Fieldwork
by Stephen Trimble
A Selection from the anthology Stories from the Trail: Field Notes on Moving through the Wild | Bookstore»
Included in Wayfarer Magazine Issue 42
Walk out the door for… a walk or a hike? Or something else entirely? Hikes tend to be longer than walks, with elevation gain that requires effort. But if you aren’t trying to clock miles, maybe the shorter hikes are really rambles.
For me, moving through space in my home territory at any speed always involves locating myself on an imaginary shaded relief map. I want to know where I am. There’s no need to watch that pulsing blue dot crawl across the Google maps screen. My screen is interior.
In this way, driving is just a higher-speed version of hiking—keeping track of biogeographic boundaries, looking for landmark features rising on the rim of the earth.
Here in Utah, it’s the Henrys—last mountain range in the lower forty-eight to be named. Notch Peak, a nick in the horizon out west in the Great Basin. Three scalloped cirques on Mount Nebo visible for more than 100 miles. Crossing the Colorado River at Hite, stopping on the bridge in the dark, listening to the steel beams humming, looking down and imagining the whole river basin stretching upstream to the Colorado Rockies and downstream through the Grand Canyon and on to the desert. Two hundred feet below the bridge, the river roils and purls and glides.
Naming these places, imagining their relationships, keeping track of my pinned spot on the continent gives me pleasure, grounds me. I’m moving across the earth, hiking on a grand scale.
Now zoom in with a whoosh to a single point, a single trail, still fully aware of where we are in space, in context. This version of hiking is more familiar.
My wife and I have a little house perched on a mesa in southern Utah. We’ve lived here for twenty years. From the kitchen window, red cliffs flare at sunrise and sunset, the ramparts of the Waterpocket Fold that provide Capitol Reef National Park its drama.
Midafternoon, we often say, “How about Chimney Rock?” What a gift to have this trail in our neighboring national park ten minutes from our home.
The scale retracts. Instead of that vast map of the whole West, this hike takes us across a single mesa on a looping 3½-mile walk. We know every turn.
First steps lead from the parking area through the Moenkopi Sandstone flats. Joanne says, “Don’t run.” We search for rhythm, then huff up the steep switchbacks into the easy headwaters bowl of Chimney Rock Canyon. The first trail sign—there are only two—directs us around the loop to the right. We prefer to go clockwise, contrary to the arrow’s insistence. Down through what we call Cliffrose Wash, where the rangy shrubs blossom in early June, the high desert air spiked briefly with heady, honeyed perfume. Across the bare clay of Scalia Point, where Joanne once took a cell phone call from her sister with the news that Antonin Scalia had died.
Then a wide curving climb to the top of the mesa. Big views along the Fold. The ledge overlooking the landmark of Chimney Rock itself. A side hill where one crystalline winter afternoon we snagged first tracks in the snow, postholing all the way. Rimrock, ripple rock, slickrock. And down.
We stroll. We climb. We amble. We chat. We suddenly remember a dream from the night before or a new insight we’ve forgotten to share about a complicated family member. We watch the Wingate Sandstone change color with the light. Today the cliffs are burnt orange against flawless blue sky. Another day, the rock takes on the deep intensity of raw meat. Gray days mute the colors, tan to brown to violet.
We move deliberately where blocky sandstone requires caution. We speed up on smooth clay between gray and purple mounds of Chinle Shale. We swing into the downhill strides.
Every step is familiar. Every day is different. And the goal is to be there, to be outside, to use our muscles, to breathe, to return home exhilarated, for that beer I’ve been thinking about for the last third of the hike.
“That felt difficult today.” “Today, it went super fast.” “What fun to run into that wide-eyed young couple from Indiana.” “How could that guy stay warm in that ridiculous outfit?”
That’s a hike.
When I’m working on a book project, I call hiking “fieldwork.”
I keep a tally of locations to photograph. I note places of ecologic or geologic interest. Special designations, special protection, “areas of critical environmental concern.” These must be the spots worth visiting. I go to each one, solo, to write in my journal, to photograph, to experience, to add these places to the skein of descriptions, verbal and visual, that will bring the Desert West alive for readers.
When I go to Nevada, it’s often for fieldwork. Just writing the word here makes me smile with anticipation. On this trip, my destination is The Table. First, I maneuver up a long rough dirt road to 10,000 feet, stopping at the weathered sign marking the boundary of the Mount Moriah Wilderness. Two miles of walking and a thousand feet up lies a tundra-like plateau, The Table, a sculpture garden for scattered Great Basin bristlecone pines. All this, a thousand feet below the rubbly summit of Mount Moriah, Nevada’s fifth-highest peak. There’s no place quite like it.
This is my third time here, and I’m elated to return. Mount Moriah predictably yields useful material—the weathered trees for photographs, the mountain for context, the potential for bighorn sheep. And, for my journal, new language that may reveal the space, silence, and solitude of the Great Basin Desert. Fieldwork.
Especially when I’m working on a book, I remind myself: pay attention. I tick through my senses. I look for color and texture and light. I watch for stories, for telling details. When the light’s too dull to photograph, I pull out my journal and look around, opening myself, doing my best to connect my brain to the place. Pen to paper.
*
Mid-afternoon I head up Big Canyon from camp, for I want to be on The Table at sunset, when the autumn supermoon rises. I’m not just hiking; I’m looking, intently. Closer and closer, smaller and smaller, the natural world transforms into an endless series of patterns. Aspen and fir on the facing hillside, a mosaic of textures. The path leading in suggestive curves between the white boles of the aspen. Leaves arranged in lovely compositions on the forest floor. A single crimson wild rose hip catching the sun. The contrasts of lichen on stone.
When I place the camera to my eye, it’s both a window into the world and a barrier to full experience. I’m looking with more intention, but I’m circumscribing that vision. I’ve separated myself from unlimited connection, but I’m focusing with clarity and intensity on this one prospect seen through the viewfinder. Both ways of experiencing a place have value, both enrich me. But the difference is profound.
I shift each composition in my viewfinder, framing one graphic among a hundred that could be framed. The tenderness, the sensuality, the order of what I see when I simply deign to slow down and look thrills me.
I top out at The Table and turn off-trail to walk from tree to isolated tree. I can’t help but move slowly, with respect, alone with the bristlecones. These are the earth’s oldest living individual beings, living more than 5,000 years. They erode to sculpted twists of weathered wood, dense with resin, impervious to rot.
Like old people, they remain dignified—not lofty like sequoias but godlike nonetheless. Meditative rather than Olympian. Their best background music: occasional single piano notes.
The bristlecone’s world is perfectly still, but my mind is racing. What’s the best place to be when the moon comes up? Which snag will communicate the ancient spirit of the trees and pair gracefully with the moon?
I hear the air riffling the primary feathers of two circling ravens; the only sound. Last light turns my snag deep gold. The sky fades to pastels. “Sky-blue-pink,” I say out loud, a perfect description I’ve borrowed from my mother-in-law. And, then, the moon. Huge, brilliant, rising right where I’d hoped.
I click my shutter, composing, recomposing, bracketing. I move forward, I move back, I crouch low in a dance that would surely look absurd to anyone watching. I crank up my tripod, I splay out its legs. I try to capture every photographic idea that occurs to me.
The golden glow on the bristlecone wanes. The sky is fading to black. I’m done. I put away my camera, turn, and head for my camp, leaving The Table in a hurry to beat the dark.
The downhill run is a hike, not fieldwork. I fantasize about dinner.
I leave behind two ravens, bristlecone pines, soft-edged evening stillness fast turning to night. And unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep.
Stephen Trimble (he/him) grew up in the West with a geologist father who taught him that landscape has content. His 25 books are rooted in paying attention as he moves through his home territory, especially the deserts and canyons of the Southwest and Great Basin. He’s won the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation and The National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage “Wrangler” Award. Trimble lives in Salt Lake City and Torrey, Utah.