I talked to Karen, my first wife, about taking a short backpacking trip, just the two of us. She was the one who encouraged my backpacking several years before. I had been interested in Chesler Park in the southern section of Canyonlands National Park, Utah. When I joined the Wilderness Society in 1967, the first issue of their magazine I received had a picture of the park, and an article discussing the controversy over building a Jeep road to the area. That did not happen, but I remained interested in the area.

We visited our parents in Manhattan, Kan., and drove from there. Our children visited with their grandparents while we were gone for the four-day excursion. We drove via Monarch Pass in Colorado, but the pass was closed by 10 inches of snow on June 16, our 12th wedding anniversary. We drove back the short distance to Salida and got a motel for the night.

The next day, the pass was clear, and we drove to the Elephant Rock trailhead in Canyon Lands National Park by mid-afternoon. We got our hiking boots on and loaded our packs on our backs. Karen’s had just her sleeping bag and poncho that weighed a total of 4 pounds, plus pack. Mine had my sleeping bag, poncho, my 1-pound Leica CL camera, 2 pounds of gorp of our own make and 5 quarts of water (desert hiking!). We had 3 miles to go into Chesler Park, but it was raining lightly, so we donned our rain ponchos. By the time we got there, the rain had stopped. We found a nice spot near a 10-foot tall cedar “tree,” more like a tall bush with a dozen branches. We spread out our ponchos and laid out our sleeping bags: Holubar zip-together bags manufactured to our specific heights.

We ate some gorp and watched the sun go down over the true horizon to the West. It was so dry, the last sliver of the sun was pure white! I hung our food bag 8 feet up in the “tree.” As we were going to sleep, the moonless starlight was so bright that I could see a pair of small rodents trying to find which branch the food bag was on — up and down, over and over again.

When we woke up as day was approaching, I retrieved our food bag. There was a small hole in it. It looked like the animals had only taken a couple of peanuts! We packed up again and started toward Druid Arch trail. I estimated we got 1/10 inch of rain the day before, from the puddles of water on the rock . The desert was flowers everywhere. Every 3 feet, there was another flower, red, yellow, purple, blue, white. Sego lilies all over!

We passed several college-age men still in their sleeping bags to the side, 50 feet away. As I looked back there was a flurry of activity in their camp. They were being passed by a woman! They never did catch up to us. We entered the arroyo with Druid Arch trail. It was perhaps 75 feet deep and 100 yards wide. The sky above the walls was an amazingly deep sapphire blue color! If I did not have a photographic record of the scene, I would think my memory was faulty! We came to a good view of Druid Arch after about 5 miles, looking like a stray from Stonehenge!

We started hiking back out to our car, another 5 miles. On the way out, we passed a family, two parents and two boys around age 10. They had run out of water and were trying to collect some from the shallow rock pools. We still had four untouched quarts of water left and gave that to them in their cooking pots. That made my pack lighter! We got to the car and drank warm tomato juice, nice again! We found a motel in Moab and drove back to Manhattan the next day.