It would be my first adventure in the Bear’s Ears area. Prior to this trip (which occurred in my early 20s) I had been more interested in the simple aesthetic beauty of desert canyons. Water pouring over orange sand, and fragments of the cobalt sky reflected in it. But after a while, I started to think more deeply about places. The beauty remained, but it began to penetrate time in both directions: centuries into the past, and centuries into the future. And if a particular place — say, Coyote Natural Bridge in Coyote Gulch, for example — was here 800 years ago, who walked under it? What did it mean to them? As these questions developed, the existence of the stories of the land began to appear. But not the stories themselves, just the fact that they exist. I could start to see them, like unlabeled books on a shelf I couldn’t quite reach. First I would have to start walking and asking questions, then maybe, just maybe, a few of those layers would start to reveal themselves.

First stop: Comb Ridge.

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