Fall
At certain moments, light and color take over everything.
Exactly one hour from Moab, heading toward Maple Canyon, a small dirt road turns from the highway into Black Dragon Wash.
Black Dragon is a place I never knew about, or heard of, a narrow sandstone corridor at the edge of the Swell.
In a bend of the sandy canyon, a giant bowl looms overhead, sheltering paintings along the bottom.
Life size petroglyphs, painted with the same blood red pigment that colors some of the rocks, stand beside fantastical looking birds and mysterious patterns.
It’s a perfect BASE jump.
From the pale rounded rim above, surrounded by sandstone slabs and miles of endless desert, you stare into the shadows and step off the edge.
Standing in the quiet canyon after that jump, I’m reminded of the purity of BASE jumping. You walk to the top, jump into the air, and land at the base with two footsteps in the sand.
You leave nothing, you take nothing, you barely touch the earth. When you are gone, you leave no trace that you were ever there…..
From Black Dragon Wash, it’s just a short drive to Maple Canyon, near Salt Lake City. Now, in the fall, with the leaves turning to pink and orange and gold, Maple is even more gloriously beautiful than ever.
Of course the bizarre, conglomerate cobbled rock is pure delight to climb, smooth and rounded to the touch. But it’s easy to lose myself in the shapes and colors, completely forgetting to put my shoes on 🙂
Maybe it was an after-effect of black dragon magic from the day before, but I found the beauty of Maple as physically powerful as the climbing. The glowing leaves, the golden light, the hushed corridors and curving shapes made me feel completely alive. Climbing is not ephemeral like BASE jumping. It’s so much more tactile and solid, so much slower and more contemplative. We leave traces when we climb, but those are fleeting too, in the great scheme of geologic time. The magic of climbing is the way it holds us in special places, for enough time to absorb details and be absorbed into them. Climbing is so good for the heart, an immersion into the art of nature.
