The White Rim

It's one hundred and twenty miles to civilization.
I've got an extra gallon of gas, half a pack of cigarettes,
It's hot out, and I'm wearing an insulated motorcycle jacket.
Hit it!

*Click on and blow up the pics for max effect.

I was awoken at first light on September 14th by the snoring of an anonymous German man in the bunk above me, and quickly began getting my affairs in order for my White Rim expedition. The hundred-plus mile trail, built by Uranium prospectors in the 1940's, follows the serpentine edge of the aptly-named Island-in-the-Sky mesa, which rises thousands of feet above the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. Because of its location inside Canyonlands National Park, there are no services along the trail, save for the occasional concrete outhouse, so you have to carry what you need. The park literature recommends carrying a gallon of water per person per day, because you will definitely not be getting any for free from the Federal government. Ten minutes later found me with a new understanding of the phrase "Dont drink and drive", as I swerved wildly through downtown Moab with 3 gallons, aka 24 pounds of water for my three-day-trip strapped to the rear of my bike inside an amorphous nylon bag. After further loading my bike with pop-tarts, snack-mix, sodium-laden Lipton bagged meals and other crap from the center aisles of the grocery store, as well as an extra jug of gas, I strong-armed the old hog the thirty miles or so to the Canyonlands visitor center to pick up my camping permit. After being read the lengthy park-rules riot act by a ranger, I headed for the head of the Schafer Trail, which snakes about a thousand feet down from the visitor center to the White Rim:




Starting in style. An earnest and entirely serious ranger advised me to stick to the inside of the Schafer trail, because, "That way, if you 'beef it' you wont fall six hundred feet."


After bouncing slowly down the Schafer switchbacks in neutral, the trail flattened out and began its journey along the White Rim plateau, which is named for the white sandstone which encircles this level of the mesa:




A few miles later a rain squall blew through so I used the time to walk out to an overlook of the Colorado:



Please note the van-sized teetering boulder.

Six-hundred fathoms further on was Musselman arch, across which naughty motorcyclists sometimes ride:



Around high noon, Horse With No Name's tiny auxilliary cooling fan, dormant since 1998, whirred to life, so I let her cool off and rolled out my ground pad for a siesta under a sun-blasted juniper tree:




I was really happy at this point that I had given myself three days to see the trail. I only had to ride about twenty miles that first day to my campsite so I had plenty of time to wander around in the dead silence of the desert and look at unbelievable things:

After a while I found myself at my campsite for the first night, which, despite the 30 bucks I had spent for the permit was really just a beaten-down patch of desert ground at the foot of a solemn mesa. But the view was priceless, looking off across dozens of miles of canyons at the distant La Sal mountains, over which had gathered a forty-thousand foot tall anvil cloud, filled with flashes of lightning, the storm completely silent from this distance.

By this point I was starting to get a little apprehensive about spending a night out here all alone, but when you've traveled this far, the Ones On Olympus tend to drop the occasional card out of the sky for you. This came in the form of my campsite mates for the night, a raucous, lewd and foul- mouthed group of forty-something mountain bikers from Park City, Utah. There were three married couples and the ring-leader, a shoe store owner who, ironically enough, was relegated to driving the support truck after dropping a boulder on his foot the previous night while trying to get into a hot tub. And these guys were living large. Just when I thought I was going to be cowering in my sleeping bag, digesting a meager Swanson Lonely Meal and peering out into the indifferent vacuum of space, I was invited down and promptly handed a stiff margarita in a thermos-lid, as well as the remainder of the group's beef bourginon dinner, speared onto the end of a plastic fork. A garbage-fueled fire was promptly kindled in a disposable turkey pan, and one of the guys began incessantly shining his flashlight at my reflective jacket because he said it reminded him of the movie Tron. One of the women commented on the brilliancy of the milky way, and her husband responded that "Someone up there is probably looking down at you and mentioning the same thing, except that the're saying "Kla Noork Ja Plu Iog yqa!" Well this chuckle-fest went on for quite a while, until suddenly very tired, I wandered back to my tent and fell asleep on my 20 pound water-filled pillow.

What will happen tomorrow? Will it involve staring at rocks? Probably. Will I be forced to "Do Tron!" again? I hope not. Will I inadvertently step on the "Cryptobiotic crust", causing terminal ecosystem collapse? The reader can only wait for the man behind the curtain to answer these pressing questions...