I'm cruising at a comfortable 40 miles per hour along the main highway through desert's paradise, Arches National Park. After passing by the monuments in Courthouse Towers and crossing the wash, the road slopes upward as I trace along the Great Wall, with all of its mysterious box canyons, cracks, and hanging valleys, towards Balanced Rock. The highest elevation in the park is Elephant Butte in the Windows Section, and the highway crests at the turnoff by Ham Rock, which due to its elevation and central location, is visible in most areas of the park (I like to think of Ham Rock, perched majestically on its sandstone pedestal, as a silent yet watchful observer of all activity in the park--the Sausage Sentinel, or Pork Protector, take your pick). Here, the road starts to fall sharply into the Salt Valley, and it is at this point that the first views of the intricate maze of spires and fins called the Fiery Furnace offer hints of the adventure to come.
I remember driving this segment of road as a child with my father, who, as a natural tenor, would at this point furrow his brow, scrunch up his chin, and lower his voice as far as he could, and sing:
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh! That Fiery Furnace!
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh! Begin to pray!
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh! That Fiery Furnace!
Get ready brethren for the judgement day!
Those lyrics, meant to inspire fear into the heart of the listener, always filled me with a sudden rush of youthful joy, because it meant we were heading into the heart of one of the most perfectly-proportioned and colorful playgrounds on earth--a sanctuary where within the walled boundaries of a few square miles there is more than enough of the unexpected, the intricate, the intense, and the intriguing to seduce and ultimately submerge the mind of a boy and his father in a state of hypnotic adventure for a few precious hours.
Not that this adventure can or should be available to the public at large--access to the Fiery Furnace is restricted to ranger-led tours twice daily, or by special permit for those of us who prefer to penetrate the maze independently. Before the park service implemented these restrictions, folks would attempt to wander into the fins themselves, trampling the landscape and usually getting lost, creating dozens of false trails that lead to dead-ends and dropoffs. So the park service put up a gate near the main canyon to keep people out. The only trouble is that most people got lost before they ever found the gate, resulting in more trampling, more false trails, and more landscape degredation. I'm glad the current access rules are in place, and I'm glad that the "true" trail remains unobvious and slightly difficult, because otherwise such a small area of wilderness would quickly be overrun by the millions of tourists who now visit Arches National Park each year. The experience would be like hiking to Delicate Arch in the afternoon, completely devoid silence and solitude, except that instead of a steady flow of people up and down a well-marked trail on slickrock, there would be a continual mass of movement in and out of every nook and cranny of the maze, creating one big trail, deviod of vegetation, covering all the open dirt in any direction you looked. It would be transformed from a fragile, living ecosystem to a dead, dry landscape like the moon, like Goblin Valley.
I still remember, as a young boy, the first time we participated in a ranger walk through the Fiery Furnace. The ranger was friendly and seemed knowlegeable. He told us about the ravens, desert mice, rabbits, hawks, lizards, and snakes that make the maze their home. He showed us a stunted, twisted, two-foot tall pinyon pine tree growing stubbornly out of a small crack in the naked bedrock, and said that they didn't know how old it was, but estimated that it could be several decades old. He impressed upon my young mind the fragile beauty of the place. Everything is in a delicate balance, from life forms pushing the extreme limits of their existence, to the monolithic sandstone fins and balanced rocks, which slowly erode, grain by grain, until they crumble into rockpiles and are pulverized into sand dunes. It is an ancient place, a shrine to the world which civilization has not yet razed and covered with concrete.
We took the tour twice before my Dad decided to wander into the labyrinth with me and my brother unaided. With two hikes under his belt, a watch, and sunny sky, he had a pretty good idea of at least how to figure out the general direction the parking lot based on shadow directions, from any point along our hike. If you stick to the ranger loop trail in the Fiery Furnace, you are never more than about 3/4 mile from the parking lot as the raven flies, but crossing that distance on foot is the real trick. We attempted the loop trail in the counter-clockwise direction, the same as the rangers lead it, and managed to make it through about two thirds of the route before becoming lost--pretty good for our first attempt. The particular segment where Dad finally got stumped happens to be one of those places, so common in Arches National Park, where the only way to penetrate the current obstacle is the least obvious way when scanning the area for possible routes from more than ten feet back. To the left, the current ground-level rock melted into a series of short fins which all ended abruptly in twenty-foot dropoffs--a possible route if you were desperate and could crawl out with a broken leg, but not a feasible solution with two small boys. To the right, a series of fins ran parallel to the fin we just crossed through and the one we were trying to penetrate. There were multiple paths to attempt in that direction, but none of them looked familiar, and they all took us farther away from the exit. Nearly straight ahead and to the right, a thin, unlikely crack, partially obscured by shadow, led the way through the fin into the next segment of the trail, but this key remained hidden from us.
The sun was sinking in the afternoon sky, and my brother and I were getting tired. Dad decided that rather than attempt to backtrack (we had never taken the trail in reverse before, and decided that this was not the time to try), it would be best to just make our way in the general direction of the parking lot and hope for the best. This meant we needed to attempt to scale down the cliffs to the left. Upon close-up inspection, he discovered that one of the fins ended about five feet above where a small arch had formed in the adjacent fin, and that it would be possible to lower small children into that hole and break up the vertical trip into two segments. I remember the trepidation I felt as he helped me edge down the slope towards the dropoff and then swing over into that arch, which offered only a small shelf to sit on, with ten foot cliffs on either side. He managed to scale down the wall using the same hole, and somehow was able to help us down the rest of the way. Thankfully, the walk out from that point on was relatively straightforward. We had discovered an alternate navigable route into and out of the main body of the maze, aside from what the rangers had previously shown us.
After more attempts and more experience, we discovered that the official route through the Fiery Furnace was easier to navigate in the clockwise direction, backwards from way we had first done it. This became our family standard and we have done the hike dozens of times this way. Since the ranger trail only circumnavigates about a quarter of the total Fiery Furnace area, going backwards also has the distinct advantage of heading north first to the area that provides the easiest access to the areas in the Fiery Furnace that are not part of the trail, when we are still fresh at the beginning of our hikes. These expeditions have revealed dramatic arches hanging high in a hundred-foot cliff faces, slot canyons that work their way into and out of the sandstone fins, occasional breathtaking drop-offs and lots of climbing and backtracking. We have encountered rattle snakes and poison ivy, walked on top of the world, and descended deep into the earth on past trips through the fins.
The clockwise route is the one we will take today. My sister Chelse and brother Todd and his wife Shayla are with me. It has been breezy today, and the wind has been gusting periodically, blowing salmon-colored sand everywhere. The grit is in my hair, and also slightly crusted around my eyes and mouth. The shade and shelter of the Fiery Furnace fins will be welcome relief for Todd, who wears contacts, as well as the rest of us.
I must admit that the rangers have done such an admirable job of making the trail hard to track that the false trails through the sand often are more prominent than the official trail over slickrock, and I frequently lose the path momentarily while making my way towards the crude stairs that lead up into the opening in the cliff that eventually leads up into heart of the sandstone.
Today, with three new recruits under my wing who have been freshly indoctrinated at the Visitor's Center with the importance of staying on official trials, slickrock or wash bottoms, I am determined to stick to the trail all the way in. Which of course, means that today I got lost on the way in, an accomplishment that has not happened in years. Going against my better judgement, at a fork I followed the more established path which headed in the opposite direction of our goal. This time I didn't just lose the trail, but ended up in a totally new canyon that I had never before explored, a complete dead-end.
Having thus inspired confidence as the leader of our little party, I told them "Ha ha, I often lose the trail on the way in. I promise that once we find our way into the maze I can get us through." Of this fact I am sure. I have been through the fiery furnace over two dozen times, and I have a partial mental map of the area. However, at points along the way the path twists and winds so much, and there are so many possible routes (many of which I have taken at one time or another), that it is hard to formulate a complete map and I inevitably end up having to stop, think, and regain my bearings before I remember which way to go on. And if I take a wrong turn, we often encounter dramatic drop-offs that would have been a shame to miss anyway.
We follow a dry wash bottom along the base of the outer canyon, over a boulder pile, and up to the makeshift staircase that ascends up into the fins. At the top of the fins, we look back and can see the valley in front of the parking lot for the last time before we emerge from the other side of the sandstone jungle.
I scramble up a small ledge to the right of a drop-off. This one is only about ten feet; enough to produce a sprained ankle, but not enough to invoke that shimmering feeling that my stomach uses to cue my brain that I had better watch my feet carefully. This ledge is easily walkable, and a stained footpath has been worn across the bare rock by the years of ranger-led tours to this small dead-end canyon. I say dead-end, and it is for the tour. But there are ways around most obstacles in the Fiery Furnace for those with a little drive and an adventurous spirit, and this canyon has been the starting point of many prior adventures.
As I round the corner and look up, suddenly it is there, just where it was the last time I was here, just where it was when the tour came through this morning. It doesn't really matter how many times I have seen it or how many thousands of tourists have also visited this sacred spot; the sudden appearance of that slender ribbon of rock, silhouetted black against the electric blue sky, brings a rush of wonder that is really inexplicable to one who has not seen Surprise Arch in person. I said the arch is black, and it is if I am looking heavenward. Standing under Surprise Arch, I would be in shadow here for 23 hours of the day, at the bottom of a ten-foot-wide crevasse, sandwiched between three-hundred foot sandstone walls.
But if I take my eyes away from the celesial blue that canvasses the wide-open earth and allow the contrast of the low light of inner-earth to work its way into my nerves, the true wonder of Surprise Arch gradually reveals itself: it is not an extinguished, spent, charcoal log, but rather a petrified stream of molten fire, living, glowing deep with red and burnt umber, jutting out perpendicular to the streaks of desert varnish that drape over the sheer rock walls, which give them the appearance of frozen smoke and heat rising from a bed of cooking coals. There is incredible energy, down here in the ground.
Since scaling cliffs is not on the agenda today, we turn around and head towards the narrow fissure that cuts diagonally through the large fin to the east, the fissure my Dad failed to recognize coming the other way during our first hike through alone. The fissure becomes so narrow at one point that I have to turn sideways and work my way through with my hands. The cool, solid, gritty sandstone grips my hand and I can feel the individual sand grains fill my fingerprints. The texture of the rock face is wonderful, and I pause to enjoy the raw sensation of cold, petrified earth on my skin. Within an hour or so the continued friction will cause my fingers to swell to the point where they can't close completely without extra effort. This condition, along with the unique smells of juniper and sage and the silence of the sandstone world, is part of the desert solitaire experience. As my fingers swell I sink deeper into the heavenly hypnosis of the Fiery Furnace.
Before I emerge from the fissure, I pause to admire a strange section on the wall that has been carved and hollowed into layers of oval cavities, the larger ones about the size of a golf ball, with smaller ones carved into the otherwise smooth edges of the larger ones. Swiss cheese within swiss cheese. I don't know what specific properties of this section of sandstone allow such weathering, but my Dad told me years ago that "rock-peckers," distant cousins of common wood-peckers, were the culprits.
|
