A large footbridge, hidden around the first bend of the well-marked trail, straddles one of the main arteries to Cottonwood Creek. The dark wood of the bridge has been worn smooth by the mix of damp air, treeshadows, and the alternatingly eager then exhausted touch of happy hikers. In Springtime, water sprints under foot in a decided and timeworn path until it meets the main waterway just forty vertical feet below. In Summer, after the snows have melted, the stout and sturdy bridge turns nearly superfluous as the stream lazies into a trickle. But today, though it’s already late June, water is thundering its way (not down but) seemingly straight forward, pounding its shoulders into the newly frail streambed walls. The sound is…more than deafening. It is frightening. It is somehow humiliating. I feel weak and young standing just inches above the angry locomotive; its hydraulic pistons driving thousands of gallons of minutes-ago-snow through this usually sleepy artery. This artery which takes trillions of snowflakes from the heart of my journey and shuttles them down the canyon, along a crescent route through central Utah, into the Colorado, and eventually out to the extremities of the Pacific Ocean. Misguided Californians would claim that their ocean is in fact the heart where the circulatory cycle begins, but on top of my mountain is where purity is restored. What finds its way to the coast is full of every pollutant the western states have to offer, including copper, lead, streptococcal bacteria, staff, chlorine, the moral greys of Colorado City, petroleum, sulfur, the oily spring break backwash of Lake Mead, animal feces, battery acid, and generic mud. The Sea of Cortez is a kidney. Lake Blanche is the wet engine. On to the heart.
Just a few dozen paces past the bridge and into the first switchback, the vista opens up in front of me and I can see clearly uphill nearly to my destination. The air is cooler than it was forty paces back and it hangs with the dampness of water-darkened rocks and respiring vegetation. Five minutes into my hike and I notice that I have slowed to a crawl. The air and the green are intoxicating, but they are not the only things stroking my senses. There is a haunting. And a reason I came up here to forget. And though it remains unnamed and unformed in my head, I know that it is only because I have refused to name and form it.
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