trip report: utah, california & oregon coast
16 nights | 7 states | 3,850 miles
this was a trip for i’d dreamt about for months and yet still somehow didn’t manage to plan until i was en route. most of my planning energies had instead gone into gear configuration. vertical storage in the truck canopy for light-weight items that requiring frequent access; a duffel for clothing, and a twin duffel for my kitchen affairs. recovery gear behind the rear seats, a fridge for perishables, portable battery, hitch winch, and day bags in the cab.
the truck itself was settled. what remained was figuring out was where i’d take it. i knew i would do a clockwise loop from seattle to idaho through st. george, utah down to los angeles and then back up the coast to seattle. i had very little idea what i’d do in between, but while we were consolidating dry food into ziplocks my dad suggested i check out moab.
i’d known moab was an offroad mecca, but always considered it more of a jeep thing. i didn’t think there was much for non-wheeling overlandy types, but a quick peak at onx proved me wrong. with plenty of easy to mid-grade trails from the edges of town out through public lands and into the surrounding national parks, i decided my route to st. george would have to go through eastern utah. so the night before i was set to leave, i had my first destination.
and that’s just about how plans went each day. i’d go to bed with a vague sense of where i’d sleep the next night and only a slightly stronger sense of how i’d get there. the first night wasn’t actually in moab; it was on the edge of horseshoe canyon — an offshoot of canyonlands national park where butch cassidy and his gang used to hole up between the canyon streams and famous pictographs.
that first morning i decided running the trail would be better than hiking. more privacy, less time, and a bit of a workout. this became my pattern on each of the subsequent hikes i did on the trip, including a mad dash up six hundred feet of sand dunes outside mojave. given the elevation i had to be careful about dehydration, and even after liters of water and multiple pedialyte packs, i was still feeling it mr. krabs when i rolled into moab to gather my bearings and a few extra supplies.
this was an appropriately-sobering first dance with the desert, but not to be humbled this early into my adventure, i opted for more familiar terrain for my second night. on onx i found a spot up around 9,000 feet off of a mountain pass with views south over the san rafael swell that looked like it might be a little bit cooler.
got what i bargained for! watched the clouds in the valley slowly roll up the mountain towards me as i was cooking breakfast, then tiny flakes of snow that i thought would surely pass. of course, minutes later the sky was thick with globs that were accumulating all over my half-broken camp. this was amusing until about an inch and a half had accumulated in the span of an hour and i realized i had three thousand feet of descent between me and my monday morning meetings. so it went, for three weeks.
after being thus chastened by my surround, i decided it would be better to slow down and listen. windows down, no music, just the crunch of tires and chatter of a dry suspension to keep me company, until i’d chance upon some other wandering biped. maybe it was the lower frequency of these interactions, but the stakes for each of these encounters just felt higher.
for example, i met two sisters on 10 mile road in arches national park, right after i’d navigated the steepest part of the trail. while they couldn’t see it, they were about to go down a 40 foot, 22% sheer rock face in a rented yukon. i’d just picked my way up the same face in 4-lo. the gals were persian — beautiful, and in their early 50’s. i asked them if they’d been through this road before (“no” *smiles* ), so offered to spot them down.
one of them, the driver, kept calling me a godsend. but she was the real miracle. their tires were fully inflated, they probably had no more than 7” of ground clearance, and at multiple points in time she had a wheel up in the air. but they never scraped, hardly slipped, and not once did she seem uncomfortable.
two days later, we ran into each other again on the grand view trail in canyonlands. godsend, again. some kind of grace, at least, i conceded. and no shit, turns out they had come up the butt-puckering schaffer switchbacks from moab just like i had. no fear, these gals.
and these encounters kept happening. church people say that jesus comes into our lives all the time if we just pay enough attention to each other to notice the spark. for example, on my way up the coast on a beach pullout just north of the rogue river an older guy pulled up next to me in a white mercedes van. his dog, carl, jumped out the backseat and cruised right past me in an absolutely sporting plaid doggy jackets. less sprightly, but no less enthusiastic was carl’s owner, jim. he looked to be about 70, but his crutches and big black cataracts-style glasses made him seem older by a decade.
i don’t remember how we started chatting about aliens, but we were there in about three minutes. he said something about a storm coming, and whether i was going to be camping nearby. three inches of rain apparently, (since i hadn’t checked the weather; i could barely even be bothered to check my calendar after all). i thanked him for the tip — and, to be polite, asked him where he’d been and where he was going. he said he was just a hermit living up the river, running errands before the roads got wet. we get to talking about beauty, (hard to avoid in a place like that), and seconds later he was leaning his crutches against my tailgate to show me pictures on his phone of the mandalas he’d been sketching. eyes, ancient symbols, color, and symmetry. exactly what you’d expect i guess, but more remarkable given that he said he’d only been at it a few months and had spent his entire working life as a seaman. i asked him if he believed in grace, and he said we’d better not forget how special we all are.
…
when i was 16, i went on a church backpacking trip that we called a pilgrmiage. at night we’d read aloud from paulo coehlo’s the alchemist about how the protagonist, santiago, learned to read signs calling out from the quiet spaces in the world around him. if he could find a way to listen, we were told that these signs could lead him a treasure that only he could find. without revealing too much, suffice it to say that he learns to read the signs, and finds the treasure in the end — just not in the form or place he was expecting.
santiago was on to something — i genuinely believe the world has a language to speak to us. sometimes picking up on it takes a lot of attention; other times it just breaks through when our guard is down — when we’re stressed or unusually emotional. i had no shortage of either on this trip, and plenty of space to listen. the one sign that kept recurring was a raven. they would appear around me any time there was something i needed to pay closer attention to, or mark as particularly praiseworthy. for example, i saw one in the evening as i was barreling along the salt flats outside capitol reef looking for a less exposed place to sleep. it was gliding on a gust above a ridge i was about to crest. a minute later, i saw a jeeptrack turn off my road and head up to where the raven had been. i followed the track, and like that, happened upon one of the most epic spots on the trip. another afternoon, when searching for the trail to a remote arch, i saw a raven sitting down in a ravine. when i wandered down there, i immediately found the path and enjoyed an hour alone under the rock.
when started thinking about this trip — or honestly, when i started offroading in 2021 — i’d hoped the experiences would bring me to some sort of grand realization. i’d hoped for desert mysticism, ideological breakthroughs, or at least to meet someone else who wanted the same things. i don’t think i experienced either of the former, and will probably continue to bungle any chance at the latter. but i don’t really mind. the trip was a resounding success. i was blessed with a continuous series of small, powerful moments that added up to a palpable sense of being held. if not wholesale repentance, it felt at least like movement — movement out of a rut i’ve been trudging through for a while. my close friends and family know i’ve struggled to be fully myself since i was diagnosed with a few sleep disorders. but if i’m being honest, the beginnings of the rut probably go back even further to when i stopped praying earnestly. cycling felt like a kind of prayer — when it wasn’t brutal. a few weeks into planning my next trip, i’m hoping this new hobby will too.