Sunday, August 7th, 2011

The next day it's an all-too-short drive in the canyonlands before we enter the swift westbound current of the river of I-80, snaking across the plains around Lyman and Fort Bridger. The line of the Uintas draws closer until we're driving through the Weber River gorge on grooved concrete. We stop at an ambitiously conceived rest stop with pavilion-shaped visitor's center and picnic shelters built of great slabs of aggregate. There's a paved path that climbs steeply to the top of a ridge. We follow it and look at the traffic running down the distant grey ribbon.

After a tiresome run through Salt Lake and the alley between that city and Snowville, we exit on another rural highway that leads us through the southern reaches of the Curlew National Grassland and across the gap between the Raft River Mountains in Utah and the Black Pine Mountains in Idaho. Then it's fields to the right and the Jim Sage Mountains to our left as we drive through the aching heat to Malta.

Here the vast fields are replaced by smaller farms and horse ranches, with an occasional clapboard schoolhouse or brick storefront– the heat is unrepentant. As we leave Malta behind and round the northern head of the Jim Sage Mountains we can see the bald granite rising from dark green scrub forest like monk's tonsures. These are the Albion Mountains, a vast gallery of bonelike monuments and emerald stream valleys. The sun glows yellow on the peaks and the promise of the blue shadows under their eastern faces is like a balm; all aches are commuted. This is where we're camping tonight, in City of Rocks National Reserve.

As we're setting up camp a group of noisy boys climb over a shoulder of the rock behind our site and blithely walk through our living room. One of them even says "How's it goin'?" as they crowd through.

As we're hiking down a draw behind the site we hear the same group coming the other way, all of them talking loudly. Of wildlife there is not a sign until they've receded far behind us. Later I relent in my internal argument with these knuckleheads and say to Celeste that if we're really serious about letting the outdoors in we should be reaching out to people like this. "Instead of giving them dirty looks?" she says. But now as I write I'm not so sure. How do you explain something that should be self-evident?

The trail descends into deep cuts in the granite, lined by aspen groves and waist-high grass. In some of these canyons flow small, clear streams over beds of speckled gravel. In the trees are hidden hairy woodpeckers, canyon wrens and creepers.

Today is Celeste's birthday and in honor of the time the rocks are washed a blue and pale violet; we eat punjab eggplant and rice and drink cider and wine. Later there's a heavy papery buzz just over my head and a big, black, fast-moving beetle scurries across the gravel in front of the fire pit. I coax him onto my hand and carry him to the table, where Celeste tries to hold her hand near my camera as he scurries over her knuckles and wrist. I manage to shoot a five-second film of him landing on the tabletop and disappearing between the boards.

The net of stars descends behind the granite tower back of us as the fire dims.