Big Rock Candy Mountain... Red Canyon... Kodachrome...
I woke up before dawn, stuck my head out of my tent, and looked up at many, many stars. And it was a good morning. I packed up my tent. I visited the local livestock population. We made a quick camp breakfast. We cleaned up. And it was partway through cleaning up that the day started to get hot. It was still pretty early in the morning. But we were in Utah, a place with real weather.
Our first stop was Big Rock Candy Mountain. There's a good song called Big Rock Candy Mountain. I liked that song so much that I read a book by the same name. And now here we were at an actual mountain!!
At the time we were there, I was pretty excited, but that's because I was an ignoramus. I guessed that Big Rock Candy Mountain was a real place, a place I was seeing now, a place whose name had inspired that awesome song. But the song had come first. The place-name had come later, was basically a tourist trap. As a San Franciscan, I'm supposed to be able to detect sucker tourist traps, but I fell for this one. I bought the t-shirt. I know better now, though.
On the drive that day, I found out that Bianca had been to med school and was now doing the Australian equivalent of "rotations", getting experience. Since Bianca already reminded me so much of Lea Widdice back when she'd been going through rotations, this was not a surprising coincidence; rather it made you say "Oh, of course."
We were close to Bryce Canyon. As we drove along, I thought we were in Bryce Canyon. We moved among brightly-colored hoodoos and canyon walls. But we were in the nearby Red Canyon; not so many colors, not so stripey as Bryce. But spectacular nonetheless. We stopped for a short walk and quick lunch.
The heat beat down. I was happy to walk amongst red canyon walls; but I was pretty darned happy to hide in the shade of the bus afterwards, too.
Things hit a snag: Driver Jimmy was on the phone with the rangers at Kodachrome Basin, our next stop. We didn't have the campground reservation that he thought we did. The rangers had a spot for us, but not the usual Green Tortoise spot. There was a remote campground in that park, where boisterous backpackers could whoop and howl and carry on without disturbing their sedentary neighbors. That was the usual spot.
But we didn't have that usual spot this time. Our spot was not so remote. Futhermore, the "Basin" in "Kodachrome Basin" meant that if we whooped and howled and carried on, our echoes would disturb our sedentary neighbors pretty quick. There were quiet hours enforced, starting at 10pm.
What to do? We could try to find another campsite; but we were at the start of Labor Day weekend. That was dicey at best. We could try "outlaw" camping at some out-of-the-way spot. But this group might not like doing without restrooms. So we'd sleep at Kodachrome and shut down the party at 10pm.
Since I was a morning person, this meant that I'd be having a wilder night than usual; usually, I gave up on trying to stay up late with the night owls, and instead turned in around 9. But tonight I was determined to stay up until 10.
At Kodachrome, the rangers reminded us that we'd need to be quiet at 10pm. And they warned us that we were re-doing their trails to have better signage... but that in the mean-time, in some places they had no signage. And that the new trails would not match our maps.
Various groups of us went off on various trails. My group went along the Panoramic Trail. This trail was confusing. The trail had branches not marked on the map. Then those branches came back together—there were little scenic looplets on the trail. But it was never really clear where we were going.
The sun beat down and beat down some more. We wandered, kinda lost. There was scenic desert landscape. There were canyon walls. There were pillars of rock. But there was heat. We walked about three miles in about two hours. (Yeah, that's slow.) In that time, I drank 1.5 liters of water. And the signage, oh the signage...
Back at the camp I slumped in a little shade and recovered. Then I set about setting up my tent again. It turned out that my first time setting up my tent had been somewhat disastrous after all: my tent poles and pegs had been left behind at Mystic Hot Springs. I didn't really have a tent; I had a pile of cloth.
I was too hot to try to jury-rig supports. I eventually figured out that lots of folks would be sleeping out under the stars: there were tarps laid out with pads from the bus on top of the tarps. There was space for my sleeping bag, and so I could sleep out in the cool night. But first, I was determined to stay awake until 10.
We had camp dinner. At past meals, I'd drifted into dishwashing. At cold campsites, my tolerance for cold meant that most folks shunned that task. But now I made a beeline for the dishwash station. Even when there were no dishes to be washed, it was good to put my hands into cold water and feel the dish sink act as a heat sink.
As night fell, we had a "debrief". We went around, each of us... saying our favorite spot; saying our favorite meal; giving "shout-outs" to people who'd gone above and beyond. There was smart psychology behind this activity: get folks to remember that there had been some parts of the trip that they liked. Maybe those memories would linger.
After that, there were clumps of conversation.
Leena had brought along star charts for our trip. So she had a star chart for the northern hemisphere on this night. She sat with me and pointed out constellations. I didn't know many of those, but it was an excuse to dredge up some Latin; I barely remembered that aqvila was the eagle. (Was that a Latin class memory or a nostalgia for sci-fi nerd-dom?)
Charlie sang some songs, and had brought along his audio recorder setup so that we could sing along. The singer layout was strategic: people who could actually sing were close to the recorder. The rest of us were out of earshot. And thus we sang songs about romances gone bad. "The Damage is Done" "Don't Stop and Talk / I know she's Pretty" And then it was 10, time to be quiet.
I lay in my sleeping bag and looked up at the stars. Though Leena's voice was still in my head, the stars didn't fit together into constellations. I wasn't really making sense of them at all, just looking up, letting my thoughts fall into them. I reminded myself to shut my eyes: the last time I'd lay under a skyful of stars was that sailing trip in 1999; I'd watched the stars so long that I'd forgotten to go to sleep and had been a complete ass the next day.
That was also my previous attempt at a group tour. My fellow travelers on that trip had been so awful that I'd largely given up on group travel with strangers. But now I'd tried it again, and I'd fallen in with a good group.
It's good to try new things. And it's good to give old bad things another chance every ten years or so.
I remembered to close my eyes. I slept.
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