Moab slickrock, climbing, a solo Green River canoe trip, Monument Valley, slot canyons, Lake Powell, and three unforgettable weeks in the desert Southwest.
All photographs are clickable to open the full-size image.
Numerous trips to the desert Southwest were never as good as this one in 1994. By the time I arrived, my body was strong after two months of climbing and backpacking through the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest. These three weeks in the desert Southwest were only one part of a four-month road trip. The next few weeks became an almost nonstop mix of mountain biking, climbing, paddling, hiking, canyon country, and open-road wandering.
This page currently covers only about three weeks of that four-month adventure. Once I find and scan more of the old photographs from the rest of the trip, I’ll expand this page to tell the complete story.
After two months of climbing and backpacking in the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, I reached the desert Southwest strong and ready for more. Mountain biking the petrified sandstone and slickrock around Moab, Utah, was spectacular—and punishing. My body took a beating that first day.
My legs were trashed from the steep slickrock—up, down, up, down, plus a few wipeouts—so I switched to climbing for a couple of days. I could belay right from the car and did many self-belays using a solo device anchored to the bumper. By the end of the second day, my fingertips were burned and blistered. It was time to find the river and go paddling.
Monument Valley was one of those places where the scale of the Southwest became almost impossible to comprehend. Somewhere below all that desert country was the river I was looking for.
Then I found it. I was nervous as hell getting ready to solo the Green River, hoping to bail out before it joined the Colorado and carried me toward the Grand Canyon. Once underway, though, it was beautiful: half mellow, half wild, with alternating stretches of whitewater and quiet pools.
The river alternated between excitement and calm—whitewater, pool, whitewater, pool. During the mellow sections I could kick back, listen for the roar of the next rapid, and enjoy the silence and space of the canyon country.
Remote ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings appeared in the canyon walls along the river. I had thought about camping near one and sitting quietly with candles after dark, but the place felt too powerful and too important to treat casually. I moved on.
The slot canyons snaking toward Lake Powell were some of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. The deeper I went, the narrower they became. At one point I was roughly a hundred feet below the rim and miles into the canyon, wondering where the lake was—and hoping the distant weather would stay quiet. A thunderstorm many miles away can turn a slot canyon into a flash-flood trap very quickly.
The Four Corners area remains one of the wildest places in the United States for me. Climbing, road and mountain biking, whitewater, hiking, and backpacking are everywhere. During this trip the old Toyota covered more than 12,000 miles, and the desert Southwest became one of the defining chapters of that journey.
For about three weeks I stayed mostly at the Lazy Lizard Hostel in Moab—six dollars a night for a bunkroom or three dollars to camp. There was a hot tub, barbecue, picnic tables, and an easygoing traveler atmosphere. The only dilemma was that incredible free backcountry camping was everywhere along the river on BLM land. With great weather from fall through spring, it felt like paradise.
The Four Corners and desert Southwest remain among my favorite landscapes in the lower 48. The combination of huge open spaces, slickrock, rivers, canyon systems, climbing, mountain biking, backpacking, and simple backcountry camping made the region feel almost limitless.
Original page created in March 1998. Updated April 25, 2002. Modernized and updated August 11, 2026.