AN EXCERPT FROM
AMERICAN DISCOVERIES
By Ellen Dudley and Eric Seaborg
FROM CHAPTER 11:
CANYON COUNTRY COGNOSCENTE
The three-member scouting team left the Pacific coast in June. It's now mid-November. Come along with them as they explore a possible route for the American Discovery Trail through Utah's canyon country. The authors continue telling their story in alternating voices, beginning with...
ERIC:
The canyon country presented topography foreign to all three of us—giant, jagged thousand-foot cracks, canyons that divided and divided again into labyrinths. On our maps these canyons looked like an indecipherable maze where they’d find our bleached bones years later. Even the name of our next segment—Dark Canyon Primitive Area—was ominous, only slightly better than nearby Box-Death Hollow Wilderness.
Our Salt Lake City briefers had warned us of the hazards, using strange words such as “box canyons” and “pour-offs.” Each time a canyon split, we’d have to decide which was the “true” canyon. If we picked the wrong one, we might follow it all day, then run into unscalable cliffs on three sides—a box canyon—with no choice but to retrace our steps.
Rain falling on the plateau or mountains runs fast off the slick rocks and hard soil, rushing in transient waterfalls over the canyon rims and rock faces they called pour-offs. Collected in the canyon, that water becomes a flash flood. Our only warning might be the sound, because they said we’d hear the rumbling long before we saw the water. It would sound like a train or a plane crashing through trees. Churning in the storied “wall of water” would be tree trunks tossed like toys, car-size boulders rolling like marbles. We’d be lucky to have time to scramble up the wall.
Fortunately, we’d been offered guidance from a local expert. I called him from Lake Powell’s Hite Marina on the only phone within fifty miles, a radio model. The proprietress of the general store let me use it after hours for five dollars plus the cost of the call.
Al Frost invited us to spend the night at his house. “Come on up to Monticello and ask for Alfred Frost. Everybody here knows me. Just ask anybody, they’ll show you where it is.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you gave me directions?”
He thought for a minute. We were to turn at the only traffic light in town, then look for a brick house with a big spruce.
As we drove northward, I said, “His voice sounded really old and frail. And his directions were pretty fuzzy.”
“How old is he?” Ellen asked.
“I heard he was seventy-six.”
“I wonder if he’ll be able to keep up with us. This is going to be a rugged trip with heavy packs.”
“Everybody says he knows this country better than anyone. They talk as if he’s the legend of the slickrock.”
In our usual fashion, we’d biked on until dark. It was after nine o’clock when we knocked on the Frosts’ door.
“What a rough looking bunch,” Al welcomed us in a voice that sounded much more robust without the filter of the phone lines.
At first glance, we noticed signs of his age—thin white hair, knotty knuckles, and milky pupils. But the way his eyes twinkled was our first hint that he’d never outgrown his gee-whiz little kid’s energy and enthusiasm. His skin wasn’t wrinkled and sagging, just creased and weathered, and he moved smoothly, without a hint of stiffness.
Al had returned that day from a week of leading a group of seniors on a backpacking trip. He could be “ready to head out again tomorrow,” but we’d spent the last fifteen days on the trail ourselves, so we took a “day off” to do laundry, organize, pack, and study maps. Al’s wife Maxine accepted our taking over their house as if she were used to Al taking in strays.
The next morning we piled into Al’s pick-up, three in the front and me sprawled across the packs in back, and drove back to where we’d left off.
The familiar high desert landscape appeared flat to the horizon, featureless but for red sandstone buttes like the Squaw-with-Papoose Rock that marked our trailhead. For two miles we walked among small washes and hillocks, until that flat world suddenly ended at a rocky outcropping. The ground dropped away in a near-vertical jumble of boulders and cliffs into a multi-colored canyon. We perched on the edge, and a similar edge faced us just two hundred yards away. In between ran a stream, fifteen hundred feet below. It looked as if an earthquake had yanked the two sides apart and left a gaping hole.
Like Alice following the white rabbit, we followed Al into Wonderland, descending a steep, rock-strewn trail. While we carefully picked our way down, Al showed us how to “lope” downhill, his feet seeming to skim along the rocks. He made the descent look easy, but for us every step was a grueling fight with gravity, the weight of our packs squeezing kneebones together, quadriceps burning like brake pads to keep us from pitching forward.
Our legs were quivering after the two-hour drop to the stream, which was just a few steps across, impossibly small for the task of cutting a canyon this deep.
Al was there waiting for us: “I just never get tired of
this country. I took my first hiking trip through it when I was sixteen. My
younger brother Kent and I wanted to visit some friends of our family who lived
out on the Colorado River.
“We filled our pockets with cracked wheat and nuts and took a sack of bread, and that was all the food we took. We sawed the barrel and handle off an old shotgun so it would be lighter, and figured we’d just live off the rabbits. In those days they provided a big share of our family’s food. But the coyotes were so thick in that country we didn’t see a single rabbit.
“At first we followed a horse trail that cowboys used to drive cattle to their winter range. When it petered out, we cut due west cross-country. One day we had to walk through a foot of wet snow. We built fires at night to stay warm. One night we slept in a cave filled waist deep with cedar bark—light and fluffy as down. Some Indian’s bedroom, I guess.
“When we came to White Canyon we could follow a horse trail all the way down to the Colorado. The Chaffins were surprised to see us. They’d invited us, but they didn’t believe we’d really do it.
“We started back when it was time for the Chaffins’ annual springtime trip out to Hanksville for supplies. The road just followed a wash out from the river. And of course over the winter lots of rocks and boulders had rolled into the way. So Kent and I sat on the hood of the car, and when we came to a rock we’d jump off and roll it out of the way.
“Kent wanted to walk home, but I’d had enough of walking myself, so we split up. In those days it was just accepted that people would put you up, so I stayed with some people in Hanksville until I could get a ride back on the mail truck.”
ELLEN:
Al’s world was turned inside out from the world we knew. When you climb peaks, you rise to meet the sky. For the first time we’d done just the opposite, leaving the sky behind and dropping into the depths, going from a horizontal universe to a vertical one. The canyon walls surrounded us, rising in sheer pitches so high and so close that only twenty degrees of sky remained—a sliver of cobalt connecting us to life on earth’s surface.
The Solomon Islanders have thirty words for kinds of wind, and we needed a similar vocabulary—more than offered by the largest Crayola box—for the reds, oranges, and yellows of the multi-layered walls. Even at midday there was a hint of sunset from the ruddy slabs bouncing the sunlight back and forth, and it really was like seeing this new world through rose-colored glasses.
We walked up the stream, our view bounded by its curves in the canyon. Each time we rounded a bend, new cliffs, pools, and waterfalls appeared, and the arena behind us closed off. Where the canyon floor was broad, walking was easy. But when the water ran too close along a canyon wall, we had to cross to the other side. And when the walls closed in on both sides, we clung to narrow ledges, edging sideways because of the width of our packs. In summer we could have just splashed up the stream, but in November we couldn’t afford wet boots. We constantly looked ahead, watching for stepping stones so we could cross the stream before the wall closed in on the side we were on. Al was masterful at keeping us on an efficient path. Always the western gentleman, he waited at any crossing where he thought the rocks would give my bad leg trouble, holding out a hand and lending me his tamarisk branch walking staff.
We camped on a rock bench—a terrace—above the stream, a quiet spot, only the burbling of the water until I set a pot down hard on a rock. The sound crashed like cymbals, ricocheting harshly off the sandstone walls.
It was my birthday, and I was in for a big surprise. Hidden in Eric’s pack was a liter of wine, a cheesecake, and a pound of bacon for morning. (He’d heard me talk about our family tradition: On your birthday you’re allowed all your favorite sinful foods—as much as you want of anything you want.) And Sam had brought a couple of lurid tabloids “for the compulsive reader,” along with a birthday card that showed a cowboy scrubbing his armpit. On the caption, “Old cowboys never die, they just smell that way,” he’d penned “scouts” over “cowboys.”
In the morning we continued our journey through this sunny underworld. Despite the narrow window of sunlight, plant life flourished wherever there was space between the water and the walls. Cottonwoods and primroses rooted in pink sand so soft and fine, like confectioners’ sugar, that I sat and sifted it through my fingers like a three-year-old. The polished slickrock held surprises, too. Crossing the stream, I saw petrified wood imbedded in my stepping stone, and clinging to a narrowing ledge, my fingers traced pink geodes with sparkling crystals.
A waterfall on the north wall marked the mouth of Youngs Canyon, “the second canyon on the left,” our first turnoff. We entered it and pitched our tents on a flat ledge, where water-buffed sheets of flat rock rose in small tiers of soft mauve marbled with purple, lavender, and ecru lace—a dainty contrast to the bold colors and rough planes of the massive rocks above us.
As the angle of the sun’s rays increased it was as if sculptor and painter were collaborating, molding shapes and mixing colors. Shadows deepened, scalloping and notching the slabs into battlements. Colors intensified dramatically, pale pink into rich salmon, light orange into deep apricot, faint red into glowing crimson. We marveled at this new way to see a sunset, watching the changes in the color of the canyon walls instead of the sky. The rim was the last to go, still catching the light—a canyon form of alpenglow. And so evening began not when the sun set but when the line between sunlight and shadow rose to the edge, taking our light and color away until dawn.
We basked in our good fortune to be in this place at this time. Wallace Stegner once said, “Parks...are not America; they are exceptions to it....Americans confuse national parks with resorts.” Anyone who has seen Yosemite knows how true this is. The valley’s air is choked with motor home fumes, the high country scarred by ski lifts. We had just spent another day in a place that was all that so many national parks are not—unpaved, untrashed, unspoiled.
We hadn’t covered much ground on that second day. The ledges had narrowed often, so those stream crossings had multiplied. All those zigzags slowed our pace. “We’ll make up for lost time tomorrow,” we said.
ERIC:
In the morning we continued up Youngs Canyon, into terrain Al had never seen. We had thought he knew every twist and turn of his route but it turned out one reason he’d been eager to go was the chance it offered for exploring.
The magic of the first two days faded as the going got rougher. Where the streambed was broad it was choked with willows, tamarisk, and sharp-edged, eight-foot bullrushes. Where the canyon narrowed, smooth chutes and abrupt rock faces blocked the way.
We climbed hand over hand to get past one obstacle. At the next, Al scrambled up, then tossed down a rope to pull us and our packs up. We laughed at ourselves for having worried that he’d slow us down.
Our progress was painfully slow—and then came to an abrupt halt beneath a high cliff. We were in a box canyon.
We retraced our steps, undoing most of the day’s work, Al still watching for a way out. “You know, the trail could go right through that notch up there,” Al said. A precipitous loose-soil and crumbled-rock slope led to the rim, but it was too late to start up.
We camped on an incline so steep we had to trace a switchback curve from our stove to our tent, trying not to slide into a prickly pear cactus. We wondered if we’d roll downhill in our sleep, or if we’d attained what engineers call an angle of repose.
We ate dinner and fell into our tents, exhausted and dispirited. Our “official” forward progress on the ADT route had amounted to about two miles, a new futility record.
We’d already been out three days, and were still four more from our end point if nothing more went wrong. Al had said to plan for a four or five day trip. We’d packed extra provisions, but it looked as if we’d end up hiking on empty stomachs...
In the morning we found a faint trail and footprints leading up a thousand-foot climb through the notch. The trail then disappeared in a side canyon. After a two-hour search we found cairns—small rock piles placed to mark the trail—that led us up to a high plateau and a rutted old jeep road, where we could confirm our position on the map. We were relieved to find that we were still on target.
We camped at the last water source we could hope to reach that day. With all these lost trails, we weren’t making up any time. We’d have to start rationing food tomorrow.
Once again Al had the most energy at the end of the day. He gathered everyone’s water bottles and hustled down to the spring to refill them. He made camp faster than any of us and then relaxed while we finished pitching our tents.
Al was an incredibly efficient backpacker. For breakfast, he poured cold water into a baggie that held cereal and dried milk. His only dirty dish was a cup for tea. Lunch was birdlike portions of nuts and dried fruit. Then he poured boiling water into a freeze-dried dinner’s foil pouch. Again, no dishes.
At night he’d find a dwarf pinyon pine with just enough space under it for his sleeping bag. He’d throw his poncho over the branches to keep out the dew: “That should keep me warm.” No heavy tent and stakes. His frugality in eating and equipment meant his pack weighed half what ours did.
As we waited for the water to boil, Al said, “Did I tell you the story about John Young? He was out hunting, chasing after a desert bighorn he’d wounded.
“He finally caught it on a ledge where there was an old mine. He picked up a piece of ore and put it in the pocket of his chaps.
“When he got home, there was a letter waiting from Uncle Sam calling him off to the war in Europe. It wasn’t until years later, after he got back, that he put his chaps on and found that piece of ore. He sent it off to Durango to have it assayed, and the report came back that it was high-grade gold ore. He’d already made plans to move to California and didn’t want to get into mining, but his brothers did.
“So he told them, ‘You just go up over that ledge there. You’ll find it, no problem.’ And every spring after that, I would see his two brothers loading up their pack horses and heading off to look for the mine.
“I saw one of the guys a few years ago. He was old and shaky and had a hard time walking. I asked him if they’d ever found that mine. And he said, ‘Oh, no, but I know just where it is.’ I don’t think he could have even walked across the street, but he said, ‘I’m going to go mine it next year.’“
Gold mine stories were almost part of the landscape. Al’s never panned out except for the one about his friend Fletch. “He bought a ‘worthless hole in the ground’ for $1,000, then sold it for $32 million when the bright yellow streak turned out to be uranium”...
ELLEN:
On day five we awoke to a “red sky at morning, sailor’s warning”—a blood red line on the eastern horizon beneath a slate bank of clouds. Yesterday morning high cirrus wisps had drifted in. By noon the tendrils had thickened and the sun was glowing like a bulb through gauze, circled by a yellow halo. Today that halo showed up again. Was this a storm’s portent, like a ring around the moon? Al gave a noncommital answer, perhaps in a “let’s not worry the womenfolk” vein. I was nervous after all those “two feet of snow” forecasts and then last night’s bedtime story.
“Back in 1967, this same week,” Al had recounted, “we had snow as high as your shoulders. It snowed a foot, stopped a bit, snowed another foot, then REALLY began to snow.” Lying in my sleeping bag, I’d counted up our dwindling food items, like counting sheep, to keep from thinking about snow so high we wouldn’t be able to walk out.
I kept watch on the western sky as we descended gently into a rimmed valley. Another enclosed world like Dark Canyon, but this one was broad and open to the sky. The valley floor was about half a mile wide, thick with golden grasses and sagebrush that towered over six-foot-five Eric. The walls were creamy instead of red, hundreds of feet high instead of a thousand, with natural stone arches and deep alcoves, some with vaulting overhangs.
We were astonished to see, perched high within one of these alcoves, a prehistoric cliff dwelling, virtually intact, large enough to contain a little village. The Anasazi, or Ancient Ones, had lived in this area for generations when, for reasons that no one can explain, they moved whole towns into niches such as this one halfway up a cliff. As we walked on we spotted more pueblos in cave-like overhangs, looking inaccessible to all but eagles. Saw-edge petroglyph designs were etched on rock faces below.
This was so much like Mesa Verde National Park, minus the crowds and tourist scat, and I couldn’t believe we were seeing these cliff dwellings without signs and rangers, as if the Anasazi had walked away just yesterday. I wished we weren’t so far behind schedule. I wanted to climb up to a ruin and sit by a kiva. The valley was so remote and unspoiled, not even the ubiquitous cow pie, and it would’ve been easy to go back in time, to imagine living there in the twelfth century.
This valley was lush by the harsh standards of the desert, with a running stream that could have irrigated fields of corn and beans. A good place to live. We wondered why the people had moved their villages into those crevices. Archaeologists have found no evidence of warfare, such as signs of assaults on the cliff dwellings or an increase in burial sites. Adding to the mystery, the Anasazi abandoned these mid-cliff homes with corn still in pots, bow and arrows on floors, as if they expected to return.
Farther on we were able to inspect Anasazi construction. On the valley floor we came to slender circular towers, about twenty feet high, made of flat orange stones, carefully stacked without mortar. “These must’ve been their granaries,” said Al, the ex-wheat farmer. “Those little square windows way up there...maybe for ventilation.”
The scenery changed abruptly when the earth fell away from our feet again at the edge of another gaping chasm. Gypsum Canyon was as deep as Dark Canyon and wider. “John Wesley Powell was almost caught in a flash flood down in there,” Al said. “He was exploring in Gypsum Canyon when he heard a great roaring. He scrambled up the side, just in time to watch a wall of water come pouring down.” A narrow escape for the one-armed Powell, whose only complaints about his disability came when he would climb a canyon wall and get into a position where he couldn’t release the grip of his one hand without falling, and had to ask for help from his crew to get down.
We ate lunch looking across at the purple buttes beyond the far rim, “Robbers Roost country,” Al said. “That’s where Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch hid out. When I was growing up, I knew people who swore they’d seen Butch Cassidy long after that shootout in Bolivia that was supposed to have killed him. These were people who’d known him before and they recognized him.”
ERIC:
We skirted Gypsum Canyon along a high terrace and camped on a broad plain. As we cooked dinner, we asked Al how his family had come to this country.
The Frosts had been among the first waves of Mormon pioneers, seeking refuge from persecution in the desert that to other emigrants was only an obstacle on the way to the fertile coast.
“My father homesteaded 320 acres just east of Monticello. He broke new land out of the sagebrush flats and farmed it. We had a milk cow or two, a team of horses, and a wagon. Had little wheat crops every year. We were just poor as a church mouse. So was everybody else—we didn’t realize we were poor. We had enough to eat and that was about all.
“After the Great Depression hit, much of the land in San Juan County was sold for taxes. To get rid of this land, the county commission sold it for a dollar an acre with ten years to pay. It was so cheap, we bought as much as we could.
“I grew up working for Dad for nothing. I never once was paid a wage till after I was married, when I was twenty-seven. When we finally split up Dad’s company, for my share I took all the land I could possibly get.
“Then for three years in a row, we had good crops. The price of wheat was the highest it’s been, and I was able to put a lot of money away. I never had to borrow money to put my crop in, then sell it when the price was low to pay back the loan. I could always wait until I could get a good price, and that has made all the difference.”
Al had also been a river guide and a member of the state legislature. He’d run cattle and prospected for uranium and gold. And he was the only person I’ve ever heard say that farming wasn’t a hard way to make a living.
“I made sure we never had any animals on the place. It’s animals that need constant attention. I just raised winter wheat. You’d sow it in the fall and harvest it the next summer. You wouldn’t have to do anything in the winter”...
ELLEN:
It was now the morning of the sixth day of a “five days at the most” backpacking trip, so we were down to our leftover rations, thrown in the pack in case of emergency. For breakfast we mixed instant rice with the last of our oatmeal. “Not bad at all,” said Sam. A unanimous verdict.
A chill wind was blowing and clouds were piling up in thick folded layers like cake batter pouring into a pan. We hurried through Beef Basin, a summer cattle range where cowboys had made “brush corrals” from huge tumbleweed balls to fence in their cows after roundups. We saw herds of deer, and then our first human. We were stopped at a spring when a pickup bounced down the jeep tracks we were following.
I found myself in the middle of the road, arms spread, blocking the way. “This is a holdup,” I announced to the mustache under the cowboy hat. “Give us some bread.” A semi-comic, semi-serious hunger-crazed impulse, something I’d never think of doing in the city, where the driver might take my threat seriously and reach for his glove compartment gun.
This driver acquiesced with a wide smile, as if he encountered a wild-eyed stickup artist every week. He passed out a loaf of bread, then apples, graham crackers, and granola. He was there to provide a food drop for a National Outdoor Leadership School group on a month-long winter survival course. We hoped he still had plenty for the students. “Sure, I know you,” he said when Al walked up to introduce himself. “I’ve heard lots of stories about you.”
Everybody probably had amazing Al stories, I thought. He reminded me of physicists I’d known, still boyish in their seventies and eighties because of their enthusiastic curiosity. Rounding the next bend, heading up that unexplored canyon, seeing beyond that mysterious butte—that’s what kept Al young and strong.
He led us around a ridge of knobby buttes and onto a high plain. I stuck close, not wanting to miss any intriguing details of this morning’s lecture. He was a modern version of the intrepid explorer Jim Bridger, who, according to one biographer, “could read and recognize signs made by any critter on four legs or two, readily determine the sex, age, gait, and often the purpose of any animal whose trail he picked up.”
The marks in the dusty roads looked like hieroglyphics to us but to Al they were a newsreel. “All these deer tracks we’ve seen have been moving in one direction down the trail. It’s like they’re moving out of the high country to better pastures. And they’re moving fast too, look at the distance between prints—they’re not just walking. No, they’re moving right through the country. You know, you can tell a deer trail from a cattle trail because the deer move directly, on the shortest path. Cattle meander.” Farther along, more traffic records: kit fox, mountain lion, and rabbit.
Al showed us how to find waterpockets, the little round scoured potholes where rainwater collects. Soil had collected in some of them, and the smooth white sheets of rock were dotted with circular green gardens. Even when dry and dusty, these bowls are home to potential animal life waiting for the rain, their equivalent of the prince’s kiss on Sleeping Beauty’s cheek. Adult toads encased in protective mucous sacks, emaciated gnat larvae down to eight percent of their normal body weight, twenty-five-year-old fairy shrimp eggs, all lying dormant until rain fills their waterpockets and animates them.
I’d dubbed pinyon pines “desert drugstores” because of Al’s tips: “You can make a bandage from that tree. Just make a ball from that pale resin, then cover it with sand so it won’t be too sticky. You can use the clear golden stuff for gum—it’ll make your teeth clean and shiny.”
Back up on the mesa, he’d warned, “Don’t walk on those little black mounds.” Thrusting up from the red mesa earth like frost crystals, those crusty lumps were cryptogamic soil, a delicate two-inch layer of fungi, lichen, algae, and moss. Deceivingly important because their threadlike roots soak up water and weave the loose sand into soil, these networks can be destroyed in a careless step, just like alpine tundra plants.
Our next campsite overlooked Bobby’s Hole, another of those irregular breaks in the fractured landscape. Clouds and halo had dissolved, and the low sun fired up the colors in the deep red rock canyon below and orange beehive rocks above. The Henry Mountains and the rim of the Colorado River, topped with Gunsight Butte and other apparitions, lay to the west, silhouetted in overlays of pale to deep purple.
To make the most of the short daylight we always hiked up to the moment the sun dipped below the horizon, which was also the moment the temperature plummeted like a rock from a canyon rim. It felt as if we lost twenty degrees the instant the light dimmed. I always dreaded my first task when we set up camp: Expose my shivering skin as I peeled off my sweat-dampened hiking clothes and replaced them with heavy layers, starting with expedition-weight thermal underwear. That night, despite layers on top of layers, I sat huddled in a crouch, clutching my hot mug to denumb my freezing fingers.
Meanwhile Eric and Sam were comfortably sprawled, bare-headed, parkas still stowed, oblivious to the temperature—as usual, ten degrees of latitude to the south of me.
ERIC:
On the last morning of our backpack we walked through a valley golden as a California hillside, flat for its hundred yards across, low cliffs of faulted slabs and rifts on each side, a wide tunnel that pulled our eyes like a well-composed painting toward the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park several miles ahead.
The Needles loomed like mosque minarets and Russian Orthodox onion domes, only irregular, like the castle towers children make by squeezing wet sand through their fingers. They were several hundred feet high, striped red and cream. We entered a dense group of pinnacles and fins, one last unique enclosed world.
We could never have found our way through the twists, ledges, and jumbles without the rock cairns. The trail passed through crevices so narrow our packs scraped the sides. We wedged ourselves through one slot and emerged into a broad meadow surrounded by pinnacles. We lay on our backs on the soft grass and found shapes—a dog, a turtle, even a backpacker—carved into the sandstone by wind and water. Eventually the trail brought us to the other side of the Needles, where we’d left our vehicle eight days ago.
Much as we’d been looking forward to this goal, we didn’t want the experience to be over. The end of this remarkable journey meant the end of our time with Al. “Let’s kidnap him,” Ellen said. “I’d like to make him our fourth team member.”
I thought back to a typical scene: sitting on a warm rock, Al with his pack propped up by his walking stick in a way that made a pretty good easy chair. Under his white cowboy hat, his steel-gray eyes squinted across Beef Basin: “Those are the Sweet Alice Hills. Soon as I get back from this trip, I’m going to get my brother and head out there. There’s a cache of gold that a friend of my father’s told me about, so I figure it’s about time to go look for it.”
He paused in story-teller style long enough for us to ask for the details.
“My father’s friend was working as a cowboy. One day he saw some marks on trees that led him down into a wash. In the bottom of the wash, a little square hole had been dynamited out. It was all covered with sand, but he could see just a corner of it. He dug the sand out and saw what looked to him like gold bars.
“You see, the Wild Bunch would do that sometimes, bury their booty. Gold would be too heavy for them to carry, and they might be pursued, so they’d find a hiding place for it so they could get away, then come back for it someday. He figured that this might be one of those caches. He tried to pry the bars out with a stick, but he couldn’t get them to move. He figured he’d just come back the next day with a pick.
“But that night the rancher he worked for said they were going to start moving cows the next day. So he was busy all the next day and every day for the rest of the season. He got a job somewhere else, and one thing or another kept coming up, and he never made it back.
“Many years later, he and my father went up there on horses. They rode around all day, and he finally was starting to recognize the landmarks. But it was getting dark and they had to head back. My father had to be home the next day, and they never made it back up there.
“But he told me the story many times, and I know all the landmarks. So, as soon as I get back, I’m going to get Kent and we’ll go look for it.”
“Why haven’t you been out to look for it before?”
“Same thing. Things come up. You don’t get around to it. But I’m going to get Kent and find it.”
It was the classic lost gold mine story. If it’s not a case of someone dying before they can give directions, it’s people never getting around to going back—though you’d think that would be their first priority. Seventy-six-year-old Al was ready to go off hunting for gold, though we doubt he’d know what to do with it if he found it. He’d rather be out hiking than sitting in a mansion.
For us, our trip with Al was treasure enough...