River Day 5 10 October 2014 : Caspar Institute

We were in the heart of Stillwater, and Turks Head is a sort of pivot. You've seen pictures of it: one of Canyonland's, and indeed, the Southwest's, icons.

Mostly, it's seen from above, or from a far distance. From river level, it's situated on a broad plain, a jagged finger pointing eastward that the river winds its way around. On our first river trip, Rochelle and I skirted it too close to shore, and got caught on some of the rocks that periodically fall off of it. Ooops!

But this day, it was in the distance, and our destination was downstream five river miles, but "only" about two miles by land.

The day dawned bright and clear (of course) without any of the feathery clouds that had saved us in the last few days from the brutal sun. Even in October, it can easily get up to 120° down at river level, where the rocks reflect and hold the heat. We filled our water bottles, ate a hearty breakfast, packed a lunch, and headed out as soon as possible.

Again, the sense on the trail is that one's following a path that has been trod for millennia. The desert soil, or what passes for soil, is fragile, yet much of it is inhabited by delicate xerophytes and cryptobiotes, a strange symbiotic community composed of bacteria, algae, lichen, and the soil itself. A careless footprint here will be visible for hundreds of years.

Turks Head and the river

Along the way, we passed several large boulders, and found that they had been decorated, a long time ago, by the proto-Pueblan people who farmed and lived on the bottoms through the canyon.

We clambered down a precipitous wash and regained the river a mile below Turks Head, where we found a possible campsite and more petroglyphs, but very little shade. We crouched in the shadow of a boulder to eat our lunch ... and then clambered back up the cliff, finding it if anything even more precipitous on the way back.

By now, the sun was at its harshest, and the little clouds were over there. In a word, the walk back was sunstruck.

PVs, charge controller, battery, chargers in the wild

We got back to camp with empty water bottles and a few hours of good sun and several camera drained batteries. We expected that, and were prepared with a string of technology that harvested incoming photons and tamed them for use in our cameras. We sought the shade with cool beers and our books, and watched the sun work its way up the opposite cliff.