We took time out this past month, on the Memorial Day holiday (May 28, 2007,) to go on a very nice five-hour hike (“nice” meaning that the weather was nice and the hike was unbelievably scary.) We hiked the “Island in the Sky” out in Snow Canyon State Park (not to be confused with the other “Island in the Sky” over in Canyonlands.) In fact, this hike has such a reputation as a scary hike (based on injuries to personal friends) that I didn’t sleep very well the night before. The hike itself probably only covers about a mile from one end of the “Island” (a red sandstone butte shaped like a big ship and about 600 feet tall according to the topo map) to the other, but the bouldering, climbing, scrambling, sliding, jumping, and squeezing makes it seem a lot longer – one rock-climbing website puts the hike at 3.39 miles. Of course, as my luck would have it, on the very first big boulder that I had to pull myself over I popped my ribs again (that were injured over a year ago back while whitewater rafting in Chile), which made the rest of my day rather more painful than necessary. But I couldn’t complain too much about my pain as our “guide”, our friend and neighbor, Robert, was debuting his two newly repaired knees (I noticed that he was walking pretty gingerly that evening.) Les, CJ, and Kat had all gone with Robert on this hike several times before, but this was a first for Rhiannon and me (yes, Annie made me look bad by solving all the bouldering problems faster than I did.) One serious impetus to finishing the hike is that at almost any point in the hike, from the very beginning, it’s just as scary and intimidating to go back as it is to go forward. Besides, I find that it’s therapeutic to confront one’s demons and override the freezing flashbacks from my misspent youth in the red rock canyons of the Navajo Reservation. There was one point in the hike when I thought I might just be coyote food – it’s where you have to squeeze through a small crack in the rocks, (I had to suck in my gut as far as I could, holding my breath and inching myself forward with my toes – not for the claustrophobic,) come halfway out onto the face of a sheer cliff, and then swing over to a ledge just beyond and to the left of the far side of the crack. Over the course of the hike I learned to quit looking down or up and just focused on solving the problems at-hand and was able to get by a lot better. By the time we started our final descent off the Island, the sun had been shining long enough that the black (igneous) parts of the rock were hot! – too hot to hang on to – fortunately there was enough of the red sandstone to carry us down. At the end of the hike we all got home relatively intact, with only minor abrasions and contusions, seriously depleted layers of skin on our palms, elbows, and shins, and a few rips in our jeans (and a rib bandage for me.) I’m glad we’ve been working out at the health club for an hour every morning for the past couple of months – I’d really hate to see how I’d feel if I’d done the hike when I was in worse shape.
