In a Cave on the Colorado

I am writing this from a super remote cave along the Colorado River, about twenty miles south of Moab, Utah. Off the grid. No address. No schedule. Just sandstone, river air, and a thin layer of dust that seems to coat everything out here like the desert’s signature. With my laptop and Starlink providing the connection to the "real world".

It is New Year’s Eve, and today I climbed up to Delicate Arch.

Phenomenal does not quite cover it. The landscape glowed the way it only does out here, like the desert is lit from inside. And the ravens were massive. Not “cute little black birds,” but real, intelligent, mythic beings with wings.

They soared around the arch in slow circles, calling and scanning the humans below for handouts. Like they were running an ancient, perfectly efficient operation.

Getting there meant climbing with hordes of people, which is its own kind of modern pilgrimage. There were hikers of every kind, including children throwing epic tantrums, red-faced and overwhelmed, their little bodies saying “no” to every step.

And honestly,

I was glad their parents brought them.

Let them rage.

Let them complain.

Let them be dramatic.

They are still learning, in real time,

what it means to meet a landscape

that does not bend for anyone.

One day they will remember

they stood in this place.

When we reached the arch, everyone formed a line waiting to take their picture inside it, as if proof was required.

I am sure Edward Abbey is rolling in his grave

somewhere outside Tucson.

But I just rolled with it.

I stood below the arch, off to the side, where I could breathe.

The sun was behind it, perfectly placed,

turning the opening into a kind of portal of light.

I took a photo from there, the sun framed behind the arch with a guy reaching for the sky, and the crowds did not matter.

They did not dilute the awe.

They did not weaken the feeling.

The moment was still holy

in its own strange, shared way.

This photo was edited for brightness and contrast, but the being that appears in it is natural. It showed up on its own, the same way it did in The Wild photo I included in Unfolding into the Wild. I am not trying to convince anyone of what it means. I am simply reporting what happened.

This is part of the experiment too.

Noticing what shows up

when you are paying attention.

After the hike, the puppies and I drove back to our cave. I have two: CiniMini, a short-haired princess who does not like the cold, and Wicket, a little fuzz ball adventurer who has been exploring the world around him since the day he started walking. Wicket loves sprouts. CiniMini chews them up and spits them out like a tiny food critic. They were dusty, sleepy, and satisfied, the way babies get when the day has been full of sun and stimulation.

I settled them back in, got my fire going, and then, I found myself walking over to my neighbor’s cave where a small group had gathered around a campfire.

Eight fellow travelers. Just like that. One of those desert gatherings that forms the way weather forms, as if the night itself has decided that loneliness is unnecessary.

The commonalities between us were uncanny.

There was a calm guy with his pup who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, and I felt that familiar little jolt of recognition that happens when you meet someone who also knows what it means to build a life around simplicity and discomfort and deep, unexpected beauty.

There was a couple with a farm outside Missoula, Montana. The guy was from Arizona, and they wanted to buy land in southern Arizona. We talked about trogons and birding, because of course we did. Out here the conversation always finds its way back to the wild things.

Traveling with them was a woman who worked for the BLM. She was also part Gambian, which made me laugh with that private cosmic timing because my sister just moved home from The Gambia. She had come with the Missoula couple, and her roommate was there too, a wildlife biologist who manages a bighorn sheep herd outside Grand Junction.

That combination alone feels like a sentence the desert wrote.

There was also a couple planning to relocate to Canada or Australia. The guy was an Australian surveyor, and the woman worked for a politician.

At some point, the conversation tilted toward the state of the world, as campfire conversations often do, and she spoke with this grounded, passionate intensity. She encouraged us, very plainly, not to give up on politics altogether. Not to retreat so far into disgust or exhaustion that we abandon the shared project of shaping the future.

It was one of those moments where a stranger says something you did not know you needed to hear, and it lands cleanly because the fire is warm and the night is honest.

It was spontaneous and beautiful and slightly impossible, the kind of New Year’s Eve I could never have planned, and the kind my old life would have missed completely.

It felt like it was meant to be,

not in a forced destiny way,

but in the simple sense

that when you live outside and stay open,

life keeps offering itself to you.

Now I am back at my own fire, typing this by the glow of my laptop. I am alone out here in the best way, tucked into a cave on the Colorado River with nothing but sandstone walls and open air between me and the night. It is 11:50. Everyone else has gone to bed. I put the puppies to bed too, curled up like tiny commas in the sentence of my life.

The moon is bright tonight, but the stars are hidden behind a thin veil of clouds.

It is supposed to rain tomorrow, or maybe snow.

I hope it snows.

Snow in the desert feels like a miracle.

Though if it does snow, CiniMini will have to be carried everywhere. She will take one look at the cold ground and act like she has been personally betrayed by the concept of winter, while Wicket will do zoomies and taste it.

Still, I hope for snow.

I hope for the quiet softness of it.

I hope for the way it makes red rock look tender.

I hope for the reminder that change

can arrive gently,

and transform everything.

And if my soul is shining tonight, it is not because everything is perfect. It is because I am here.

Because I climbed the delicate arch.

Because I stood off to the side and

let the light speak.

Because I came back to the cave

with my puppies and somehow found

a circle of humans who felt like mirrors.

Because I let the land hold me.

Because I stopped trying to orchestrate life into

something impressive,

and started letting it be real.

If your soul remembers something science forgot, maybe this is part of it.

That the point is not to control the night.

The point is to be awake inside it.

Happy New Year.