Candice Gaukel Andrews | Writer/Author

Travel Essays Table of Contents

Canyons of the American Southwest:
Hope in A High Forest
Canyon Elements

New Zealand:
Searching for the Poets of New Zealand

Patagonia:
Getting Down to the Bones

Canyons of the American Southwest: Hope in A High Forest

    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, 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 59,000 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.

Canyons of the American Southwest: Canyon Elements

Color
Alive with Color

    I've found the place where color lives.
    The canyons of the American West are so infused with color, that the proper names of many of their plants and animals include hues.
    In Utah's Bryce Canyon, tiger salamanders and side-blotched lizards display their notice-me colors on red rocks next to blue spruce. Violet-green swallows fly above golden-mantled ground squirrels. Pink cliffs change tints in the rising and setting sun, while hoodoos are even more saturated with pigments after a rainstorm.
    In Zion Canyon, waterfalls create rainbows above the Emerald Pools. Golden eagles and black phoebes fly to white cliffs that stretch up to a cobalt sky. The yellow strata of Bright Angel Point sear in the sunlight on the Grand Canyon's North Rim.
    I've found the place where gold soars through the air, yellow scampers across rocks, and blue grows up from the ground. I've found a place in living color.

Clay
Pictures and Pots

    Most modern Utah cowboys no longer make their way in the world by moving cattle. Some move land now, as real estate agents, or move among the fake facades of towns, as extras in Western films. Being a cowboy or a rancher or a Native American in a Western film is sometimes easier than actually being those people in the West.
    If you talk to the Utah cowboys long enough, chances are you'll pick up some Real West stories. They'll tell you that James Arness has one leg shorter than the other. Richard Farnsworth was a local rancher, and Wilford Brimley shoed horses. Dale Roberts once had a place just down the road, and Clint Walker is still a neighbor.
    One of those extra cowboys, Ken, has an "Outdoor History Museum" on his holdings. If Ken invites you over and you should find a pottery shard jutting up out of his land or a fired clay splinter trying to hide by lying quietly barely under the dirt, you are welcome to pick it up and examine it. But you must leave it when you go. That piece of pottery that you pick up, Ken says, may have lain there for four hundred years until you held it, just now. The place where you stand could have been an ancient Anasazi pottery-manufacturing site. Or it may have been a place where they smashed their works. Perhaps the shards were once parts of pots that came to provide havens for evil spirits and therefore would have to be destroyed so no one else would use them. Just conjectures and tales he's heard from local Hopis.
    Ken's ranch also harbors petroglyphs on a giant slab of vertical rock; the stories of hunts from eons ago or the etchings of children practicing and playing on walls. Ken speaks of Montezuma's Treasure, but his humor is dry like the land he comes from, and you don't know if he's serious or not. Legend has it that in the 1500s when the Aztec king was killed by his own people in Mexico and the Spanish conquistadors were driven from Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs took their treasure and hid it in this area from the Europeans.
    It could be here, in a clay-footed cowboy's dry treasure land of pictures and pots.

Water
A Fluid Artist

    It is thought that the Colorado River has ribboned across this country since before the Grand Canyon existed. It may be the primary sculptor of the deepness, practicing its art here for more than six million years at an average speed of four miles per hour.
    Some believe that millions of years ago, the Colorado Plateau began to shift and rise. But the river remained and steadily kept cutting its way through the rocky upthrusts. The top layers of sedimentary rock easily gave way to the river knife.
    In nearby Bryce Canyon, the towering pinnacles, spires, citadels, and watchtowers known as "hoodoos" are mostly the result of water erosion. And deep within the neighboring, majestic Zion National Park, the Virgin River slices smoothly through the White and Vermilion Cliffs. The Virgin River, too, has been imagining and creating canyons for millions of years. It is the resident artist who sculpted the enfolding and protective slabs of monolithic rocks that form its canyon walls.
    It was from the Virgin River in 1869 that John Wesley Powell emerged, after ninety-nine days of exploring the Grand Canyon. His experience caused him to reflect that trying to capture the canyons in words and pictures was futile. He stated that in the end, "Language and illustration must fail."
    But Powell must have meant his words and journal drawings could never make the cut. For the water continues the creations it started eons ago; the illustrations it's been painting; the language it's been writing on the land.

New Zealand: Searching for the Poets of New Zealand

    When you first start exploring beyond your home ground, you tend to see everything in relationship to where you live. I suppose it's a way to get a grip on a new world and have it make sense. And so it was for me when I went to New Zealand.
    New Zealand is a lot like Wisconsin - only with mountains and an ocean. I felt right at home with all the green meadows, cows, and sheep. I have to admit that I assumed going to New Zealand would be the easy choice for a foray away from home - at least I was going to a country where I spoke the language.
    I began to think I might have been mistaken the minute I landed. Fresh off the plane and going through customs, I had a communications breakdown. The man at the desk asked me if I had a "tint."
    "S'cuse me?," I said in my best American Midwest accent.
    "Do you have a tint?," he repeated. Asking me about my hair would be bold of him, I thought, so I asked one more time if he would restate his question.
    "DO YOU HAVE A TINT?," he said again rather loudly. Getting nowhere, I finally just shrugged my shoulders, shook my head "no," and slowly started to back away. It wasn't until the next day when I met two travelers from Michigan that I received some illumination on my bizarre first encounter in a new land. He was asking if I had a "tent."
    My fellow Midwesterners were able to interpret for me because they had had a similar experience shortly after they arrived in New Zealand. At their hotel, the concierge gave them cryptic directions to their room. They were told to walk down the hall, look for the "nine geese," and turn left. They thought that meant they would pass a painting or a wall mural with nine geese in it. It wasn't until several hours later that they realized they were supposed to pass the "main desk."
    Despite this initial language barrier, the New Zealand forests spoke to me in a way I understood. Dripping green and spongy, they reminded me of Wisconsin's Northwoods after a rainstorm. But there was one big difference: there is nothing in New Zealand's woods that can hurt you; no bears or wolves, no poisonous snakes or spiders. Because I come from America, I suppose, I kept missing a danger in the woods, the heartbeat of a nation, a wild icon. The wolf. The bear.
    What New Zealand lacks in woodland creatures it makes up for in its bird life. The country is rich with avian songs, and I wondered what the poets of New Zealand had to say about their tuneful land. I looked for their works in bookstores, but couldn't find any. Then I met an actual poet. A 90-year-old sheep rancher named Donald.
    Donald's family had lived on his ranch in the Hector Mountains for 125 years. One day in a van, I was privileged to accompany him up the foothills surrounding his land, so we could get a sweeping look at his holdings and hear the stories of the area.
    Up and up on a narrow, gravel road we went, as Donald talked of his grandfather who came to New Zealand from Scotland.
    "Mustering was good work as long as you had good dogs," he stated, as if it were a long-remembered, natural law.
    Higher and higher we climbed. At five thousand feet, Donald said, "This is a young man's country. I would have to get in a chopper to see all this land now. Mostly, I just stand down below and look up."
    Here, standing on this mountain in New Zealand, next to a sheep rancher almost as old as the country itself, I heard the wistfulness for what was that comes to speak to us all eventually, a common language that spreads across oceans, across nations, across human minds and spirits.
    On the way back down, Donald talked more about the region's history. As we pulled into his driveway, he commented quietly, "As William Cullen Bryant said, 'It is the spot I came to seek. My father's ancient burial place.' "
    Wanting an excuse to linger, I watched his sheep dogs work for a time, driving a small herd in circles around us. The dogs could stop the sheep on a dime and sometimes did so right in front of me. It was an amazing feat they performed.
    It occurred to me then that the heartbeat of New Zealand I wanted and missed was there in the beating chests of those smart, little sheep dogs, and its poets are the old musterers who still stop to look up.

Patagonia: Getting Down to the Bones

    Bones are everywhere in Patagonia. They dry on the brown steppes and jut up from the continent's gray floor. They protrude like blue spikes through the surface of lakes and bleach white on the ocean's shore. And, right now, mine are shaking.
    I'm just barely managing to hold on to the side of a mountainous cliff in Argentina's La Leona Petrified Forest. Being from Wisconsin, I don't believe anything technically called a "forest" should be as windswept, dry, and barren as a lunar landscape; nonetheless, it is. And I'm hanging on to this hard-rock surface for dear life.
    Our small group of eight is taking a tour of this place of beating sun, high winds, and tree-rocks with a local guide who is part Argentine and part mountain goat. The forest was here at a time when South America was tipped farther north; thus this area was once leafy and green and home to dinosaurs. Their petrified bones and the bones of the once-breathing trees here are sixty-five to ninety million years old.
    Our guide strides up the rocky contours with the ease of one born to it, leading us over narrow footpaths that sheer off on either side into steep canyons and slots. Climbing up and climbing down, switchback after switchback, I think I've put on a strong and brave front so far. My backpack is heavy; determined to capture this once-in-a-lifetime trip, I'm hauling two cameras and several weighty lenses, as well as the usual fleeces and rain gear. It's been an hour and a half of dizzying height after dizzying height, and even though I've been afraid of high places for as far back as I can remember, I've hidden my terror. On the final, straight-edged climb up, however, I lose all footing and resort to grabbing on with all fours. I am now the one who's petrified. Once I find the nerve to release my hand from the prickly bush I've taken hold of, our van driver hoists me up the rest of the way.
    For three days prior to our visit to La Leona, our small van had shuddered and shook over the washboard highways of Peninsula Vald�s, almost as if we were traversing the rib cage of some sleeping giant. Small dust devils followed our vehicle down the gravel roads.
    On the peninsula, there is no fresh water. Showers are taken in salt water, and electricity is turned on only at night. We sleep in a remote, lighthouse inn. On a beach at Punta Norte, my footsteps make the sound of tinkling, shattering glass as I step on the bright shells. Magellanic penguins are everywhere, and I photograph them standing under the hot sun, bleating from their shallow burrows in the ground, or hurrying down to the waves.
    I eat my sandwich lunch in front of the Atlantic Ocean. Along with the bread and meat, I swallow dust. We take a walk to look for orcas that will sometimes beach themselves intentionally to hunt baby sea lions. We do not see them; instead we find elephant seals lying along a sandbar. A gray fox wanders nearby. I didn't know beaches could sound that way; that they could clink and bay, bark and bleat.
    On my last evening on Peninsula Vald�s, a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, I go horseback riding on the steppes of Patagonia. My horse is big and fawn-colored, like the dust. During a slow sunset, we ride the narrow trail that sweeps down to the ocean on one side and stretches out to the horizon on scrub plain to the other. A few sheep and an occasional brown hare share the expanse with us. I look down and see tiny bones of other animals in the dust. A skull here; a perfect, complete hare skeleton there. Life is harsh, elemental, and beautiful on these steppes, and I think I am falling in love with the bones of Argentina. On the ride back to our lighthouse home, we listen to tango music on the van's CD player. Argentina - heat, death, passion.
    After our stay on Peninsula Vald�s, we make the three-hour drive to Trelew, followed by a two-hour flight to El Calafate and the now infamous La Leona Petrified Forest walk. If that walk was testing my mettle, the walk on Viedma Glacier near El Chalten and Bahia Tunel took the measure of my soul.
    A boat transports us to the rocky front of the glacier, and after scrambling up the huge boulders, we sit down to put on our crampons. Stepping from rock to ice is stepping back in time. There are billions of years under my feet, when Pangaea was new. We walk among the glacier's caverns, peaks, hollows, crevasses, and formations for two and a half hours. We take a moment to sit down on this unfathomable landscape to drink a toast of Bailey's Irish Cream, chilled by the glacier's ice. It is the closest thing I've ever had to a holy drink.
    On our way out of El Chalten back to El Calafate, I see Cerro Torre coming out of the clouds for the first time. Cerro Torre juts out of the young Andes Mountains, like a splinter from the spine of the continent, picked clean and worn shiny by the Patagonian winds.
    In Punta Bandera, there is a blue cemetery. An iceberg cemetery. On the teal blue of Lago Argentino, the deep blue of hundreds of icebergs float, backed by the cool blue of the mountains. Through my camera lens, I see these bones of ice close-up, poking through the skin surface of the lake.
    In Chile's Torres del Paine National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, we can see the French glacier. It looks gray, like slippery skin newly shed from the vertebrae of the mountains. Standing in an alpine meadow, I can hear the avalanches on the other side of the mountain and see the condors soaring overhead.
    My last night in Chile, I take an early evening walk with our guide out to a peninsula, located a short distance from the lodge, which promises a direct view to Grey Glacier. I decide to take this last walk unencumbered, without my heavy backpack and camera. The sun will be setting soon anyway, I think. At the start of the path leading down to the water, which winds through a small forest, we spot a huemul, a Chilean deer. There are only about twenty in the park and perhaps only two hundred left in the world. I begin to rethink my decision to leave my camera behind. The only thing to do now is drink in the moment and try to burn the image into my memory.
    The peninsula is made of stones blown there by the winds. Just as we come down the path out of the woods and onto the peninsula, the setting sun illuminates the three needles of Torres del Peine. It is the first time during our stay in Patagonia that we can clearly see all three. From our vantage point, Grey Glacier slides out below them, and icebergs float all around us. It is a perfect moment.
    A perfect moment, that is, except I don't have my camera. But maybe that's what was meant to happen. I was meant to see this last evening as a writer, not as a photographer. It's something I've felt in my bones for a while now.