At the motel desk, I bumped into Thirsty Boots, an older hiker I hadn’t seen
since Southern California. He said he was leaving the trail due to a foot
injury. I liked him, and wished him well on his journey home.
There was a snafu at the
front desk with regards to my package – it wasn’t there. I called my wife
and asked her if she sent it out on time, and she assured me she did; in fact,
she had a tracking number that said it had been delivered to the post office
the day before. Bottom line, the motel owners hadn’t gone to the post
office to pick up hiker packages. The post office was next door to the
motel, and I went there and retrieved the box.
There were chores to do
in town, and I had to hurry to get everything accomplished – shower, laundry,
sort through the resupply box and repack the contents into the backpack, visit
to the grocery store for additional supplies, namely milk, cookies and
chocolate pudding, and a haircut. Strangely enough, there were no barber
shops in Mammoth Lakes, only salons. I found one by the grocery store and
walked in. I asked the counter clerk how much for a three-minute buzz,
knowing full well that a custom salon haircut can run as high as twenty-five
dollars. She shouted to one of the hair stylists my request, and the
answer came back - ten dollars. I accepted the offer, and five minutes
later I walked out with a buzz that would last me until I crossed into Canada.
I’d been on the road
eight days, ever since leaving Independence, and getting a shower and putting
on clean clothes put new life into a journey that was getting old quick.
I only stayed in town
one night while some hikers will stay two, but as always, I felt the urge to
keep moving. Before leaving the next morning, I searched out a restaurant
and ordered the biggest breakfast I could find on the menu. I was amazed
at how much food I was consuming, yet still losing weight. I must be
feeding a tapeworm.
By 11:00 a.m., I was
standing next to the Mammoth Lakes Ski Resort trying to hitch a ride back to
Red’s Meadow. With me were two other hikers – both in their midfifties –
Lucky Man and Purple Haze. Within a few minutes, a couple stopped and
offered to take all three of us back to the trailhead at Red’s Meadow.
Lucky Man and I decide
we had to have a chocolate milk shake before getting back on the trail, so we
headed back to the café at Red’s Meadow, while Purple Haze headed on up the
trail. The shake was delicious, and under the circumstance worth it, but at
eight dollars, it was the most expensive milk shake I would have on the trail.
I like to read maps, as
well as study them. I have an REI store close to my home in Salt Lake
City, and one of my favorite pastimes when I’m in the store, is to go to the
map section and pull out various topo maps and figure out how to access an area
I might like to visit.
Southern Utah is a hiker’s paradise, but it takes
a good topo map and knowledge of how to read it to take advantage of all that
the red-rock canyons have to offer. Often trails don’t exist, only
landmarks, which are like cairns that show the way across slickrock sandstone –
a prominent knoll here, a water hole there, a dry streambed that leads to the
head of a canyon where piled-up rocks that look like a staircase will give
access to ledges above.
Navajo Mountain and Rainbow Bridge
In 1958, as a boy scout
in Glen Canyon, now Lake Powell, I found a little-used trail that continued
under Rainbow Bridge and into unknown canyons. While the rest of my group
played in the waters beneath the bridge, I followed the trail upstream, to see
what was around the next bend. The trail followed beside the stream that
eventually flowed under the bridge.
About a mile into my exploration, I
came to a wide spot in the trail that at one time was the site of a
well-established camp. I found the remnants of wooden floors, bed
springs, stud walls, sheepherder stoves and assorted trash – rusted cans and
bottles – evidence that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to establish an
elaborate rest area for campers or tourists. I counted the remains of four
wooden floors and concluded that the camp could have accommodated twelve to
sixteen campers plus guides.
I was quite certain that whoever used this
camp hadn’t accessed it by the river, for in 1958, scouts were about the only
passengers that floated the Colorado River, and besides, it was a seven-mile
hike from the river to the bridge. From stories I’d heard from our
leaders around the campfires in the evening, I learned about Navajo Mountain,
and concluded that this camp and its visitors had to have come from the Navajo
Mountainside of the Colorado River. It was a mystery and remained so for
many years.
Sometime in the
mid-1980s, after I was well established as a river outfitter, I read an article
in the local paper about a horseback trip that had departed from the Rainbow
Lodge adjacent to the Navajo Mountain Trading Post and traveled to Rainbow
Bridge. The article went on to explain that the trip had been put
together by a local outfitter to commemorate and recreate pack trips that had
made regular excursions to Rainbow Bridge beginning in the 1920s and continuing
through the 1950s, until the lodge burned down in 1951.
This was part of
an old trail that prominent people like Zane Grey – western outdoor novel
writer, and Teddy Roosevelt had traveled to view Rainbow Bridge in 1913. After
reading the newspaper article, I took a week off from the office and traveled
to the Navajo reservation and followed the dirt roads out to the trading post
at Navajo Mountain which was now more of a convenience store that sold gas.
The Rainbow Lodge had
been rebuilt, and I met the current owner, a cattle rancher from Kanab, Utah.
He told me that after Rainbow Bridge had been discovered in 1909,
interest in visiting the bridge increased dramatically. He said that S.I.
Richardson and his son, Cecil, built the trading post and lodge in 1924, and
began offering tours to the bridge via horseback. It was fourteen miles
one way, and the Richardsons built two camps along the route to accommodate
clients – one at seven miles along the trail, and the other at the end of the
trail, just before the trail opened up to views of the bridge. The
remains of this second camp are what I discovered as a fourteen-year-old boy in
1958. Mystery solved.
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