Wow! What a Saturday. Our friend Will, in the office upstairs, is always going on about the white rim road in the Canyonlands outside Moab. It's not a bicycle trail; it's a jeep trail. I guess you can ride a bicycle on it if you want, but we took the Jeep. Wow!
The canyon is two thousand feet down to the Colorado River, red rock sheer walls. About half way down is a bench. From the top you can see the shelf with some corroded copper green growth on it, and some white rock. In the midst of all this red rock canyon is a layer of white sandstone. All along the canyon walls you can see this line of white, a thousand feet above the river. On this line of white, is the white rim road. It winds its way for a hundred miles. A hundred miles? We could drive that in a day even if we drove slowly. A day-trip. We checked with the rangers. Allow a minimum of three days.
We drove out to the canyon's edge and started down. The people that built this road found a way to make switchbacks that would drop that road a thousand feet in about a mile. Low range, low gear. Saved the brakes. We got down to the bench. Now all we had to do was drive along this level winding road as far as we wanted. We drove for two hours. We covered eight miles. We declared victory. We've conquered the white rim road. We headed home for the day.
Before we headed home, however, something really strange happened. Something I still don't understand. We stopped at the sign for Musselman Arch. We couldn't see the arch, but we saw where to park. We were all alone. We followed the trail to the arch. We were walking across flat rock. We still couldn't see the arch. We walked right up on it. The arch wasn't in front of us, it was underneath us. We walked right out to the edge of the shelf. There, separated from the rock we were standing on, was the top of Musselman Arch. The arch was connected to the flat rock we were standing on at either end, but for about a hundred feet, it is a pure slender separated arch.
We stood and admired the arch. Judy wondered aloud how that slender strand of rock could hang in the air like that. There were cracks in it. It looked like it would fall down. We walked around to one end, where it connected. Here is the part I don't understand. My acrophobic wife grabbed my hand and asked if we walked out across the arch would I hang on and not stop before we got to the other side? What? Here I am, being careful not to stand too close to the edge so she won't get too scared, and she wants to walk across the top of the arch? She is already holding tight to my hand and her hand is already soaking wet because that's what happens when she sees anyone doing anything up high, and she wants to walk out across the arch?
I don't get it.
But we did it. We headed out. We walked right across it. It was a thousand feet down the slope to the bottom of the canyon. We didn't look. We watched where our feet went. Judy's legs started to go just past the midway point. She kept going though, on wobbly legs. We got to the other side safely. My wife, the adrenaline junkie, was ecstatic. She can't watch a window washer on a high-rise without getting sick to her stomach, and she walks across a stone arch a thousand feet above the canyon floor?
I still don't get it.
