Night at the Outpost by Christine Olsenius

By Christine Olsenius

The campground billed itself as the last outpost before Canyonlands National Park. It had a small, battered log cabin for an office but no water, sewer or electric hookups, thereby offering a rather minimalist appeal. What attracted me to the place were the prairie grassland feel and the 360-degree view of mesas, pinnacles, buttes and mountains. There were no groomed sites here, just helter-skelter patches of sandy soil amid the swath of wild grasses with an adjoining picnic table. I looked for a table first and then claimed a site. It was an alternative universe for any traveler looking for Wi-Fi and cable. But it was the ideal location at the end of the road for someone who wanted to experience the quiet rugged landscape.

Canyonlands is a desert landscape that showcases the relentless impact of time, wind and water on sedimentary rock. Over millions of years of erosion, the Green and Colorado Rivers sculpted multi-layered, striated, irregular rock formations scattered across 337,000 acres of desert terrain. The erosion unlocked colors in the rock from cream, to terra cotta, umber and sienna, which catch the changing light throughout the day adding vibrancy to the landscape. There are elusive springs tucked near rock overhangs surrounded by the greenery of Mormon Tea, blackbrush and cliffrose. There are also shallow caves with petroglyphs where past generations of wanderers have left stories of their journeys through this land.

It is wild country and I have a chance to lose myself in it for a while. I am thankful for this privilege. In particular, I am thankful for this park, for the people wise enough to preserve this timeless and inspiring landscape where I feel small, in relation to its immensity, and insignificant, in relation to its age.

Something draws me to open, empty landscapes like this. They touch an inner chord but I don’t know why. Perhaps, as Belden Lane said in his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, “In desert and mountain wilderness, people discover liminal places suggesting thresholds between where they have been and where they are going…Out on the edge–in the desert waste…they transgress … all the personal boundaries by which their lives are framed.” Maybe that is it. This place, unlike any landscape I have ever seen before, stripped of all pretenses, offers me a new reality, a chance to see the world in a different light, feel its energy, and become a part of it if only for a moment.

The campground is situated near a red wall of sandstone that is less than a quarter-mile long and includes small-cave-like indentations. Pinyon pine and Utah juniper are tucked in rock crevices and some sit precariously on towering spires. Some campers pitch their tents up near the caves and I wonder what force of habit makes them choose such a site. Is there some ancient genetic marker that makes us choose the protection of a cave? If so, I and some other campers didn’t get the marker, as we choose open sites where the view of the desert and mountains is unimpeded. Daylight lingers long over the open countryside, and it takes a while for evening to darken so much space. But eventually the Milky Way lights up a highway in the sky.

I stand out under the night sky that offers a starlit backdrop to the rocky spires outlined against it. The wind blows softly across the grasses and the only sounds are the muffled voices of campers settling in for the night. Then, from a far tent site, a fiddler starts to play a soft, mournful but melodic tune, somehow appropriate for this place, this night. It does not feel like an unwarranted human intrusion. It feels like an echo of nights from a century past when early settlers or Native Americans celebrated this place with music, branding the night with their voices to quell the fear of the emptiness around them. Sometime well before dawn, I hear the coyotes howl – a primal sound that sets my skin prickling. They don’t linger, but hurry on to some pre-ordained rendezvous. I can hear them running they are so close. This place and this night are etched in my memory.

In his book, The Necessity of Empty Places, writer Paul Gruchow had an insightful way of expressing what I was feeling. “We go to the mountaintop, or retreat to the desert, or repair to some lonely cove along the wide and empty sea. We are drawn toward wildness as water is toward the level. And there we find the something we cannot name. We find ourselves, we say. But I suppose that what we really find is the void within ourselves, the loneliness, the surviving heart of wildness, that binds us to all the living earth.”

I discovered something special that night at the Outpost. I found some much-needed wildness that filled a need I had within myself. I felt the power of this ancient landscape reconnect me to the earth – to this sweep of red rock terrain. We all need these special places that inspire or heal us. Sometimes we don’t know how much until we are touched by a special landscape that speaks to us like no other place we have ever been.