Candice Gaukel Andrews

    The American West. Right away you picture open plains, deep canyons, and starting over. What is it about going "West" that has always meant hope in the American psyche, as if a new beginning could be had just by heading toward the right compass direction? Horace Greeley is often credited with John Soule's quote "Go West, young man." It soon became a mantra for nineteenth-century Americans, when things didn't work out quite the way they planned farther east.
    It follows that there is something in the landscape of the West that suggests to all of us a sense of hope and renewal. The West is characterized by vast plains that spread out as far as you can see and so many stars in the night skies that possibilities - like the Milky Way itself - seem endless.  
    In September, I left my Wisconsin home to take an eight-day guided trip to the West to see if I could find hope pictured in that iconic landscape. On my climb up the Grand Staircase, I would cross the Colorado Plateau and stop at three canyons: Bryce, Zion, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Fresh in my mind were the images we've all grown up with; photos in magazines and books of sunlit mountain peaks, and four-color spreads of red-rock cliffs, cowboys, cattle herds, and campfires. The West.

Bryce Canyon National Park.
    I found out quite quickly that I'm a flat-lander. The altitude here on the Colorado Plateau is giving me a headache, making it hard for me to sleep at night, and leaving me breathless with the slightest effort. The dryness is another shock to my system. My throat is perpetually scratchy and my skin is cracking. It's like my own private battle with the West over water rights; this country is pulling out every last drop of my body's moisture.
    Driving up into the Dixie National Forest, breath is even harder to find because the look of the landscape itself takes it away. It is so beautiful here that I'm sure words for describing this holy ground will never be allowed. I can feel the water-sculpted holes in the soaring rock towers suck in the words I try to form, as if they're being drawn out of me and circled down a drain quickly, before they can be voiced. I can almost see the words my dry throat can't utter washing down the canyons like boulders and lying in the bottom of rocky gorges. The Dixie National Forest has 1.8 million acres for my words to get lost in, to sink lower in, as I climb higher.
    At seven thousand feet and still climbing, the trees are dressed in a golden yellow at this time of year. Soon their leaves will fall, and the mule deer will go lower. Everything is being sucked down, it seems, but I still climb up. I see other trees, fallen and horizontal, walking down the slopes like the deer.
    At mid morning, I pass out of Ponderosa pine and into scrub oak. I see the notch in the skyline for Red Canyon in the distance; is it a notch where my words will finally catch and find form?
    The Paiutes have a legend about hoodoos and fins, such as those that stand in Bryce Canyon. They are really people that Coyote, the Trickster, has turned into stone. Legend people. I think Coyote has tricked me; my words are stones, heavy, unable to roll off my tongue.
    I take the trail that goes down among the hoodoos of Bryce. On the narrow path, they are so close and so red and so real. Looking up, they shoot into the air. Their shapes change with every tilt of the head or lean of the body. Some people see castles or animals in these fantastic formations, but I see eons of words; old, forgotten words, in a language not remembered, imprisoned in stone, waiting to be released again. Colors are richer in the cool shadows at the bottom; more vibrant.
    I make one last stop in Bryce at the Bristlecone Loop Trail. My guide spots a flammulated owl; an animal he has never seen and says he may never see again. The walk through the forested loop is filled with dead trees. I could not help but stop and feel the bones of one - a grandfather, with a trunk as smooth as silk, who still walks the Earth.
    In Bryce, I have seen the ancient ones of stone and the skeletons of grandfather trees, but I cannot say that I have seen hope.

Zion National Park.
    The stones of Zion are so different. The narrow hoodoos characteristic of Bryce give way to gigantic slabs of rock in this "place of refuge." The atmosphere is definitely different here. These massive monoliths protect and enfold, unlike the stones of Bryce that take and take.
    Among the tallest sandstone cliffs in the world, prickly pear cacti and Hopi blanket flowers bloom. Watching the sun paint its touches on the West Temple at 7:00 a.m., I understand why painters and photographers love the light. It selects its beauty. Walking the narrows across the cold Virgin River, the sound of a waterfall and the sight of the dripping rocks are loving companions.
    But Zion, too, demands a payment. The walk up to the Emerald Pools is grueling in the hot sun, and the Virgin River mandates a slow, sure-footedness and requires that I succumb to a walking stick.
    Zion takes my heart, too, the night I walk by moonlight beneath its watchful rocks. Here I find starry, Western skies and even the Andromeda Galaxy. But even this is not the "new start," the promise of the West.
    I took the walk because I still can't sleep in this altitude.

Grand Canyon National Park, North Rim.
    It's 5:00 a.m. and just before entering the Grand Canyon, I pass through a ponderosa pine forest. Between the trees, embers flash in the darkness. This is the last smoldering of a forest fire that began in July and burned fifty-nine thousand acres.
    Already, in this newly burned area and in the dim light of dawn, I can see green sprouting through the forest floor. Regrowth starts immediately after a forest fire. Oxygen is being released from the soil. For some reason, here at my lowest point - with only one hour of sleep and a parched throat, I feel like the Walking Dead - I can breathe again.
    Just beyond the burn and climbing still higher, quaking aspen leaves shiver yellow gold in the light of a new day. In these brilliant colors - the burning reds of the embers, the vivid greens of new growth, and the sparkling golds of the trees - and in the reinvigorated air, I can't help but feel promise. A forest growing high on a canyon rim in the September sun is hope manifest.
    I didn't know my quest for "the West" would end in the colors of the trees rather than in the colors of the canyons. I didn't know it would end almost nine thousand feet in the air just short of the deepest canyon of them all. For me, the hope the West stands for really isn't in the open plains and wide skies that we've come to associate with it; hope comes from a burning forest on a high plateau.