A New Canyon

Uncompahgre Plateau, Colorado

My Journeys with Myla, pt. 2

Note: This is the second of a sequence of blog entries concerning my travels with Myla, a superb dog of uncertain breed (we think she’s half rat terrier and half dachshund) who was found barely surviving on the streets of Grand Junction and rescued by a group called Grand Rivers Humane. We adopted her in the autumn of 2013, and she has been a beloved part of our family ever since.

I am midway up a winding, narrow sandstone canyon on the northern reaches of the Uncompahgre Plateau. This canyon is new to me, which is a situation that is always special – I have never before seen these cliff walls with their bands of salmon and ivory, wind-carved caves, spherical swallow nests, and scattered junipers, pinions, and sage. The sand on the canyon floor is smooth and damp, and small ovals of water still collect in the carved stone basins. They provide water for Myla to drink, and this saves on the water in my steel bottle, its shining cylinder bright in the high sun. An occasional orange and brown butterfly drifts in the still air, the first of the season. I sit on a granite slab that centuries of massive storms have tumbled down canyon from the mysterious heights above. From there I watch the waning crescent moon, a smile-shaped rim of white world so pale it nearly vanishes into the pure blue sky. It is setting, and the high walls of the plateau, like the prow of a great ship, will soon receive it, well before the fall of night. I am tired from the climb up to the canyon’s mouth from the basin floor, and I am content to rest on the granite block. But Myla is still filled with energy, and hunts lizards, digs at the undersides of rock, explores the ledges, and even flushes a rabbit – a brown streak of fur vanishing into a tangle of brush and dead juniper, well ahead of Myla’s open jaws.

The new canyon, the moon, the butterflies, the excited dog – it all becomes a moment of pure joy, a simple but wondrous experience in the American Southwest.