It was an unpromising day, the hottest all week. I arrived on the canyon rim in the heat of the day. This far corner of Southern Utah was windy, sandy and bypassed both by the canyon seekers and the water skiers. This part of this canyon doesn’t appear in the guidebook scriptures and so therefore does not seem to exist in the slickrock universe. Few heretics seek it out.

The way into the canyon was the steep sandy spill of a dune in a short side canyon. On the rim the steady wind cooled the blaze, but deep in the meanders cut 800 feet into the Navajo sandstone, it promised to be an oven. Wait ‘till the cool of the evening or go in now? Mad dogs and Englishmen, they say, but here instead was a madman and an English dog. A growing beard is scrubbed by a sunburnt hand: sure would be nice to be deep in the canyon when evening turned. So we spilled gleefully down the dune, our feet sinking deep into cooler sand below.

At the bottom, the deep sand gave way to shallow, fine, burning red Utah canyon-bottom fill postmarked from hell and preheated for our walking pleasure. The canyon was wide, the walls tall and undercut, and the algae-green stream ran disappearing more than appearing. The dog slunk from shadow to shadow, laying down under each in clear defiance of this folly. It’s pads were worn from days of slickrock scrambling and its slinking was done gingerly. So we paused, burnt, and examined paws, burnt. Ha ha, it’s a joke, dog. He didn’t get it, although his mouth was involved in a major cooling activity which seemed to involve completely disgorging his tongue and shaking it furiously, so any humor may have been lost in a fit of self-evisceration. Hey dude, you try walking six inches above this burning plain wearing a furry coat. We were on the verge of cooked puppy brain. Time to find some shade.

Under a few tumbled house-sized boulders was a cool cave with sand which hadn’t seen the sun all day. Just what the vet ordered. I left him with his bowl full of water and a thankful look and moved on. (Yup, dog lovers can easily tell the difference between thankfulness and resentment)

After a meander or two, I came upon a side canyon which looked unpromising on the map and unpromising on the ground. Lower walls, brush, boulders, and a probable dead end in a unclimbable dryfall. But you never knew. Out here, promises and appearances change with every turn of canyon wall. And so it was. Shortly, I came to a fork. I tossed a pebble at a globby rock in the streambed. It scattered left. I went right.

The walls rose and the walls tightened about me. Running water appeared under my feet. Redbud bushes and thickening willows sprouted around. The canyon bottom coiled and curled and covered over me in a surf wave of dripping maidenhair ferns and vines. Snakegrass and cattails under cottonwood shade. Rippled wet sand and cooled pools. Sunlight on high canyon crags behind darkened ridges and fissures of stone. And another turn. A plunge pool with flickering wrens and reflections deep enough to see through time to when this crevice was born. And another turn. A huge ironwood tree filling up the whole of the sky-roof of this magical space. And another turn. Scoured and bowled rock snaked up the watercourse like a slide at a waterpark. I gaped and turned like a penitent in a basilica for the first time. Reverent and thankful for multiple gifts of shade and moisture and green. When did it finish? All pleasures such as this end in a petering out or a short, sharp drop. The next turn brought it: the curving lip of a stone-falls smoothing out into each vertical wall. Thirty-odd feet high and smooth as molded and fired clay. Nothing to do but stand and be thankful at the source of all this verdant wonder. These ends are neither frustrating nor confining. I see them as a beginning and not an end. No less satisfying than when a river reaches the sea at the other end of this long connection of liquid and earth.

These places cannot be bottled or filmed or described in words in a way that conveys the true essence of being there. The wind rattling the cottonwood leaves. The color of low sun on rock against sky. The feel of cool water between toes and warm stone on the palm. The smell of wet and willow and brush bloom.

I went back and fetched the dog from his little alcove, much recharged, and tried the other branch of the side canyon. This one too was choked with lushness and light, a double universe. The sun was falling in the west and all was in shadow now. Its upper end was longer, more polished and tunneled. A deep and low undercut alcove above the watercourse was obviously an Anasazi site. I climbed up from the water to find that the pothunters had already been there. The neat and square trenches suggested an academic dig. In other canyons I had seen the more random and scattered diggings of amateur pothunters. The Anasazi buried intact pots full of sustenance in the backs of these alcoves, and this was the primary goal of both flavors of pothunters. This site was likely dug during the emergency archeological studies just preceding the finishing of the Glen Canyon Dam and the subsequent filling of the vaulted lower ends of these canyons. Perhaps they found hints toward the Anasazi way of life in addition to the treasured pots. There were a few broken pieces of corrugated pottery left and nothing more. This was one of the lowest and deepest alcoves I had ever been inside, almost a disk-like cave. Such places hide at the ends of side canyons of side canyons of side canyons out there in the sandstone wilderness.

With the sun almost over the invisible horizon, it was time to return to camp. The left branch had a smaller, climbable waterfall, but petered out into a wide jumble of boulders above. I struggled up the dune, one step forward and two steps back, supremely happy, my head swirling with images of canyon walls and verdant springs.