For the complete adventure travel menu, see Lynna Howard's homepage.

(This is an excerpt from a longer story. Photos courtesy of Leland Howard, see www.wildernessbooks.com | View Sample Photos by Leland Howard)

The usual mad rush to get things done preceded this trip. I looked into my business crystal ball to see what clients might need while I was gone and tried to head them off at the pass; notified the local police that I would be gone so that they would check my house more often; stopped the mail; did banking; arranged for my kind Mormon neighbors to water my infant lawn, which is as soft as green fur -- the tiny blades of grass coming up around the inevitable river rocks that keep surfacing like porpoises (what is the plural of porpoise anyway?) in need of air; called the home of the non-hormone-ridden local cows to stop dairy deliveries; searched the garage and house for my camping supplies, which had ended up in strange places after the move; packed food, etc. ..... finally breathed a sigh of relief and felt my shoulders relax back into normal position as Leland and I loaded my stuff into his truck and we headed out...

I love leaving home. Even the roads already traveled offer a certain element of the unknown -- and the roads not yet traveled, ahhh, there are enough to last a lifetime or two. This time we had hassled over setting up a travel schedule that was stricter than normal for us. This unnatural exercise almost led to Leland and I having an argument, with him reaffirming his oft-repeated priorities (the need to go where the photos are, where the weather is right) and me saying "Yes, but we do have to photograph the petrified wood for Earth magazine and we do have to be in Snowbird, Utah on the afternoon of the 1st, so we'd better make at least a loose plan." We finally agreed on a relaxed plan with a beginning, a middle and an end (like a play), but with lots of room for improvisation inbetween....

A family of moose (cow, twin calves, bull) crossed the highway in front of us, the bull pausing long enough to get his photo taken. The black bull loosed a shower of aspen leaves with his broad, sand-colored antlers as he crashed through the trees on the other side of the highway. He seemed to enjoy beating up the red and gold bushes as he went. Bull moose are ugly and powerful. They look like they're always on the verge of deciding whether or not to charge the truck. Some silly female tourist got out of her car and stood in the middle of the road to snap a photo. She doesn't know how close she came to dying...

If you follow Highway 150 to Kamas, you are just out of the Uintas for a brief space before the Wasatch Range looms on the western horizon. The Wasatch Mountains stretch from the southern border of Idaho to Nephi (south of Provo and way south of Salt Lake City), ending in the last hurrah of Mount Nebo. As we have found to be true in past years, the fall colors in the Wasatch Mountains are much more impressive, more accessible, than those in the Uintas. Entire mountain sides were covered in red Maples, like one long hosanna to the clear, blue autumn skies. I can never figure out what it is about those leaves that gives them an extra depth of color. It's as if one were seeing the deep pinks, reds, and magentas through a thin layer of liquid icing...

Fall color photo by Leland Howard

We hurried down to Capitol Reef National Park for the first real meat of this adventure, an assignment from Earth Magazine to do a story on a field of petrified wood that lies just outside the Park's borders. About two years ago, Leland and I happened on the ancient forest during one of our random forays in search of photographic cliff and sandstone texture shots. I still remember poking my head up at the top of a 12-foot vertical climb and being struck dumb for just an instant (even an instant is a long time to be speechless for me) by the sight of petrified logs and whole trees lying in the eroding sandstone at my eye-level. I was looking forward to going back. When we'd found the field, it was late in the day and both nightfall and inclement weather were threatening with such insistence that we couldn't spend much time with the old trees now turned to stone....

Geology is seldom simple. It was in a Chinle Formation that we found the petrified wood, but to reach the area would require a steep climb the next day. It's all the same stuff, and laid down at about the same time (say 248 to 208 million years ago) but some of it rests at lower elevations now than do other sections, the result of faulting and folding pressures that raise one area while lowering another. It's like a puzzle you have to look at long and hard before you can make sense of it, or like a detective story that will yield an answer only after you gather enough clues.

I approached the question of what was where and how it had gotten there by working slowly from the known to the unknown. The geology within the National Park has been fairly thoroughly explored by lots of people more knowledgeable and experienced than I can ever hope to be. So I looked at their maps and descriptions and their tales, averaged the opinions and added my own observations to come up with a likely story for our ancient forest...

As we neared the heaviest concentration of fallen logs, the only prints we saw were those of mule deer and our own, greatly faded and dimly visible prints from two years ago. There were Leland's tracks and there were mine. No one else had been there and it would have taken a keen eye with great experience to tell that we had been there...

At dawn, on the morning of our departure, the moon was still up in the northwestern sky as the sun rose near the Henry Mountains. The moon hung like a benediction over the red sandstone cliffs near our camp and I could not tell if it was moonlight or pre-dawn sun that lit the white tails of mule deer leaving the hillside seep to cross the ridge above us.

Return to Lynna Howard's Homepage | visit www.wildernessbooks.com | View Sample Photos by Leland Howard

Legalese: Unless otherwise noted, the text and images that appear on this web site are copyrighted material. Please do not copy or redistribute these materials in any way without prior permission. Thank you, Lynna Howard, 1996, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. All rights reserved.