My friend Dan and I know the quote through Edward Abbey, and Abbey apparently rather Biblified the language, but it was, it turns out, Friedrich Nietzsche who said that "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."  Neither Dan nor I have ever been much at resisting that temptation:


Desert12 01

Oh, we found an abyss, all right, a wonderful one, new to us both, a fantastic introduction (way better, than, say, Dan's luggage going on walkabout on the way to Montana) to our latest desert stompings.  This is . . . you know, I'm not going to tell you.  If you'd really like to know, ask.  No sense blabbing it to the riffraff.  It's somewhere in Utah.  It is, in any case, a delightful spectacular uncrowded spot, and a great place for the obligatory self-portrait-in-shadow-(with-rainbow) shot:


Desert12 03

We stayed there two nights—two long, silent nights, one of the magical things about this place being that it is, somehow, unbelievably, miraculously, NOT under a commercial jet flight path.  Such silence.  Such blissful silence.  Then on down the road, southward, to a different sort of rock:


Desert12 13

The next morning, Dan inspects the local scenery (see him out there?) and finds it to be quite large:


Desert12 17

Then down the road again, this time to the Hole in the Rock road, across the Grand Staircase-Escalante (or Grand Staircase Grand Staircase, according to Dan's translation of the Spanish) National Monument.  Gus discovered that treed lizards will stay treed forever as long as you don't blink,


Desert12 19

we abandoned one campsite for excessive numbers of ants and cow pies but blundered in the dark into an excellent alternative


Desert12 20

in vast, vast country.  How vast?  See two giant white Ford diesel pickups in this shot?  They're in there. You might have to click through to the larger version:


Desert12 21

At the end of the Hole in the Rock Road (57 miles of good gravel, bad gravel, good dirt, bad dirt, and occasionally pretty damned bad dirt, in that order, from the highway at Escalante, Utah) is, duh, Hole in the Rock.  A testament to Mormon perseverance and ingenuity, or to full-blown religion-driven insanity, or both, this is a crack in the rock which Mormon "pioneers" "improved" (blasting, carving steps, setting timbers) to the point at which they could (successfully! miraculously!) get 80+ wagons, many people, and a lot of cows and horses down to and across the river and over to Bluff.  What remains is one amazing, challenging hike, with a lovely swim in "Lake" Powell at the cool and easy end and a shadeless sunblasted white-rock furnace at the hot and difficult one.  So well worth it.  Gus did incredibly well.  Photo credit to Dan.  Dan is an excellent photographer and can no more capture the verticality of a shot like this than can anybody else.  It's freaking steep.


Hole In Rock Dan

(And this is out of order, but I have to put this photo in: Gus, altogether amazing—"the best dog everrrrr," according to Dan—did have one episode in which his feet just got too hot to walk anymore.  So I carried him . . .)


Desert12 44

And, in fact, with that interruption in the such-as-it-was narrative, I'm going to call this entry long enough.  There are a bunch more photos in a set on Flickr, and I'll be happy to explain/excuse/exaggerate as you might like on any of those photos if you post requests for same here.

For almost twenty years my good friend Dan and I have stomped our good desert.  All parties concerned are older, somewhat the worse for wear, and damned fine, thank you!

No, wait.  One more.  Gus, the Lizard King:


Desert12 30