Summer is the time of storms in the deserts of much of the Southwest, just as it is the time of intense heat. Except for its mountainous areas, the Southwest receives most of its meager precipitation in this way. The weather systems that form the thunderstorms of summer are thus vital to the cycle of desert life, and were they ever to fail, so, too, would most of what lives in these dry regions.

When desert updrafts meet this moist Gulf air, they carry it skyward into cooler altitudes, where the moisture condenses into white, decorative cumulus clouds reminiscent of cauliflowers. If the air is sufficiently moist, the clouds can grow in height, becoming "towering cumulus" clouds. And if the updraft is strong, the air more saturated with moisture, and the differential in temperature between warm updraft and cool upper air sufficiently great, then you have all of the necessary elements to create a cumulonimbus cloud - also known as a potential thunderstorm.

I did not visit the ruins of Kin Bineola the night I arrived nearby, but made camp and turned in instead. August is the month of thunderstorms in the Southwest, and especially in New Mexico. By midafternoon, the anvil shapes of thunderheads were spreading in the four corners of the sky, and not long thereafter grey skirts of rain began their slow descent to the parched earth beneath them. Thunder rumbled richly across the valley, and the sky acquired a rich assemblage of angry grey clouds, towering ivory domes blushed with gold by the setting sun, and a double rainbow arching overall.

So there was naught to do but rig my ground sheet up as a rough lean-to against a barbed wire fence, and listen to the pit-pit-patter-pit of rain from dusk to midnight as the occasional thunderstorm struck a glancing blow, scattering droplets via gusty winds as it passed in the night, and illuminating the valley floor in sudden bursts of light as it rumbled by.

I'm currently hiking and camping in Nevada and Utah, which explains this off-topic post. I'll continue to cover big news when I'm able to access email, and will also upload and time-phase these entries for posting when I come into town for gas and supplies. To find more of this type of writing based on past trips, look to the folder link at left titled Not Here but There: A Wilderness Journal.

When you think of spectacular Native American ruins, you're likely to first envision the magnificent cliff houses of Mesa Verde, and their cousins in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. But there are less-well known and equally dramatic sites that can be found near the intersection of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, with the grandest to be found in and near Chaco Canyon.

 These buildings were constructed at the same time as the cliff houses, but they are more mysterious. While Mesa Verde and the other cliff ruins in canyons throughout the region were clearly once habitations, the purpose(s) of the "Great Houses" of Chaco Canyon is ambiguous. For example, they contain many rooms, like the cliff houses, and the circular kiva chambers as well. But unlike the cliff dwellings, fireplaces and granaries are very few. If they were dwellings, then, where did they cook? And where did they store their food?

Many archaeologists today therefore believe that the Great Houses of Chaco were not full-time dwellings, but rather some sort of cultural centers, acting as gathering places for a more distributed population. This, despite the great size of the buildings, with hundreds of rooms, and their impressive height - some are as tall as five stories. Indeed, the buildings raised by the Chaco culture were among the largest buildings in the world at their time. And like the cliff dwellings, they were all built – and then abandoned - at roughly the same time. 

The next day, I walked across a loop of the canyon to watch the sun probe in its depths to find the river, and this time could listened to the twittering of swallows plunging and soaring against the northern wall of the canyon, riding the updraft formed as it warmed in the sun. Again and again, a bird would suddenly wheel and dive, catching a meal as a hapless insect was wafted upwards from the safety of the shadows, and betrayed when its sparkling wings caught the sun. 

The single dirt track that branches off the road in from the north leads to the Lava Falls trailhead, which zigzags drops precipitously from the edge of the canyon, and drops rapidly down to the river, a half a mile below. The name of the trail derives from what must have been a spectacular event of only a few thousand years ago, when a lava flow cascaded in a flood of fire over the brink, presumably damning the Colorado far below in a cloud of steam. Over time, the force of the backed up river would have worn the dam away, or perhaps more cataclysmically torn it apart.

The first part of the name explains itself, given that most of the area lies in Arizona, although in fact the Strip extends up into southern Utah, and a bit west into Nevada as well. The feature that explains its emptiness is the nature of its border to the west and the south: the Grand Canyon – a gulf that along this lengthy stretch has not as yet been (and I hope will never be) violated by a bridge or adjacent highway.  In consequence, you can only reach the Strip from the north and east, and only then via one of a small number of dirt roads. For that matter, there's not much to be found to the east, either. Only to the north are there any towns at all. 

The emptiness of the Arizona Strip is also due to the fact that it is almost exclusively public land in all of the popular western flavors (National Park, National Monument, State Park, and the balance under the supervision of the Bureau of Land Management). At its greatest extent, the Strip is 150 miles wide, and almost as many again from north to south, and nowhere in that vast expanse can you find a single paved road. No paved roads, and no towns, gas stations or even running water, either  –  but a great deal of quietly (and often spectacularly) beautiful country can be enjoyed wherever you go.

It had been six long weeks since I returned from a backcountry trip to Utah, and six exhausting weeks at that.  Thoroughly drained, it was high time to leave my demons behind (or try to), and seek comfort in the clean fall air of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.    

Saturday morning found me not on a trail that would lead to the dramatic viewpoints popular at peak-foliage time, but instead on one that would thread the valleys between the peaks, meander past beaver ponds, and eventually bring me back to my point of departure, suitably (I hoped) refreshed.  

The landscape I explored all that day proved to be unexpectedly spectral, haunted by the shadows of countless thousands of dead birches that loomed above a maturing understory of hemlock, spruce and maple.  The explanation for their presence was not hard to guess:  birch is a "pioneer" species with small, easily wind-borne seeds that sprout into seedlings that not only tolerate, but demand bright sunlight to survive.  Throughout the west, aspens are the opportunists that retake the clearings.  But in these northeastern woods, it is birch that is most likely to colonize areas burned by fire, or (like this) clearcut by man. 

But birch is not a long-lived tree.  The thousands of pioneers that together sprouted on these mountainsides a century ago had now together died, their reforesting mission accomplished.  In the years that followed, their twigs rotted and dropped, and then their larger branches.  Now, like hapless lepers, they raised only blunted limbs to the sky.

After ten days of staying off the beaten track in Arizona and Utah, I decided to make an exception and visit a few of the slot canyons for which this part of the country is justly famous. Like many other visitors to the Grand Staircase of the Escalante National Monument,I chose Dry Forks Coyote Gulch, a drainage in the southeast corner of the Monument, into which three slot canyons empty in rapid succession: Peekaboo, Spooky, and Brimstone.

Upstream of where the trail enters, Dry Gulch itself becomes a slot canyon that can be followed for miles. Anywhere else, it would be an attraction in its own right, but its easy, winding path pales in comparison to the drama of the serpentine, and sometimes almost impassable, corridors of its more famous tributary slots.

Although I had not seen a soul in a week of wanderings in the Escalante, there were already three vehicles at the trailhead when I arrived early in the morning; there were three more by the time I left. And no surprise, because each of the slot canyons that can be accessed less than a mile from the trailhead is spectacular in its own right.

Like most visitors, I scaled Peekaboo first. The canyon enters from the north, emerging as a narrow cleft ten feet up the stone wall of the main canyon. After clambering up (using handholds) the canyon wall, and then up and over a modest pouroff, you work your way gradually uphill for .25 miles, past fins, dry whirlpools and modest pouroffs, looking up on occasion through arches that span the narrow canyon. At times, you need not only all of your arms and legs, but your back (and some ingenuity) as well to span, brace and lift yourself up and over obstructions. Eventually you emerge into the gravelly wash above, from which it's less than a half-mile hike due east to reach the next wash, which almost immediately dives down into the bedrock to form Spooky - the second slot canyon.

You have been warned
Entire text of a sign on a Lake District mountain road

Safe backcountry driving is one part experience and three parts caution and good sense. If you exercise the latter, there's no reason to get into trouble while acquiring the former. In this installment I'll provide some rules to keep in mind to keep you out of trouble, as well as offer some practical driving tips for driving in the southwest. While I'm hardly an expert or professional driver, I have driven several thousand miles of unpaved backcountry roads over the past ten years, and pass along what I've observed in that time for you to test on your own.

The first thing to keep in mind is that once you leave a paved road, you should assume that you're on your own. Cell phones will rarely work, and the more isolated your destination, the less likely it is that anyone is going to happen by to help if you're stuck, broken down, or out of gas. As a result, it's up to you to avoid any of those things happening, and it's also up to you to make the type of preparations that will get you out of a fix if you end up in one anyway.