness purpled the mountains as the sun dimmed, while the peaks of the La Sal’s were obscured in what must have been a promised storm above 8,000 feet. But here on the stones overlooking the campground it was warm as the rocks let go their heat from the day and the soft light brought out the contrasts in geology and distance that the camera struggles to capture in the bright light of day. I felt like I witnessed something that will not, at least for me, be repeated. As it is with each sunset.
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