The Great Adventure

I’ve been strange-feeling since I saw “Into the Wild.” Have to fight the constant urge to be someplace else. So I finally decided to be someplace else. I grabbed my friend Matt, who is a fan of unplanned and spontaneous adventures, and we headed South, the direction of warmth.

Steinbeck has said that maps can be tyrants. We can be so immersed in road maps that we never actually see the country in which we travel. Matt and I became anarchists, for the most part, against maps and itineraries, however being lost became the side effect of abandoning road map tyranny.

Our journey began in Price, Utah at the Cowboy Kitchen, which translates to "a smoky chamber with no windows." We were greeted by an enthusiastic waitress who suffered through her early morning shift with our requests for ridiculous pictures and our obnoxious comedy. She laughed at our silliness which made it easy to forgive her for the dirty glasses, the fermented Orange Juice and the curious smell that lingered in the dining chamber with no windows.

Our trip was filled with many adventures that my memory will now exaggerate. Along the path to Devils Garden we lost our way. We created our own path through a steep canyon that dropped down into the layer of some large desert creature, my imagination will now call Mountain Lion, whose footprints were left fresh in the sand for our discovery. This quickened our pace, and heightened our sense of hearing. It sharpened our eye sight to which every rock became a growling predator.

Once we found the trail again, we almost stepped on a rattle snake if it weren’t for my paranoid sense of hearing. Lisa and Elmer, a strange couple we met on the trail, found our rattlesnake discovery very interesting and we found their fake English accents interesting as well.

I almost fell off a cliff on multiple occasions. Sister Sanchez, a friendly Filipino lady, comforted me atop the cliff edge of Delicate Arch, which was neither delicate in appearance, in reaching nor on my nerves, (and its much more incredible in person than our Utah license plates portray). Sister Sanchez comforted and distracted me while Matt danced around the slippery sandstone cliffs. I was left frozen between two rocks unable to move, convinced the rock I was wedged against was shifting and moving, and my feet could not find themselves secured to the Earth.

I was almost run off the road by a semi truck and then we were almost flooded out of the enclosed hot tub chamber by the Archway Inn staff.

It was decided that Arches National Park and all its attractions should be renamed, and Matt and myself were nominated to inherit this responsibility. We already have begun. Such names were conceived “Dark Angel and her Eternal watching Fan/ Priest” “Franky Four Fingers” “The All-Seeing Eye” “Melting Woman” “Black Eagle” “The Cobra” “the Adoring Monk” “Vomit Stripes Arch” “Skin Flesh Arch” “Dancing Fire Toes Arch” We thought our names were much more interesting than “balanced rock” or “Panorama Point.”

We also created a silly game/ competition in which we set the camera on a ledge and set the timer. Before the picture snapped we had to race to and pose ourselves at our impossible destination. Our pictures proved just how ridiculous this game was.

Our trip turned out to be exactly what I needed, and before we even got back to Provo I found myself planning the next great adventure.

Pictures from our Great Adventure