Sandstone Spine: Seeking the Anasazi on the First Traverse of the Comb Ridge by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts [Roberts, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Adventure, Travel, History, Illustrated, United States
ISBN: 9781594852381
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books
Published: 2005-06-29T14:00:00+00:00

Navajo sheepherder, Maxie Platt

“Lon Tanowa,” answered Maxie in his soft voice. I scribbled the name in my journal.

As we hiked on into the north, I turned that cognomen over and over, like a pebble plucked from the seashore. Lon Tanowa—it didn’t sound like either an Anglo or a Navajo name. Who was Lon Tanowa, and what was his story? After half an hour, the light dawned in my brain. What Maxie Platt had said was, “Long time ago.” If he knew who had built the trading post, he wasn’t telling me.

Just north of the spring, the Comb reasserted itself out of nowhere, in fierce and unclimbable 600-foot cliffs that swooped down to the sandy plain. If we were truly to follow the ridge here, we would have to head east down two miles of Chinle canyon—a stretch that Vaughn had found brutal even without a backpack—turn another corner, find a way to climb the lower cliffs on the west bank of the stream, hike two miles back to the crest, follow it for a mere two miles farther into the north, only to have to undo all that progress by climbing back down into the Chinle gorge again and finding a passage through it as it carved its way back toward the west.

The very prospect of such a labyrinthine ordeal seemed daunting, so we agreed, for once, to cheat. Across the next two and a half miles, we would skirt the Comb on the west. Cones of alkaline badlands, gray dirt heaps that parodied the slickrock we had hiked across for days, festooned the shallow valley through which we hiked. We crossed a low pass before heading downhill again.

In only an hour and a half, we had regained the Chinle where it burst through the gate it had carved in the Comb. Our shortcut had saved us five or six hours of miserable toil. Now we managed to splash across a riffled section of the chocolate stream with our boots on, but once we had climbed onto the bench on the far side, we could find no way up the smooth cliffs that arched toward the crest of the Comb, here only 200 feet above us.

Traversing back east as we sought an escape route, we ran smack into a geological nightmare—what I described in my journal as an “arroyo hole.” Here, a small side-canyon had eroded so drastically that a thirty-foot-deep chasm blocked our way. In the end, leaving his pack on the bench, Greg managed to kick steps in the vertical mud, like an ice climber front-pointing down a waterfall pillar. When he reached an unstable platform, we broke out the rope and used it the only time we would on the entire traverse—in the inglorious task of lowering our packs off that ugly precipice. By the time we had floundered across the arroyo hole and out the far side, our faces and legs and arms were coated with fine, brown dust.

Easy ramps led back to the crest of the Comb.

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