The Plateau of Doubt: Hiking the Hayduke Trail across the Colorado Plateau

By Jonathan Stewart

The Plateau of Doubt details a 725 mile, two-season trek tracing the Hayduke Trail across the Colorado Plateau. Not only does it describe the stunning scenery spanning six national parks, two national forests, three wilderness areas, two national monuments and one national recreation area, but the underlines the challenges involved in hiking one of the most remote and desiccated landscapes on earth. It illustrates the dramatic impact a warming world and over-grazing are having on the fragile environment of the Colorado Plateau.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483480879

Book preview

THE

PLATEAU

OF

DOUBT

HIKING THE HAYDUKE TRAIL

ACROSS THE COLORADO PLATEAU

JONATHAN STEWART

Copyright © 2018 Jonathan Stewart.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8088-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8087-9 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 3/16/2018

JONATHAN STEWART

The Plateau of Doubt

Hiking the Hayduke Trail across the Colorado Plateau

J onathan Stewart has spent the past decade hiking over 12,000 miles of backcountry trails. He has hiked the length of the Pacific Crest, the Continental Divide, the Grand Enchantment, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Divide, the Long, the Colorado and many other well known long distance trails. This followed three decades working for the U.S. Forest Service where he fought wildfires as a smokejumper, heliattack foreman and crewboss, directed wilderness and backcountry trail crews and managed youth, volunteer and hosted programs. He also spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and six years as director of the NW Service Academy, one of the nation’s first Americorps programs. He currently volunteers as a crew leader for the Conservation VIP helping rebuild trails in Patagonia while managing his family tree farm in Oregon. Densely forested with trees over a century old, it is one of the first small woodland properties in the nation set aside to sequestor carbon to reduce the impacts of climate change.

Learn more at http://pilgrimagetotheedge.blogspot.com/

To Pat Sanderlin

In honor of a friend who shared many lifelong adventures.

In our youth, farming in the tiger filled jungles of Nepal.

In our middle years, rebuilding youthful lives in Oregon.

In our retirement, wandering the backroads of the West.

Pat was a lover of the outdoors whose consumate good cheer shall be sorely missed.

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ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

T his book grew out of two brief seasons hiking across the heart of the Colorado Plateau, but it took four long years to write. As described in this book, this journey may seem to be a lonely one, but it was not. Both this hike and this book were dependent upon a few special friends who made it possible.

Key amoung these is my wife Marty. She not only only kept me healthy by sending food packages to critical resupply points on my journey but maintained my morale with her cheerful voice on our intermittant telephone calls. Her constant love, patience, and support, including taking valuable time away from her passion as an artist to carefully review and edit this manuscirpt, played a key role in bringing this book to print.

Special thanks goes to Les Joslin, a prolific author, knowledgeable historian and careful editor, whose reading of this book’s initial draft helped conclude this long journey. It was Les who helped translate my many steps across the Colorado Plateau into a far better insight into our time and place on this ever-changing planet.

I also wish to thank Faith Holly Hall for her generous gift of editing this manuscript before it went to print. Her keen eye discovered a number of minor errors your author carelessly overlooked.

I also need to thank Li Brannis, whose maps, knowledge, and hospitality made hiking the Hayduke a joy. There are many others who deserve appreciation for helping me complete this journey. By hosting me in their homes, providing rides in their vehicles or treking the same pathways as I, they made this journey a pleasure. For any number of reasons, their names and acts of kindness may be erased from this memoir, but their generosity and friendship is never forgotten.

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INTRODUCTION

When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about. – EDWARD ABBEY, The Monkeywrench Gang

T he guidebook tells me that a devil lurks in the crypt at the end of this nave. I hear its deep throated rumble long before I see its tangled matted hair of bark, shorn limbs and uprooted trees. I leave my pack on a sandy beach above a mass of shattered driftwood. I wade into the chest deep water swirling against a logjam collected atop the boulders framing a thundering waterfall. The stumps, logs, and rootwads form a thorn- packed crown atop two warehouse-sized boulders that have tumbled from the cliffs high above, blocking the canyon. Carefully skirting the pull of the water threatening to suck me into the throat of this liquid monster, I clamber atop a huge cottonwood log wedged crossways between the canyon walls. It, like the surrounding alga-coated boulders and cliffs, is slippery and wet from the mist drifting up from the roaring cataract beneath me. I peer downstream.

Twenty-feet below me is a diamond-shaped boulder the size of a house wedged between two even larger stones. This triad splits the river into two, V-shaped, 30-foot-high waterfalls. The East Fork of the Virgin River tumbles over the water-slickened rocks into a deep, dark pool. Large enough to hide the Loch Ness Monster, its purple depths are shrouded in darkness by vertical stone cliffs that rise to a cleft of azure sky a thousand feet overhead. A spotlight of sunlight illuminates a sandy beach at the pool’s far end.

As I look closer, I see I am not the first to hazard this slippery slide, for a six-foot length of frayed nylon rope is tied to a branch sticking out from the bottom of the logjam. Two thirds of the rope is missing, chewed away by the tumbling water. I return to my pack, wading back upstream through the waist-deep torrent. I empty three quarts of carefully filtered water from my platypus bladders. I blow into the containers, creating a pair of water wings from the two flexible plastic canteens. Wedging them deep inside my pack, I wrap the pack in a black plastic garbage bag. Stuffing my hiking boots deep inside, I use a shoelace to bind the top of the fragile bundle.

Hefting it on my shoulder, I wade back to the logjam. I scramble back atop the prickly mass of driftwood, carefully working my way down the farside to the rope dancing like a twirling dervish in the waterfall. Before slithering down the slippery rock face a dozen feet below to grasp the frayed cord, I toss my pack as far as I can out into the splash pool. It swirls around, drifts beneath the plunging cascade and is driven into the depths of the pool. Dismayed that I may have lost my gear, I quickly follow. I lean out and grab the upper end of the slimy nylon rope, pulling it up like a twisting snake from the thundering cascade. Holding on with one hand, I clamber as far as I can down the slick rock face parallel to the top of the waterfall. The cascade roars like a dragon while drenching me in its icy claws. My fingers grip the frayed ends of the rope. I glance down. My pack bobs to the surface at the far end of the pool. Pushing myself out into the cascade, I let go.

So can you.

This is an armchair adventurer’s insight into the Hayduke, perhaps the most challenging long-distance hiking trail in the world. This journey of words will take you over 700 miles across Southeastern Utah and Northern Arizona as you share my two season trek across portions of Arches, Canyonlands, Grand Canyon, Bryce, Capital Reef and Zion National Parks …and a myriad of other public and private lands in between.

By following this three month long journey, bulwarked with knowledge I gleaned from four more years perusing local libraries, bookstores, and newspapers, you will gain a new insight into an often overlooked corner of the American Southwest. You may miss the heat, the thirst, and the cold, but you won’t miss the magic of a unique trail that crosses some of the most remote lands in the continental United States. If you perservere, you will also not fail to miss the biases and ravings that compliment the mental portfolio of a long-distance hiker. They come with the territory.

The Hayduke is an adventure in every sense of the word. It totally engages the mind, body, and soul while offering some of the most convoluted, remote, and visually exciting scenery on earth. It provides time for reflection and contemplation by forcing the traveler to look much closer at this planet’s natural and cultural systems. It brings thousands of years of human history into perspective in a landscape that vividly displays millions of years of this planet’s geology. Walking this stunning landscape showcases the rapid political, social and environmental changes that are transforming our atmosphere, eroding our planet and destroying many of the natural systems upon which our civilization depends. Join me on a walk across the Colorado Plateau. Join me on a trek across a vast stretch of land that challenges our survival as a civilization.

Take a journey with me to the Plateau of Doubt.

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Hayduke Trail

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CHAPTER 1

The Trail

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit – EDWARD ABBEY, Down the River

T he United States is currently blessed with public lands and a level of affluence that have allowed for the development and designation of a National Scenic Trail System. Eleven are authorized by the National Trails Systems Act of 1998. The most famous is the 2,200 mile long Appalachian Trail that runs from Virginia to Maine. It is followed in popularity by the 2,750 mile long Pacific Crest and the 3,200 mile long Continental Divide Trails that each stretch between the Mexican to Canadian borders. Hikers who have completed all three of these iconic long-distance American national scenic trails have earned their Triple Crown and are feted at an informal banquet each year.

Local organizations and individuals have also assembled routes combining a series of shorter public pathways, connecting roads and in many cases, their dreams, into new national scenic trails. Guidebooks are often published to highlight these lesser known long-distance trails. These include hiking opportunities like the 800 mile Arizona Trail or the 1200 mile Pacific Northwest Trail that follows the Canadian border across three Northwest states from the Rocky mountains in Glacier National Park to the Pacific coast in Olympic National Park. Often by no more than advertizing these routes and marketing the benefits to struggling rural communities proponents of these trails curried enough local political support to add these trails to the National Scenic Trail System.

State governments, working with volunteer organizations like the Green Mountain Club and Colorado Trail Foundation, have also helped construct and designate scenic trails. Two well known examples include the 272 mile Long Trail that stretches the length of Vermont and the Colorado Trail that winds for 486 miles through the Rocky Mountains between Denver and Durango.

Following in their footsteps, individuals have designed and proposed even more creative long-distance hiking routes. In the Western United States examples include the Grand Enchantment Trail that meanders over 700 miles across the Apache homeland between Alburqueque, New Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona or the 360 mile long Bigfoot trail that binds the Trinity Alps with the redwood forests of northwestern California. Perhaps the least known, most physically challenging and by far most scenic long-distance trail in the United States is the Hayduke. It meanders 800 miles across Southern Utah and Northern Arizona.

Even though the total elevation climbed and descended on the Hayduke while crossing the convoluted landscape of the Colorado Plateau is far greater than climbing and descending Mount Everest, far fewer individuals have hiked the Hayduke (fewer than 100) than have climbed to the summit of Mount Everest (more than 4,000). Not only is the Hayduke less crowded, it demands far more skill and knowledge than trudging with hundreds of porters and climbers up a well-tended, but extremely dangerous route across glaciers in the distant Himalayas.

Hiking any one of our nation’s long-distance trails can whet your taste for this kind of adventure. Walking thousands of miles along the Appalachian Trail or Pacific Crest Trail over a period months while meeting an eclectic group of equally venturesome hikers can change your perspective on the world. A convenience store, with all its colorful choices of food imported from the far corners of the world, will never look the same again. Automobiles, that in an hour carry you over the same distance that takes weeks to walk, become virtual time machines. The most famous and well-known long-distance trails, whether pilgrimage routes in Europe or tourist trails in South America, are clearly marked and often well maintained. For many, they not only provide superb exercise for the body and mind, but easily evolve into a spiritual journey of walking meditation.

But even by quieting our minds and reviving our bodies, we always seem to be seeking more, whether measured in things, experiences or achievements. For a hiker seeking a demanding adventure with dramatic scenery spiced with a fair bit of danger, there is one unique backcountry route that really isn’t a trail at all, but a rugged scramble designed by and for rock climbers that crosses some of the dryest and most remote terrain on earth. It is here you find life burned down to bare essentials with water being at the absolute core. This is the Hayduke.

The Hayduke is not really a trail, but a remote backcountry route . It showcases the dramatic scenery in the American Southwest as it traverses the length of Arches, Canyonlands, Capital Reef, Bryce Canyon, Zion and Grand Canyon national parks. It also crosses three wilderness areas, the largest national monument in the continental United States, a popular national recreation area and vast expanses of overlooked and forgotten public lands.

The Hayduke is named for a rough edged character in two of Edward Abbey’s famous anti establishment novels: The Monkeywrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! The first novel opens with the governors of Utah and Arizona strutting to the middle of a new bridge spanning the Colorado River. After the usual pontification, they cut the ceremonial ribbon. Unexpected fireworks shoot into the air and explosions rock the structure. The bridge and its builders collapse into the gorge below, leaving only steel rods dangling from the bedrock at either end.

Abbey’s hero, George Washington Hayduke III is the responsible party. He’s an eco-terrorist participating in a group of eco-raiders as they sally forth from the canyons of the Colorado Plateau in an orgy of guerrilla warfare. Their target is the industrialized madness of strip mining, highways and power plants destroying the American Southwest. Unlike most environmentalists who are willing to bend over backward to compromise, Hayduke is Abbey’s alter ego who fights for the land and its abused natural treasures. What is more American than violence? asks his hero. A veteran of the Vietnam War and Army mental institutions, Hayduke recalls napalm dropped on peasant villages and defoliants spayed on rice paddies. To him, strip mining the Colorado Plateau is simply the warfare of a mindless military-industrial complex reincarnated at home. Sadly what often starts out as tongue-in-cheek fiction all too often becomes fact. Within a few years after The Monkeywrench Gang was published, members of Earth First! were spiking trees and burning down federal office buildings.

The Colorado Plateau is home for Abbey’s fictional character who thrives on a survivalist stage. Although called a plateau, it is rarely flat, but a corrugated, heavily eroded, stone-studded landscape the size of Germany. It is bedecked with snow-frosted peaks, red sandstone arches, and the rock-ribboned depths of the Grand Canyon. Abbey claimed that if this colorful, wrinkled Navajo rug of solid stone and thin soils were ironed out flat it would be bigger than the state of Texas. Today it attracts millions of tourists who swarm to the eye-pleasing canyons and rugged mesas of its national parks, national monuments, and recreation areas from every corner of the world.

Dealing with remote mountainous landscapes that throw hail, sleet, snow, or even an occasional lightning bolt your way without the protection of a roof over your head helps define the word adventure: a hazardous yet exciting experience. But a life lived without a modicum of risk and uncertainity can easily lose its spontaneity and magic. We need a bit of adventure to challenge the mind, strengthen the body and, most importantly, redeem the soul.

This convoluted cross-country route is not a trail, but an adventure. It is a hiking miasma, making it as much an intellectual challenge as a physical one. The pathway, meandering through cathedrals of red sandstone and across deserts of windblown sand, demands every tool in the hiker’s mental backpack. This unmarked backcountry route demands skills and patience far beyond those required on most long-distance trails which traditionally follow clearly defined trails and roads.

Distances are not necessarily farther between potential resupply points on the Hayduke, but the route is rougher, more physcially challenging and much slower going than hiking a nicely graded trail. Not only does it take much longer to hike the fifty to hundred miles between resupply points, but the Hayduke demands a much greater ability to use a map and compass or, for those so inclined, a GPS while seeking hidden pathways through rugged cliffs piled in a maze of layered cakes.

Today, thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey, we have an excellent selection of topographic maps that outline the details of this convoluted land. Add a collection of local National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Forest Service maps, and a savvy hiker can always find an escape route to the nearest road if a critical water source has dried up or a rock scramble proves more challenging than imagined. By combining these detailed maps with a couple of sketchy route guides, a compass, and a little self-confidence, a hiker has the tools to tackle the sixth largest desert in the world.

Even so, experienced hikers understand the importance of flexibility. This means not following every detail of a designated route. On the Pacific Crest Trail, such a rigid approach killed a hiker I met along the way who proudly bragged of hiking every step of the Appalachian Trail. Wildfires, lightning storms, and snowstorms can impede any hiker. Finding a safe route around these natural inconveniences often demands common sense and judicious path finding. Not only does flexibility guarantee a far safer journey but often offers far better scenery as well.

On the Hayduke, this means using the official guidebook, but also obtaining detailed maps with updated information about critical water sources from other long-distance hikers who have recently hiked the trail. It also means carrying maps showing alternative trails and roads on the lands surrounding the official route. And finally, for the dedicated long-distance hiker who lacks a four-wheel drive vehicle to establish caches ahead of time, this often means detouring from the official route to resupply in nearby towns.

Unlike most trails, the Hayduke also demands the skills of an archeologist. Its route meanders across a convoluted backcountry maze of deep canyons, high mesas, quicksand, and boulder-strewn plateaus. Pouroffs are the smooth vertical stone cliffs carved by the flash floods that periodically slice through the plateau’s deep redrock canyons. Route finding involves thoughtful hours of scrambling and backtracking around the stone foundations of these short-lived waterfalls. This often means carefully clambering many circuitous miles up, over and around a thousand vertical feet of multicolored terraced cliffs to find a reasonable route around a hundred-foot-high obstacle. The hiker quickly discovers the magic of ancient lichen-covered stone cairns placed there thousands of years ago by Native Americans whose pictographs and dwellings still litter this landscape. When found, they can guide the observant hiker to hidden chimneys and steep scrambles around otherwise impassible pouroffs.

To avoid the debilitating effects of dehydrating heat or bone-numbing cold, the Colorado Plateau is best hiked in the spring and the fall when the daily temperatures are more moderate. Even then, great care must be taken to observe distant horizons for storm clouds and to avoid flash floods in slot canyons and arroyos miles downstream from thunderstorms.

By the fall of 2012 and spring of 2013, when I hiked the Hayduke, less than a dozen hikers had completed the entire 800 mile route. The proposed route is brilliantly sketched out in The Hayduke Trail: A Guide to the Backcountry Hiking Trail on the Colorado Plateau written by Joe Mitchell and Mike Coronella. They never hiked the whole route in one go, but explored every step of it while assembling a remarkable guidebook detailing a series of interconnected backcountry routes. They advise establishing a series of remote water and food caches while using four wheel drive vehicular support unavailable to most long-distance hikers.

Outfitters in tourist-savvy communities like Escalante, Springdale, and Moab are constantly seeking ways to market their services. As more hikers discover the Hayduke, for a fee they may be willing to supply critical water and food caches for future hikers at junctions between the sections detailed in Mitchell and Coronella’s book.

As this route is discovered by more hikers, the Hayduke should be designated a national scenic trail. It is a world-class hike of unequalled scenic grandeur. Given enough use and local support, perhaps federal agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management may improve a few of the more dangerous scrambles routes and require stockmen to protect critical water sources.

Thanks to the efforts of long-distance hikers like Andrew Skurka and Li Bannfors, who have both hiked the route in one go, a series of detailed contour maps and route guides is now available on the web. Skurka is famous for his solo backpacking trips, most notably a 4,700 mile six month Alaska Yukon Expedition detailed in National Geographic magazine and a seven-month, 6,875-mile Great Western Loop that included traversing the length of the Hayduke. Bannfors, the first long-distance hiker to walk the entire trail in one go, has done Skurka one better by updating his maps using regular feedback offered by other hikers tackling the Hayduke. Not only do their maps clearly note water sources but they show alternative routes to resupply points in local towns. In their effort to make the trail more user-friendly, their alternate routes are not only more direct but occasionally follow public rights-of-way or cross public lands questionably gated by a few hypersensitive property owners.

Resupply options for long-distance hikers range from post offices in Moab, Tropic, Hanksville, and Escalante, towns which have motels and restaurants to choose from, to Colorado City, a polygamist colony that has none. Access to the ends of the trail is simple. By using Amtrak trains that service Green River, Utah, or Flagstaff, Arizona, hikers can use local shuttles to reach the trail via Arches and Grand Canyon National Parks.

The Hayduke is an adventure that will test the skill, perserverence, and abilities of the most ardent hiker. Wading ankle-deep streams in shadowed slot canyons where vertical stone cliffs tower a thousand feet into clear blue skies, walking through ponderosa pine forests under a rim of shimmering pink cliffs, or striding along rimrock precipices lining the emerald green waters of the Colorado River is an experience not to be missed. But for those of you a little less keen about sweating for days on end to appreciate such wonders, sit back in the comfort of a soft armchair, pour a tall glass of cool water from your tap, and join me on a good trek.

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CHAPTER 2

In The Beginning…

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. – EDWARD ABBEY, Walking

M y hike of the Hayduke started beside a smoky campfire in the mountains of Montana. I was spending the summer hiking the northern tier of the Continental Divide Trail from Glacier to Yellowstone national parks when I was joined by another long-distance hiker. He introduced himself as Li Bannfors. He, like me, had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail a few years earlier and - just weeks before I met him - had completed hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail. A skinny, energetic young man in his early thirties, he pushed on that summer to earn the triple crown of long-distance hiking by completing the CDT.

Li was the first to mention the Hayduke while we dried our rain-soaked boots beside a campfire on a frosty evening in the Pintor Wilderness. He was on leave from the National Park Service as a fire ecologist on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I had just retired from a career fighting wildfires with the U.S. Forest Service. We had a lot in common.

I was enjoying the remote backcountry of Montana, but could not forget Li describing the Hayduke Trail as the most challenging and scenic trail he had ever hiked. Given his rapid pace and superb health, I was suitably impressed by Li’s description of the trail to recognize its potential for a future extended hike.

In later years, after successfully completing my own hike of the CDT and continuing on to hike the Great Divide Trail from Waterton to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies, the Long Trail the length of Vermont, and the Pacific Northwest Trail that traces the Canadian Border from the Rockies to the Olympic Peninsula, a much warmer, drier long-distance trail spanning the Colorado Plateau began to appeal to me.

In the interim, Li had gone on to hike the Pacific Northwest Trail, the Superior Hiking Trail along the southern shore of Lake Superior, the Arizona Trail that spans Arizona north to south, and the equally-long Grand Enchantment Trail that crosses the states of Arizona and New Mexico from west to east. Toss in a winter spent hiking three long-distance trails in Australia, and he had seen more of the world by foot than many see by car.

Li had developed skills as a cartagrapher while laying out burn plans to protect ponderosa pine forests on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. By so doing, he thought nothing of using his GPS to map his many hikes and welcomed the opportunity to share his knowledge with other long-distance hikers. We periodically met to share our love of microbrews, admire his stunning collection of photographs, and share our respective trail experiences. Li was the first to hike the Hayduke in one fell swoop. It was from him that I learned of alternate resupply routes he had scouted. He also introduced me to Andrew Skurka’s excellent collection of web-based maps and water source data. Combined with the published guidebook, I found the knowledge and maps to hike the Hayduke.

With my expectations whetted, assembling the gear to tackle the desiccated landscape ahead was my next challenge. It is easy to overload a backpack with the plethora of things marketed from the temples of extravagance that fill our local shopping malls. Like many others who live in recreation oriented communities, my local pilgrimage site is Recreation Equipment Incorporated (REI). Started as mail-order cooperative by a group of mountaineers, it is now a national institution. In my hometown of Bend, Oregon, it hides beneath three towering smokestacks, the legacy of an abandoned sawmill that was a founding feature of our community.

The whine of bandsaws and the smell of pine sawdust has long faded, replaced by movie theaters and upscale clothing stores lining the banks of the Deschutes River. They serve the many tourists and retirees attracted to the snow-capped mountains of Central Oregon. What once was little more than a stinky mill pond clogged with fermenting bark is now filled each summer by cheerful vacationers floating the river on paddle boards and inner tubes. It is surrounded by chic upscale neighborhoods filled with retirees and vacationers who happily rent the small houses and mobile homes that once housed millworkers and their familes. Today’s homes are a significant, albeit expensive, improvement over the brush shelters that for thousands of years served the nomadic tribes that fished, hunted, and foraged along this river.

Today, when I return to that peripatetic lifestyle via remote backcountry trails, I pack comforts never dreamed of by the Native Americans. For thousands of years the natives used their backs and their dogs to carry their few possessions and provisions. It was only in the last half a milliniuem, thanks to the Spanish conquistadores, that the horse arrived to help pack their loads. Today, Bend is still very much a dog town, filled with thousands of well-fed canines playing in its dog parks. But for a traveler planning to traverse the rugged Colorado Plateau, neither a dog nor a horse can navigate its stone chimneys and quicksands. Only a strong back reinforced by a pair of equally strong legs and arms can do that duty.

To maintain your strength and flexibility while ensuring your safety, the lighter the load carried the better. Technology has recently transformed the hiking world. Voyagers may have thought nothing of packing 180-pound packs of baled furs across long portages traversing the Canadian Rockies, but their lives were short and bitter. In my youth, when I spent a summer as a smokejumper, we thought nothing of packing heavy elephant bags filled with jump gear and tools after extinguishing the wildfire. They weighed in at 110 pounds. I spent many more summers as a backcountry ranger where a 70-pound frame pack was the norm. But today, with seven decades of knowledge under my belt and a much weaker back, my backpack weighs in at 17 pounds – before adding food and water.

The key to lightweight backpacking is to limit your three heaviest items – your backpack, your sleeping bag and your tent – to no more than two pounds each. Amazingly, with today’s new fabrics and technologies, you can do this quite easily. By focusing on collecting a few layers of lightweight clothing, a quality water filter, plastic water containers, a titanium cooking pot, and limiting your stash of toys to a few items like a headlamp, camera, and a sleeping pad, you have plenty of room for the two most important items: food and water.

The simplest and most healthful foods are the best. By combining grains, lentils, and beans with a few treats like granola, powdered milk, dark chocolate and spices you can easily provide three high-calorie meals which weigh in at a pound and a half of nutritous dining each day. If you