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Girl Trip to Elk Ridge

A trip into the desert without their men takes two women on an enlightening adventure into no man's land

story and photos by Katharine Niles

Weaned, as most of us are, on Guy Stories of Incredible Feats, Never-Before-Explored-Canyons/Mountains/Rivers, and other Sundry Tales of Various Outbacks, I thought a respectable story of a couple of (periodically) wild women might serve as an antidote. We did not conquer K2. We did not venture down a slot canyon with a thunderstorm overhead. And, no, we did not go where no man (sic) has gone before. Yes, we had chocolate and red wine, as opposed to beer and potato chips. And, having forgotten mine, I purchased a spectacular pink camp chair in Blanding, Utah, with a portion of the proceeds going to fight breast cancer. No macho American male would be caught dead in such a contraption, or so I surmised.

The stereotypes, however, more or less stop there. My friend Ana had been raving about Elk Ridge for a long time. "You would not believe the view from this campsite," she crowed. "And Cedar Lodge! I can't wait to show you Cedar Lodge."

Cedar Lodge is a Utah cliff dwelling. I knew that much, but from the tone of her voice and my own archeological fantasy life, I dumbly projected a sweeping alcove site, such as Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, or Betatakin Ruin at Navajo National Monument, onto her words. This, of course, turned out to be absurd, but more on that later.

My main preoccupation was that, having spent a lifetime in the Southwest, first as a child, then as an archaeologist, then as a writer - and always as a woman - I had never explored Elk Ridge or even heard of it.

"Where's Elk Ridge?"

"You know. Out there past Blanding." Ana, who is usually very measured and thorough in her speech, was remarkable circumspect about this place.

Was it on Cedar Mesa?

No.

Was it near Comb Ridge?

Sort of.

Dark Canyon?

Closer.

So finally, one late September morn that we hoped would be stellar but was rapidly looking ominous, we set out. She showed me a map. "Oohhhhhh," I said, as light dawned. In that stretch of space between the Abajo Mountains and Cedar Mesa, up near the Bears Ears in southeastern Utah, lurked a long north-south trending ridge line of some elevation. What had been No Man's Land, a blank space in my personal map of the Southwest, revealed itself to be a high plateau whose more southerly points dead-ended into thousand-plus foot walls of red rock canyons with names like Arch, Butts, and Texas.

The Ridge itself was remarkably well-signed. A nice gravel road, lots of brown Forest Service markers, flat campsites in the ponderosas that surely every hunter in the vicinity ought to be using (but wasn't - did they know something about the weather that we didn't?), flocks of wild turkeys, some deer, and the usual hustle of fall jays - what a lovely place. The road was easy save when wet, and when we turned, just past Arch Canyon Overlook, onto a side loop that would take us to the Campsite of the Gods, we bumped a bit more and ran through a couple of smaller mud puddles. They had the look of the slimy about them - drastically dark compared to the dry dirt on either side of them, and in possession of a suspicious-looking sheen. As we approached another puddle, this one much bigger, I thought about opening my mouth and saying we should drive around, but then shut it. This was Ana's truck, and I was sure Ana knew what she was doing. Besides, everybody hates a backseat driver and we were not far enough along in the trip - nor had we quite spent time like this together yet - to know where we could trust one another on these accounts. Ana, therefore, dreamily drove right into it.

Oops. "Shit," she said, as the tires spun and dug themselves in deeper. "We're stuck."

She threw it in four-low, rocking it back and forth, clutch and rubber smelling. She kept apologizing and I told her how I'd thought about telling her but that it was OK. I wasn't that worried. I was with my good friend and Elk Ridge was a pleasant surprise, and we would survive. I'm not sure Ana felt the same. She said next time to please open my mouth; she had no idea what she'd been thinking. Finally, the smoking rubber smell increasing, I got out to push. More rocking and spinning, but I could feel it go even as my feet slipped. The truck caught, and we slithered back onto dry ground. We would later see how every wet spot had tire tracks going around it, but for now we were through. Our campsite awaited. A quarter mile later, the road ended at a point. The Campsite of the Gods had been reached.

I emerged from the truck, awed, and peered over the edge. "That's one hell of a canyon," I said. Then: "This has the best view in North America!"

Ana just grinned; I-told-you-so lighting her eyes.

We got out the boxes, the cooler, fed the dog, wandered around. Then somebody (Ana says it was me; I say it was her) said: "Does that tire look low?"

We gazed at it. We agreed it looked a little low.

"Do you have a tire gauge?" I asked.

"I should." So Ana burrowed around for a tire gauge - and didn't find one. "Shit," she said again. "I must have left it in the other truck with the horse trailer."

She sat down, a little frayed. "I'm used to camping with - you know," she said, of her four-year love from whom she had recently parted. I thought I could hear the slight rasp of buried tears in her voice. "He's the cautious one. I guess that mud puddle freaked me out a little bit. It feels weird to be the cautious one."

"That's OK," I said. "It's OK to freak. I'm feeling fine, though, which is good." And it was good. I was not, at the moment, having apprehensions of boogey men or getting stuck or anything. I mean, even my cell phone said it worked up here. Worst came to worst, we'd have a bit of a walk on a long road. So we talked about that. We talked about allowing ourselves to be flexible. Allowing ourselves to be scared. Allowing ourselves a gamut of emotion that our beer-and-potato-chip upbringing never did. For we are of a generation that fed our tomboy loves often via trips with men - fathers, father figures, lovers, brothers, friends. They were very nearly the only ones doing things like this back then. Ana, for instance, learned big water kayaking on the Colorado and elsewhere from the legendary Walt Kirschbaum; I learned backpacking in high school from a couple of glamorous post-graduates (all of 18) who deigned to take me with them while they dropped acid and (once) lit my down vest on fire with stove fuel. I am perpetually jealous of women who had pioneering, outdoorsy mothers who took them skiing and bundled them up for canoe trips and the like. Neither of us had such a mother, though Ana had a pretty gung-ho aunt who took her skiing and hiking. Yet overall, the bulk of our learning the wild as women has entailed a circuitous route through the vagaries of men.

No more, however. Ana's ex-beau, a friend still, appeared wistful that he was not going with us, but Ana did not invite him. "This is for us," she said, and here we were, with a possible soft tire and all the nervousness of women who are far stronger and more competent than they think they are but still, in times such as these, run up against their patterns of the clich�d, tiresome, and all too real learned helplessness.

"We'll just watch it," I said, of the tire. "If it looks worse, we'll deal with it."

Of course, it didn't look worse, and the afternoon passed with a pleasant 3 �-mile walk on our puddley roads, a good dinner, and some momentary anxiety on my part about bears wandering into camp, especially after Ana's dog, Ellie, starting barking at darkening trees. With the moon trying to peer out from behind clouds, we settled down in the back of the truck for a breezy night's sleep.

The weather held in a sense. The clouds arced past us to the east, the wind banked on the edge of the almost-tolerable, and the next day we headed off toward Cedar Lodge. Being a good archaeological steward, I won't say which road you turn off to go to Cedar Lodge. Suffice it to say that it drops off the edge of Elk Ridge and down into hidden ledges above those impossible canyons. Once the drop happens, you need to gird your four-wheel drive, high-clearance loins, or park the car. We girded, but I was glad Ana was driving.

Post-mud puddle and bumpy roads, we began to learn more about how our navigations from sad family life - in which our urges to explore, to get out, to love and make love and find routes - were systematically shamed nearly out of us. Ana is sixty. I am forty-five. And I can honestly say we have learned to love in spite of our pasts, and love well. Are we "failures" for the five marriages between us? Are we "wimps" because we were still nervous about weather and I was nervous about hiking, somewhat trail-less, down close to some of the most intense canyon country on earth? Am I a "bad" mother and wife for leaving my boys at home? These may seem like dated questions. We're not supposed to believe they have any effect on us any more. But they do, and I think they still do, with women far younger than we.

We parked at one of the more dilapidated fence lines I've ever seen, and started following it down. A trail appeared here and there, then disappeared into the black topsoil of undisturbed desert. We skirted slickrock around to the head of a brushy drainage that Ana swore was the way. It was hard for me to be out here without a map, trusting entirely my good friend who openly admits to a "reckless" nature (albeit much tempered by age and experience) and a kind of Age of Aquarius faith in the universe that even I, fan of the intuitive, find periodically unnerving. But I also knew she was not going to insist that we were on a Mission From God, nor tell me I was being a baby when I spooked about something, nor laugh at any equipment failures. This meant more than I can possibly say, so I followed her, whining, down through the brush and out into the wash and then up onto a trail again. Pi�on-juniper, in and out of cryptobiotic crusts, onto the slickrock, a lone cairn encountered, a corner turned, and "there."

"What?" I looked across the canyon, seeing nothing.

"Cedar Lodge."

"Mother of God," I said, once my vision cleared. "I should have known."

For perched - what? One thousand? Fifteen hundred? - feet up a vertical red cliff face, and strung out in a horizontal crack no more than what must have been five feet high in places, lay Ana's Indian ruin.

It was not in a grand sweep of domed alcove. It was not even big. It had two defensive walls leading into it, a kiva with a roof mostly intact, and little masonry buildings dotting the entire ledge. That's what I could see from across the way, at any rate. The wind howled up the canyon at us, and her original suggestion that we traipse our way in there seized up in me. "No way," I said. "I am not going over there."

"That's fine," said Ana. "We don't have to."

But years ago, she had gone in there. She'd walked the ledge we were now on around to the left, back into the top of a horseshoe of a drainage that I could not see from where we were, and out to the ruin. A spring sat in the crook of the horseshoe, said Ana, and it wasn't as bad as it looked once you got over there.

Uh-huh. I ate my lunch. I took some pictures, zooming in as much as I could, and let the willies flow through me. Now that I was not committed to risking my neck for matters of insane exploration, the willies primarily settled on the volumes such a building location spoke about desperation, the need for protection, the lengths human beings will go to in order to cling to a way of life they know and love. Relative date? Late 1200s. Why? Because that was a desperate time. That was the time of the cliffs, of housing yourself in dwellings bookended by towers, defensive walls, tunnels. No one lived in cliffs till then. Many cliff dwellings are inaccessible by white honkey standards, and southeastern Utah must hold the record for most ungodly locations. Cedar Lodge certainly ranks up there. Yet, as Ana pointed out, at least you had a ledge. And a nearby spring. Not so bad.

"But talk about siege," I said. "You could get cut off in there pretty easily."

"Yup," she said. "I guess you could. Your enemy just has to sit on top of that spring."

I had to smile. Two women talking tactical warfare. All my tolerance of my husband's and son's infatuation with the likes of Master and Commander, Horatio Hornblower, History Channel tanks rumbling in black and white across the TV screen, came to the fore. All my passion for the sorrows of trauma, for Viet Nam infantry vets telling me that their primary purpose was to draw enemy fire so the planes could know where to bomb next, for Iraq War vets I knew who came home with depleted uranium poisoning and nightmares, for the occasional massacres of ancient Southwesterners - all of that came to a love in me as big as Arch Canyon. I chewed my sandwich and I loved. And I think I like studying war because it is where men are allowed to be vulnerable. Where the beer and potato chip bravado cannot hold and they look you in the face (or not) and something bordering on tears takes hold. Humanity. One ruin up a ridiculous cliff face. Message to all the men I have loved in the world: I feel safe when you cry. And I fear everything when you don't.

Ana calls Ellie back from the edge. The wind gushes, tossing our lunch juniper about like a wig caught on a stick.

"Let's go," I say. And we do. Back up out of the drainage, stumbling on potsherds and stone tool debitage and fractured sandstone hoes. Stepping on the remnants of ancient corn fields, long buried in red sand and juniper needles.

Bumping up onto Elk Ridge in the truck, the wind picks up. "Damn," I say. "I thought the weather was supposed to behave by now." It's clear, but the wind never ceases and at camp I know it will be an impossibility to sit in my pink chair enjoying a post-hike swig of wine. All the trees are tossing now and Ana has a cold.

"Let's go to Blanding," she says.

"OK."

And we drive around our mud puddle, out through the Bears Ears, east along Highway 95, and into the fantastic Sunset Motel ($25 a night for a single). Cheap, worn, clean as a whistle with good mattresses, it seems to have attracted every Democrat in the state of Utah, including a lifelong, union-proud teacher-turned-grandfather, and a woman riding cross-country on a BMW bike raising money for (what else?) breast cancer research. Ana tells her about my chair, of course, and the woman offers a nice sleeping bag for Ellie to recline on in the back of the truck. We eat dinner, sleep, go to Edge of the Cedars Museum in the morning. Our drive home is not by highway. Ana, who spent time in Blanding crawling around Indian ruins and learning backcountry routes, takes me through county roads to Hatch, then to McElmo Canyon. We have one more adventure, a supposed petroglyph panel a friend of hers told her about.

It turns out we have to cross a rather gushing creek to get there, so we put on appropriate attire, cross the creek, and search black conglomerate slabs for signs of art. Most of the slabs are so rubbley no good face for rock art can be had. We never find what we're looking for. Or at least not that. Coasting home, our gear exploding the way gear does at the end of a trip when you've given up on organization, the cab of the truck smelling faintly of wood smoke and sweat and wet trousers, we talk companionably without labeling it as such about what it means to be a woman, about sex and love and big, big country. Dangerous turf, and all of it hopelessly intertwined. But we've been there before. And we are here now, and along with the smells and the gear, I think I sniff a little bit of wisdom stealing, quite beautifully, like soft cat's feet, into the air of the truck.

Katharine Niles is the author of the award-winning novel The Basket Maker and writer of the blog As A Woman.