DEEP IN BEARS EARS COUNTRY
SPRING 1973: My first glimpse of the Bears Ears country was a revelation.
Every square foot of earth has its own compulsive magic, Lawrence Durrell once wrote.
Here in the lost dry canyon country of Southern Utah was the absolute living proof, with enough square footage to reach the vanishing point of the western horizon, as far as the eye could see, extending even beyond the eye’s imagination.
My friend and I had just driven up the switchbacks out of Paradox Valley in the corner of southwestern Colorado, and we were gazing across into Utah. Well, the road map said it was Utah, but that was clearly wrong. This country before us didn’t belong to the 20th century, the Industrial Age, the Beehive State … it lay in a kind of Altered State, the zone the experts relegate to dreams, hallucinations and visions.
We had reached a kind of frontier in space and time, and we were gazing down into the very bedrock of North America, a petrified world of towers, domes, minarets, mazes, abysses, with mountains like the Abajos, La Sals and Henrys rearing up here and there, and roan cliffs topped by bone-white mesas without names.
Over the following decades, my friends and I spend months, whole seasons, lost years’ worth of timeless time roaming the Cedar Mesa/Bears Ears country, from Navajo Mountain and the San Juan River in
