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Both roil in silt and snow melt. The same torrid geology of uplifts and twists exists in each place, so that great bands of rock arch and double back on themselves. Here, in Kashmir, northwest India, Ladakhi country to which I have absconded with eight superb students, a co-teacher, and two guides, the dominant stream vegetation is willow. Along the Colorado, salt cedar has grabbed hold, sometimes replacing any willow, and sotol and agave jut up out of the ground as soon as you leave the river. But the effect is the same - green relief in clefts of sheer and broken rock - only along the Indus you'll find bunches of peeled willow poles, tied together and leaning on other willow, waiting to be picked up for someone's roof. Pre-white man, I imagine you might see much the same along the Colorado, caches of supplies in the middle of seeming wilderness, startling any European explorer who stumbled upon them into searching for ghosts among the rock.

But then, too, I think of my colleagues and myriad other students I took down the Grand Canyon for four years running; I feel how our guides here in India, Galen and Namgial, make everything seem safe; and I come to a quiet trust. At that point - in that painter's light of late afternoon, with green and water so close at hand, I melt back into being able to love those intensely problematic men who had pointed my way to this big country in the first place. My father, of course; and an early, important love; and it no longer matters that they had been so damaging (my father), or so afraid of their own passions (the earlier love), but that I had loved them. This means that I am no longer me, a snag for stuck emotions, but a simple cup, or cupped hands, or a porous basket out of which scooped water leaks with something resembling happiness. I am next to Namgial in the bus, with my student Lauren here who also did the Grand Canyon with me some years back, as the bus driver negotiates hairpins on a dirt road that would qualify as a jeep route in America. It is dry and dramatic territory that frightens me not at all. Rather, what I feel is lucky - lucky to have deliberately lived most of my life in places like this, that I've chosen peaks and desert and slickrock and the Indus and the Canyon.

I feel this way because of and in spite of the challenges of such places. The Canyon was always a challenge, with its dust and heat and long hikes and cacti and burro piss. We'd hike exactly as the Park Service told us not to do, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., from top to bottom and back up again in one day. Two vertical miles total in elevation gain and loss, 17 miles of actual ground, the last four-and-a-half a mile an hour at best, half an orange every 15 or 30 minutes in order to find the energy to grunt up the hill. The grim terror of being my father's daughter was omnipresent, fears of being struck by lightning never quite receding so that I'd scan any sky, clear or cloudy, anxiously. But I'd also concentrate on my colleagues' good natures, on Bright Angel Creek, its name mythological to me because of the fictional burro named Brighty, whose story pulled me through childhood. Or I'd think on every old coot who tried to gold pan the place, of Havasupai digging up agave roots to roast in pits, of Hopi running to the Canyon for initiations and salt. I am, it seems, always looking for a peopled land. A felt habitat, shot through with meaning. Not cities, but little heartbeat clefts along the way, springs right above or right below the Red Wall, prayer flags on chortens high up in Himalayan passes, places in the trail where the breath catches and you either think rest, or something happened here, or Look! Pot sherd, shrine, willow poles, evidence.

I am not alone. I have never been alone. And now, on a bus, thousands of miles away from that treacherous beauty of a Canyon, I remember it has many Hindu names: Vishnu Temple, Vishnu Schist, as if whoever thought of these foresaw the Indus, and the terrible geography of two continents smashing together.

Katharine Niles writes the With The Kids column and is the author of the award-winning novel The Basket Maker.