Zebra Slot, 2021

by: Michael Little

The author, between the rocks

Last Sunday I woke up just outside Escalante, Utah. My traveling companion a bike builder, data analyst I’ve known since college.  We pulled off of Highway 12, having sped through the Dixie National Forest mostly in the dark, pointing out the vistas I remembered from the drive last year, however imperceptible they were in the night. We tucked in for sleep near the entrance of the Hole in the Rock Road, wanting to get some solid sleep ahead of the hike into Zebra Slot the next morning. 

This was my friend’s first time in Utah. An avid Pacific Northwesterner he spends his time in Washington and southern California. We woke up the morning prior on the banks of the Colorado, outside Moab, staring up at that giant red rock face. 

How to describe Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument to someone for the first time. It is a park, yes. Well, sort of. There is no park entrance, no fee to be paid, no rangers per se. A vast swath of Southwestern Utah roughly the size of Delaware. Protected ecology, riverbeds, waterfalls, hoodoos, mountainscapes: all true. 

Also true: this 1-million plus acres was halved in the Trump era, for the sake of mining and access roads. Imagine criss-crossing dirt roads, turbinate smokestacks smouldering, the shudder and hull of heavy machines, specious caterwaul. 

For now, GSENM remains protected under President Bill Clinton’s designation as a national monument in 1996. 

Cracking open the van door into the brisk February morning sunlight, I was again reminded of how I felt the first time I turned my car south out of Moab and into this otherworld. 

I had spent the previous two decades in New York. Two summers ago, my partner and I decided we were going to leave the City and head west.  We drove two days, from New York to Moab. August, triple-digit heat. We had a tent, sleeping bags, hiking boots. We bought scones from Moonflower Coop in Moab, and hit the trails running. Having put nearly 2,000 miles between us and our past lives, we trod out into the ochre and red rocks wide-eyed, inspired. I remember staring up at the rock face at Goose Island campground, across the frigid Colorado, and thinking to myself: this is a skyscraper. 

After days of arches and afternoons in the river, with blistered feet, hands pumiced by sandstone, we turned toward Highway 12 and Grand Staircase, 2019. 

The gym near my office in midtown upgraded their treadmills the year before I left New York. Three or four days a week I would duck out of a meeting and jog to the gym and workout in lieu of lunch. Usually 45 minutes, shower and back to the office. The new treadmills were perfect. I am a runner. I run. Preferably trails. And in the place of trails, I could now log into a treadmill and select a trail to have projected on the screen in front of me. The treadmill would flex and akimbo to match the recorded elevation changes of the track - trail - I was on, which had been previously videoed by a now-vistitant runner.  Sydney Waterfront (populated with animatronic tourists posing for pictures), Rome (Colosseum, etc. etc.), Pebble Beach (golfers, fog). 

The course I was most intrigued in was titled simply: Grand Staircase. On the screen: backpacked hikers, a dog or two gracefully moved aside as the ersatz “you” jogged down a sandstone ravine. A creek at the bottom and then jog up and back to some kind of red-rock rim: five miles. I would run Grand Staircase enough times each week I got to know the turns, the fauna. 

And when we decided we were heading West, I pinned Grand Staircase to the itinerary. 

However, herein lies the problem. Where to pin? An excess of one million acres of a square on a map. The map I was working off of was shades of brown. The section of the park labeled GSENM: a too-milky-coffee hue.  

My partner made reservations at a campsite just outside Canonville. Greeted by the camp steward (a Marine Biology instructor at Humboldt State University) and his Labrador, Lozen, we looked like first-timers with our New York license plates, overpriced camping gear and hyper-idiomatic speech. At this point we had acquired enough red dust to buy us a second look with the masses, however any conversation longer than two sentences and our former lives quickly betrayed us.  

We stayed three days: Kodachrome Basin (“Shakespeare Arch has fallen”), Bryce Canyon (hoodoos), Capitol Reef (Fruita), Willis Creek Canyon (three men entombed in a pickup trapped in Bull Valley Gorge). Each day we would hike, climb or run these trails and return to our camp, cook vegan hot dogs, and pass out. Night #two or #three the steward told us about Hell’s Backbone Grill. 

Fast Forward to now. The van door slides open. Just across from where we parked a Neapolitan cliffside of Tropic Shale, Dakota Formation, Navajo Sandstone. Snow-tipped pines like abandoned sentry dot the hillside. My friend and I put on our shoes and walk into the open range toward the slot. This time no overpriced gear and my drawl has been Westernized these past months. It is February, however, and we struggle to keep moving fast enough to outpace the cold. 

Not a cloud in the sky. 

Before long we’d descended 300 feet. Into a wash or gulch or dry riverbed. The sun warming us overhead, the only sound for miles: our footsteps on the softsand and rockbasin. 

And like the Grand Staircase of my gym-going days, our descent is amid red-rocks, sand, sandstone worn round by millenia of wind erosion. Knee-high rabbitbrush, sagebrush, cacti. There are no other hikers on the path today, no dogs. We march off into the brown and burnt green and red which surrounds us at every vista. 

According to the map, Zebra slot is named for the striations on the rockwall in the slot. However, Zebra striations begin well outside the slot entrance. I continue to be stunned by the silence, the stillness. One mile in we sidestep a cattle fence and step into the soft sand of Harris Wash. 

As prescribed, we leave all our excess gear at the mouth of the slot, tucked behind a desert shrub. There is no water this time of year. My friend and I strip down to our base layers and make our way into the void. 

Not far into the chasm the slot narrows to a mere ten inches. Perhaps the walls up to the rim of the canyon are seventy-five feet. Perhaps more. The friend I am traveling with races outrigger canoes - mostly he is all back muscle and arms. I am still at hibernation weight. Between our two visages ten inches might as well be no inch. 

At the tightest juncture we strip down further. I inch into the pinching rock walls. At my best I am able to split the gap by exhaling completely and shimmying an inch or two up using my pelvis and scraping my chest through. Between the rock I pause, and considering the year it’s been, the silence around me, the fact I can see the Zebra on the rock walls - do I need to touch/feel it? Actually? Do i? - my lungs completely collapse and pin me between two layers of rock one-hundred times older than my father’s father’s bloodline. Again I notice the silence. Nothing is moving. 

And I remain in this place for some seconds. Able to breathe by taking small sips of air. 

“I’m going around,” my friend shouts from the entrance - he’d retreated to put some layers back on. 

I slide out. 

We walk out and up and over the top of the slot to look down onto the zebra walls. Perhaps another twenty feet in from where we turned around the cave dead-ends. And the look down from where we were is no less stunning. 

Atop the cavern I notice balls of rocks collected in deeper basins. Now completely dry these balls have been hewn into perfect circles by the little rain that falls here, perhaps once, maybe twice, each year in large enough volume to puddle and stream down the ravine. The rocks sit unmoved in the basin of a dried-out watering hole, like fossil eggs. 

The Buddha is said to have expressed time in units called Kalpas.  According to the Buddha there is a mountain sixteen miles high, and once every 100 years a bird flies over the peak with a piece of silk in its beak and lightly swipes the top of the rock. One Kalpa is the length of time it will take for the entire mountain to be eroded by the scarf. 

And how many Kalpas to attain enlightenment? Perhaps these riverworn rocks know. 

The two miles hike back to the car my friend and I talk about the effort, and lunch. Mostly the effort: Did we fail not going all the way? Should I have brought rope? Should we have skipped that second or third taco last night? Was there something deeper in the slot we had missed? 

We pass two hikers on the trail as we are headed out. The first people we have seen all day. The couple is from Minnesota. They have matching NorthFace parkas. Between the two of them, ten inches will come easily. 

They say this is their first time in Utah. I remember the one winter I spent outside St. Paul, temperatures I had only read about existing. 

“It’s going to be great,” I offer as they turn and bounce down the trail toward the zebras.