The Needles

70 miles south of Moab, behind the lunch counter at the Needles Outpost one will find three framed pictures. The largest shows a Cessna, piloted by a friend of the proprietor, flying through the center of a giant sandstone arch. Below, side by side, hang two smaller pictures. One is an aerial view of lower Manhattan, and the second is an aerial shot of the Needles district of Canyonlands. Besides the contrast between New York grey and the vibrant oranges, whites and reds of the Needles, the pictures look remarkably similar. And indeed, the best way to describe the Needles to anyone who has never been is as a life-size city of rock, with skyscrapers of Cedar Mesa sandstone towering above grand parks of barren orange slickrock. Backpacking along the sand boulevards and side streets down beneath the towers, one feels as if they are in a well-tended Japanese garden, surrounded by gatherings of lone polished rocks, yucca plants and bonzai junipers that appear to have been gently arranged on the sand just before one rounded the last corner.
And just like a real city, one can reach out and touch the scenery. This is a refreshing contrast to the White Rim, where a person could walk for days before arriving at the foot of the scenery that appears to be right before them.
Notice I say one could walk to the scenery on the White Rim, as I myself hadn't done any walking since before the fortieth parallel and consequently was beginning to feel like someone just released from a lengthy stay in a Typhoid fever ward. My planned antidote was a three day backpack through the Needles.
I picked up my camping permit from a large and fairly intimidating woman ranger who was also, as she put it, Canyonland's "Czar" of Cryptobiotic Crust. This is the name given to the network of lichen that weaves its way through the top layer of desert sand and prevents it from blowing about and piling into dunes Sahara-style. But because of its delicacy and the aridity of the landscape, one misplaced human foot will set it's growth back decades. For this reason every ranger in the park is constantly talking at your face about your moral obligation as a visitor in a harsh land to stay on the trail and for the love of God, off the crust. This woman was obviously the ring-leader and as she handed me my permit she said to me in a low tone, "Crush my crust and I'll crush you."
"Alright," I thought as I went on my way, "I'll just chalk that one up to the plain-dealing western demeanor."
Successful backpacking in the desert requires a temporary suspension of the American work ethic. If one wants to stay comfortable, one will be smart to spend a majority of their time napping under overhangs, in the crevices between large boulders and within the dark cores of juniper clumps. When the odd cloud drifts in front of the sun, you cross your arms on your chest as a natural speed governor and amble slowly towards the next available shadow.
My first night's destination was Chesler Park, a giant grassland surrounded by rock pinnacles. The first miles of trail took me over, around and through what looked like the remains of a beach-side mudflat, frozen solid by millions of years of subterranean pressure and heat before resurfacing in Utah:









The trail eventually emerged onto a cliff edge overlooking an unbelievable scene- what looked like the geological equivalent of slightly melting a candy bar and allowing it to re-harden in its new shape:











Above: Han Solo's hometown

After staring at this in abject disbelief for a while, I walked on and passed through a row of stone towers, emerging in Chesler Park:



As I dropped my pack at my campsite, I slowly came to the realization that out of three hundred million Americans, I was going to be the only one watching the sun set and the Milky Way come out in Chesler Park tonight. I guess America's Top Model must have been on. Oh well.




My campsite was at the base of these giant towers, several of them topped with stone spheres











The next day I got up early as the Czar had warned me the day before that I would have a bit of a hump in front of me today if I wanted to make it to Lost Canyon by nightfall and God help you if I catch you taking a short cut across my defenseless crust.
I was in the thick of things now, blogosphere: Negotiating chasms, climbing ladders and passing rocks that would have had blankets over them in the Victorian Era.






















At midday I stopped for a break in a cliffside grotto:



...then passed some angry plants...












Field guide to plants that don't want to be your friend

After climbing over a small but respectable mountain made of bare and burnished orange stone, Lost Canyon came into view. I picked this as my second night's destination because it's somewhat of an anomaly, very verdant despite its location.




Lost Canyon: A ten on the Biblical scene meter if you ask me

My night in Lost Canyon was awesome, as soon as I convinced myself that I wasn't going to die of thirst. I became a little worried because I had less water left than I would have liked, but then I realized that despite all of the park service spiel about "the backcountry experience", I was really only three miles from the parking lot spigot, and if I truly needed a midnight glass of water I could just go and get it and check on my bike to boot.



Sunset in Lost Canyon

As I fell asleep under a rock overhang, I watched as the canyon walls were intermittently lit "as bright as day" by distant lightning.

The next day I power walked back to the Federal water spigot and was overjoyed to find my bike right where I had left it.
There it is. The Needles. I'm glad I'm done writing this as it was hard to put into words what is there and even a great writer, like Danielle Steele or even Dan Brown himself would do it disservice. So put it on your to-do list today. You could have already been ten minutes into your hike with the time you wasted reading this inane blog!

White Rim Wrap-Up: More Spectacle from America's Borax Belt!

I made a quick escape the next morning to avoid annoying the Park City crew all day with my incessant racket. I have to admit here that I was jealous of them on their mountain bikes. After years of cycling, off-road motorcycling felt akin to riding a mountain bike while wearing one of those sumo-wrestler Halloween suits. It's very hard to feel the grain of the trail through those giant motorcycles tires, and what is lacking in the finesse department is replaced by sheer brute force. Today I was faced with several pretty intimidating uphill climbs, technical enough that I had to walk them first to find the right line up. Once back on the bike, I pretty much had to close my eyes, peg the throttle and hope for the best. The main danger here is smashing and cracking the underside of the motor on a rock, in which case all your oil drains out onto the sand and the vultures move in. Luckily I made it up all the climbs with no problem, but in my book a well executed mountain bike climb using 0.5 horsepower is still a lot more satisfying than bullying your way up fossil-fuel style.
I stopped early at Whitecrack, which overlooks the again aptly named Maze district of Canyonlands, where the Park Service pretty much tells people not to go.



The Maze. Have your affairs in order.

By this point I had reached the point-of-no-return fuel wise, so when I reached the base of Hardscrabble Hill, the crux of the whole trail, I was understandably a bit intimidated, as I had to do or die. Now, any veteran off-road motorcyclist reading this will think the following description exaggerated and me a pansy, but never having really done this before made it a little stressful. The climb was littered with rocks (the beloved Babyheads of the mountain bike glossary) that tend to deflect your wheels in unpredictable directions when you hit them. This is a little scary when there's a drop-off on one side, and when stopping on the hill to adjust your course isn't really an option because its pretty hard to find enough traction to get six hundred pounds of mass moving again. But lo and behold, I was able to string dozens of semi-controlled lurches together into a successful assault of the hill.






Hardscrabble Hill. I could only stop to take pics of the smooth parts.

The next miles were sprinkled with 80 million ton stone columns, the occasional collarbone-threatening sand wash, dark clouds and conversations with mountain bikers.












The dead tree that had been trailing me since VA.

Early afternoon brought the Green river into sight, and I began the descent to my second night camp spot at the river's edge.






However, just as my campsite came into view Poseidon decided to drop the contents of the maelstrom in the above picture on me. My face shield immediately became opaque with wind-driven water, and the trail surface began to morph into the infamous and slippery "Utah Grease"that I had been warned about, but I managed to skid to a stop and take shelter in the camp latrine and dry my camera with tax-subsidized toilet paper.
After setting up camp, I dropped in on the just arriving Park City hoodlums, but they were understandably in poor form after pedaling thirty miles in the rain, so I wandered down a dry stream bed down to the Green.





It is green!

Then it was back to camp for a wretched and lukewarm dinner of Knorr(TM) Sides followed by a slow and lovely descent into slumber... tent-free and under the stars.



Day's End along the Green River

At cock's crow the next morning I downed a slug of instant coffee directly from my soot-covered pot, packed my things, and was forced immediately to perform an eye-opening climb up a mesa side:



Not what you need to be negotiating at 7 in the morning

A bit later, I parked my bike at the Fort Bottom trail and hiked the three miles to a cool Indian ruin perched on a butte above the Green:








Not only did the ancients build a stone fortress in a shadeless desert, they also built it on top of this 400 foot tall sandstone pyramid.

On the way back to my bike I was treated to some awesome views of the Green, a few longboats cruising slowly in the current below:



Now lest you think I fabricated this whole story in Starbucks with the help of Google Images, I got some mountain bikers back at the trail head to capture some irrefutable evidence:



Same SHI(r)T, different day



Rapidly running out of smile

I was in the home stretch now people, and after being forcefully enlisted by an phalanx of french soccer moms on bikes to find their errant support truck driver, I opened it up a little bit on a fun section of trail perched above the river:




...and then passed the Utah museum of modern art:



Just after elatedly crossing the boundary of the National park and the official end of the trail, I was forced to slog through a fifty-yard long soggy stream bed:




but immediately afterwords I ran into two of the Park City Crew in high form, laying in the sand next to their truck, waiting for the bikers to catch up and sipping on some 10:30 AM cold ones. Of course I joined them, and when the bikers arrived we made an exodus as a pack up the switchbacks to the canyon rim.

After saying our goodbyes I rode back out to the main park highway and immediately ran out of gas in front of a pack of attractive Spanish tourists. I nonchalantly struggled for ten minutes to free my extra gas can from a mass of nylon webbing, filled up my tank and headed back to my favorite Moab flophouse, on top of the world.

The White Rim was awesome, but it was just a preamble. Tomorrow I had plans to turn up the scenery meter even further with a little backpacking trip into the Needles district, bar-none the coolest place I have ever been in my life, and that includes Newark