In October of 2001 I had planned to take a solitary backpacking trip into the red rock desert of southeastern Utah to celebrate my 70th birthday. I planned to walk along an uplift (monocline) called Comb Ridge. Unfortunately I injured my lower back during weight training and was unable to go in October. I set a new target date of April 2002, but I was too optimistic about how fast my back would heal and when April came I had to postpone it again until October. A major bummer.

Meantime, I plan to make this page a journal of my preparation for the trip, including my training walks, exploration of my motivations for undertaking this unrealistic ambition, and photographs of the country where I walk in Arizona and Utah. If you would like to be notified as features are added, just send me an email and I will notify you of any updates. Just put "Long Walk" in the subject line or in the body of the message. You will receive an e-mail every time I add new material or photos. To foil the spam bots that gather email addresses from web pages, copy and paste this line into your email program:

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Update 11/11/01: New text and photo have been added at bottom of page.
Update 6/5/02: New text and photo - A trial run walk! in March of 2002; full moon setting behind Comb Ridge at sunrise

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This is the east side of Comb Ridge. The altitude gain is far less on the east side than it is on the west (see photo below). But it is also pretty steep. In places the east side is much higher than shown here. Anasazi ruins are in the rifts along the ridge. Whenever possible I will be walking along the top of the ridge but as you can see to right of center in the photo, at times conditions will not allow this. At those times I will walk lower down on the slickrock and climb up into the rifts to look for ruins.

The length of the ridge I am going to walk is about 25 miles, but with the up and down into the rifts the distance I cover will be at least double that, and it will all be rough going. The entire monocline, including the part in Arizona on the Navajo rez, is about ninety miles long.

The west side of the ridge. It is about 600 feet high in most places. I know of one place where you can walk down this face but it's horrendously steep, obviously, even zigzagging back and forth. I made that walk once - lots of fun to say I had done it, not so much fun doing it.

UPDATE: The picture below is a view of Comb Ridge from a distance of about 30 miles. It was taken from inside the camper shell of my truck from a spot about halfway up a part of the Old Mormon Trail called The Twist because it is a snakey climb up onto the Grand Gulch Plateau. As you can see, it was overcast and cold, and soon after this picture was taken it began to rain. With high winds and low temperatures and rain, the wind chill was horrendous and even though I'm toughened by many years of camping in all kinds of terrain in all kinds of weather, it was too miserable even for me and I went home. But not before I walked up The Twist.

Update 6/5/02: Altho I knew I wouldn't be able to backpack because of my back injury, I drove to Comb Ridge the last week in March and camped in my truck for a few days, taking day hikes. Aside from the fact that I love Comb Ridge and spend time there as often as I can, this was a test run to see how well I could do walking up and down steep slickrock slopes, and also to determine if I am able to carry any weight at all.

I camped at the foot of the eastern slope of the ridge with the back of my camper facing east. I had planned my trip so that I arrived on the night of the full moon. Even though I was anticipating moonrise, I was busy around my truck, settling in, putting my camp chair out and stowing things that I wouldn't need immediately. So I missed the moment of moonrise and was surprised when I happened to face the east and saw an enormous brilliant orange globe floating just above the horizon. In a lifetime of full moons I have never seen one of such intense color. Of course my first impulse was to photograph it, and I grabbed my new digital camera and turned it on.

In my excitement and hurry to catch the opportunity before it was gone, I trusted the camera to set exposure and aperture for the first few shots. But I knew I could probably be more sure of at least one good picture (all any photographer hopes for out of a typical shoot) if I set progressive exposure times and apertures myself. It was already very dark and I had a hard time seeing the screen to make my settings, but I knew it was only a matter of a few minutes before the moon would rise above the smoke from forest fires in New Mexico that gave it its dramatic color. I didn't know where my flashlight was and knew that by the time I found it the opportunity would probably be gone. In addition, I'm not fully familiar with the camera yet, so in the dark, and in a hurry, I couldn't find the aperture settings, which on a digital camera are set electronically on a menu rather than by just rotating the lens, but I found the menu for exposure time so I did the best I could and managed to take a series of shots with progressively longer exposures.

Alas! With my control limited to only the exposure time, the camera tried to average out settings so that everything in the frame would be visible, so of course it set the aperture to get maximum light. The result was that I got a series of photos with the moon extremely over-exposed as the camera tried to capture the blackened landscape with wider and wider apertures. Over-exposure took all the orange out of the moon, and in all the pictures it looks like a big white amoeba, its edges wavery because since I didn't have time to set up my tripod, I was handholding the camera during long exposure times. In sum, the shoot was a fiasco. You can't do night-time photography without careful and time-conscious preparation.

Here's the Amoeba Moon, unretouched. Note that the camera's self-adjustment made it possible to can see fuzzy details of the desert landscape in the photo, but these were not even dimly visible with the naked eye.	Here's the same photo in one of its incarnations as I played with it in Photoshop -- the effect being as if the sun is rising at night. The mountain that's very dim on the far horizon is Sleeping Ute.

In the morning, I awoke before sunrise and was up and about when the full moon set over Comb Ridge. This time I got a good one. This is the Real Southwest, where most panoramic landscapes are polluted with power poles, signs, and fences:

Because a digital camera allows you to review a photo on an LCD screen as soon as you have taken it, I knew I had a great shot and I was in a cheerful mood as I prepared for my first walk on the ridge. At home I had gathered what I needed for a day-long hike, put everything in my day pack, and weighed it: about ten pounds. This included two bottles of water -- the single heaviest item, camera, GPS, bug dope, sun screen, cell phone, a book to read during rest stops, and lunch (which Paul, my physical therapist, had suggested would be nine of the ten pounds). This seemed a cautious amount to carry until I could determine how my back was going to do.

Paul had suggested that a pack that put the weight on my hips rather than on my shoulders might be easier on my back, which made sense to me at the time, and just before I left Flagstaff I had found a large capacity fanny pack -- or excuse me, what is now known more delicately as a waist pack -- and I loaded this with my ten pounds of gear and cinched it around my waist. But I was immediately uncomfortable. I had not gone more than ten steps before I realized that this much weight on my hips somehow was stressing my lower back rather than helping it. Fanny packs are great for light loads, but not for heavy ones, apparently. I turned back and transferred everything to my conventional shoulder-strap day pack, which felt much better. So much for rational theory. I have learned that when you're talking about back problems, not everything makes sense.

I set off northward along the base of the ridge, looking for the first of the larger rifts I had marked on my topo before leaving home. Comb Ridge has many rifts cut into it, and it is here that you are most likely to find prehistoric ruins. Using my TopoUSA computer program, I had selected several of these rifts to explore, marked the maps with map coordinates, and printed them out. Here's the map of the part of the ridge where I camped, and where I was walking:

The black line near the bottom marks the old highway from Bluff, Utah, to Mexican Hat, not maintained since the new highway was built back in the thirties. It is still drivable in parts, but has completely crumbled where it drops down into Butler Wash (scarcely legible in this miniature scan of the map; it's marked in blue). Not too many years ago you could make your way through the wash in a 4WD if you were careful, but it is now in a very dangerous condition. Moral: You can't necessarily trust topo maps to be up-to-date. There is nothing in the map to tell you that it isn't a good idea to go cruising down that road.

In TopoUSA you can insert GPS readings of latitude and longitude by putting the cursor over the location and selecting a draw icon that places a notation on the map. You can also draw lines to mark routes. So the coordinates in the boxes are my own additions, as is the route marked in red that would take me up the first rift that I thought might have ruins in it, assuming that I would start from Butler Wash Road. It was this rift I started out for from my camp site, which is also marked on the map, walking along the base of the ridge rather than from the road. It appears to be no more than a mile as the crow flies, but I was not flying, I was walking a zig-zag course as well as climbing and descending. The map doesn't begin to suggest the number of small ravines and washes to be crossed. It took me about an hour to reach the rift, which tells me that my initial guess about how long it would take to walk my planned route in October is probably close. Altho the length of my Long Walk is only twenty-five miles, it's going to be very slow going even without the detours up rifts to search for ruins. Allowing for one of these side trips every day, and also allowing for the fact that I am a creaking 70 years old with a bad back, I doubt if I will cover more than three crow miles a day. The estimate that it will take me about ten days to cover the twenty-five miles is close.

(To be continued. If you would like to be notified when I post the rest of this account, send me an e-mail with Long Walk in the subject line. You don't have to write a message, altho I'd enjoy hearing your comments on this page or anything else on this Web site. I won't use your e-mail address for any purpose other than to notify you of updates to this page.)

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