THE MOUNTAIN SONG

“What's accidental to you may just be part of a road”

Road to the Henrys. Notice the potholes.

Every road must be connected to another road. A road not so connected, by definition, isn't much use. So one road always leads to another.

I drove the road to Starr Springs, an oasis at the foot of Mount Hillers, southernmost peak along the main range of the Henry's in south-central Utah. Across Highway 276, the Little Rockies — Mounts Ellsworth and Holmes — stood as 8,000-foot dwarves to the rest of the Henry Mountains. With twisted gold and maroon strata bearing little vegetation, the Little Rockies seemed more like Basin and Range peaks than mountains of the Colorado Plateau. Farther south, the blue majesty of Navajo Mountain loomed above the scarps and plains of the Cane Spring Desert.

Starr Springs was lush with high oaks and willow brush. The woods stood so dense I had to peek through the canopy to remind myself that tawny deserts threatened to swallow me in every direction.

I strapped some water on my back and hiked the road to Clay Point, which trended around the southern flank of Mount Hillers. Gigantic headstones embedded themselves along the south base of the range. The rock fins seemed to have once been part of the horizontal strata, but were now tilted vertically. They limned the whole mountainside at its base for miles.

The long, gentle pediment that swept Hillers at its southwest flank drew my eyes. I figured that if I could climb it, I'd have great views of the canyon system that surrounded the Henry Mountains to the west like a vast moat. The open scrub surrounding the Henrys makes perfect scrambling country. So, I abandoned the road and bushwhacked through the clumpy sage plains that rolled toward the ridge.

Drainages and small canyons radiating out from Hillers toward the distant San Juan River soon interrupted my intended course. I climbed a hillock and resurveyed my route. Beneath me, the road I'd left an hour ago wound and bent a few hundred yards away. I should've stayed on that road. I would've made it here sooner. My intuition told me to walk the road. It would've been a lot quicker.

I climbed back down to the road and crossed a cottonwood wash. I stumbled upon another road. Not a well-graded, red dirt byway common in southern Utah, but a rough track studded with sharp white stones more often encountered in the high mountains. I wouldn't have driven it.

I relinquished my original destination of the southwest pediment of Mount Hillers, and decided on the road to the base of Hillers. This was my second hike of the day, and the sun was far into the west half of the sky. Thunder rumbled over Mount Ellsworth, and dark sky cricked with lightning just over the canyon country to my south. I made it to the base of Hillers, then headed back to camp before the lightning could turn me to human toast. On the way back, I took the section of road I’d bypassed on my way out and not the high scramble I’d trekked before.

The road beside the mountain turned and led into the mountain itself. It guided me to fins of several colors, fins high and sharp and shaped like spades. I passed a campsite and fire ring. The fins, maybe 40 feet high, brooded like the headstones of a giant as I approached the mountain. The road eventually pinched out into P-J woodland, with a deep, boulder-strewn wash on my right.

I dropped down into the drainage, and the world assumed a radically different shape. Two dark tan fins that seemed from their color to bear an igneous pedigree weren't fins at all. They formed walls much like a castle’s, with a wide, 50-foot gap where the drawbridge should be. They stood over a hundred feet high and one was about 20 feet thick. Behind them, the sandstone fins I'd seen for the whole hike vaulted up in paints of white and pink and copper. The wall was a dike formation separated from the more brightly-colored Popsicle fins. I felt like Frodo passing through the Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings in Lord of the Rings.

This morning, before I drove into Starr Springs, I'd camped out on the western rims of Clay Canyon, miles across from here. I'd watched as harmless cumuli swelled at the summits of the Henry's, which were then to my east. Those clouds eventually mushroomed into gigantic cumulonimbi that dwarfed the mountains which helped make them. The topsides of the thunderheads ceilinged out at the troposphere and streaked dark like India ink. I'd abandoned Clay Canyon because I didn't want to get stopped out by a flood at Bullfrog Creek crossing like I had last year. It can be dry and sunny overhead, but let it rain in the mountains miles away, and you can watch your Jeep get carried off to God’s auto pound by a flash flood.

Now, as I neared the gates of the mountain, the air chilled. The sky above brewed black. A strong wind blew out between the pinnacles of the dike like a giant exhaling. I was Frodo at the gates of Mordor. Climbing up a stair-step wash, I passed through the gate. I negotiated a boulder field as I crossed over the threshold. Plutonic pilasters opened up into a vast grotto. The stone unfolded from the two-dimensional walls of Mount Hillers into a hidden third dimension.

The giant's hollow, completely enclosed by the walls of the mountain, stood a thousand feet high, and about a quarter-mile deep. Spires of fire and ivory, granite gray and burning ruby, toothy and sharp, stood in battlements along the clifftops. Organ pipes and flutes of stone serrated the enclosing walls of the amphitheater. Spruce and fir draped the cliffsides, stacked in steep, rising tiers. Boulders splashed with greenshield lichen spilled everywhere. Up the wash I treaded, up the walls of the grotto vaulted in black clouds.

The cove spiraled up in vertical layers like the spines of tall books stacked alongside shorter ones on shelves. I wandered farther and farther in, past all my intention and plan. I meandered through the empty quarter of a strange, holy city of cathedrals and minarets. Then the cold rains came. I stood next to 20-foot boulders, canopied by immense specimens of pinyon and spruce bigger than I’d ever seen. It grew so cool and wet in this temperate enclosure that I put on my rain gear.

I crouched in a dry creek bed and listened between the chords of the wind for the roaring sound of a flash flood. I used a flat, diorite boulder as my standing desk to write all this down, rain splatting the black-inked words into teary mascara. Shags of juniper bark dangled like party streamers before my eyes. Heavy pine duff softened my step. Gigantic Mormon tea and cliffrose told of the perpetually wet world through which I climbed.

The atmosphere cool and aromatic. A Bryce-like fairyland enfolded me. And a rock garden, too. A nearly perfect, A-frame boulder blocked the wash. Along the grotto’s walls, penny-hued hoodoos like hooded monks stood in a line and watched my trespass. Boulders maroon and pink, serpentine green and metal gray. Some stones, called porphyritic diorite, were jeweled with pebbles set in a black substrate. The fragrance of pine wafted in. Beneath my crunching boots, fine and dark red gravel lined the run of each stair of a gray-bouldered wash, as if I walked the bottom of a once dry aquarium.

Giant sage plants loosed their sweet scents on the rain, melding with the dampening smell of wet stone. Birdsong rose and fell in the soft drops as I sheltered beneath the trees. White piping soared above me on the walls. Fins over a hundred feet high – ivory and alpenglow and orange – planted themselves in the middle of the amphitheater. A jagged, church-sized monolith was emplaced in the middle of the vast, round knave. It seemed like the needled mound at the center of an impact crater, sharp and steep. I passed by a dead juniper trunk so twisted it seemed more water than wood, a river’s rapid spinning in its own fossilized whirlpool.

I finally turned around from my trance and gazed back toward the break in the dike through which I'd stumbled. I gazed at the cliffs and plains of the desert, of Navajo Mountain through a picture window. That arid planet from which I’d emerged here seemed unreal, cloaked in storm and dream and distance. Out there, a realm of horizontality. In here, a domain of verticality. The two, the active and passive forces of the cosmos, crossed here in a balance that held everything together, without anyone ever knowing that it did.

I wondered how I'd happened onto all this.

Before I stumbled into this roofless cavern, as I stood on the road back to my camp, on a treeless ridge, exposed to swirling storms, I'd almost turned around and headed back to camp at the thud of thunder and the lash of lightning. Yet I went ahead into the storm, and I can't tell you why. Accidents make up my life.

All of this from an accidentally discovered road, from a hidden entrance into a mountain I’d found by chance.

Roads led me here. Unintentionality did. My pure accident stumbled upon the miraculous. Whatever turns and switchbacks and detours you take, whatever mistakes you seem to make, you always end up in the place you’re meant to be. And if that hasn’t happened yet, it’s because your journey is not over yet.

Just when you think your day is over…

Just when you believe you've run out of grace…

When the storms come…

And you think you’re lost…

…you may have it all wrong.

Trust your process. You’re being led. There are no accidents.

What's accidental to you may just be part of a road. One road always leads to another, and even when the road dissolves into rocks, you’re still on a path; the pathless path.

On the way back to Starr Springs, under a soft rain, a full rainbow planted itself before me, its anchors on either side of the road. The colors seemed brighter than any rainbow I'd ever seen. I made out the red and the orange, the yellow and the green, the blue and the indigo and the violet all standing out from one another, and yet all shading into each other in a seamlessness that made all colors one. I remembered part of a Navajo chant that I'd been reading about just yesterday-

Homeward now shall I journey,

Homeward upon the rainbow;

Homeward upon me starting,

Homeward upon the rainbow;

Homeward behold me faring,

Homeward upon the rainbow.

It's called The Mountain Song, and upon the rainbow, both man and god move from mountain to mountain.

I remembered that always, whatever road I took, I followed the road home.

Read more about these landscapes in my books. My novels and short story collection are currently available through my website.

The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy

The Crippy

The Mind Altar

Canyon Calls

Please visit my other sites for more information on my books and writing: justmikejust.com, canyoncallsthebook.com, and justnonfiction.com