adventure

Most people remember special Thanksgiving dinners, but Addie Baker, Dottie and John Sanders, and their 13-year-old son, Kyle, and I will always

REMEMBER THE FEAST WE DIDN'T EAT.

Addie stayed home to cook the turkey, but the Sanders family and I elected to enjoy a pre-dinner hike in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area of far northern Arizona. I planned our trek. On a particular mountaintop, a side road off the highway ended at the mouth of a small canyon, I said. We would park there, walk over a hill parallel with the canyon, climb down into it, and then hike back to our car. We promised Addie we'd be home by 5 P.M.

"No, we don't need heavy jackets," I said. "We'll be home before it starts getting cold." As we left

LOST ON THANKSGIVING IN THE Wrong

my house, I realized I had forgotten the map. "But we can't get lost," I said. "I've been there before, and once you get in a canyon, you just go where it goes." That last part would prove frighteningly true. We parked as I planned and walked north over the hill. There was the canyon. I stood looking into it. That thing was deep. "We can get down here," Kyle said.

I didn't remember the bottom of my canyon being that far from the top, but this had to be the right place. The only other crevasse in the area was the "Big One," which could be entered only at a ranger station. I hesitated. Knowledge of my senior citizen status sat like a specter on my shoulder. Twin specters. One on each shoulder. But the rest of my little group had already disappeared over the side.

I sat down and slid over the first big rock. The

Canyon

way down was longer and harder than I expected.

I would have worried about how I was going to get back up again as I edged down, mostly utilizing the seat of my pants, but I was too busy with my immediate problems to be concerned about future ones.

My friends waited for me in a red-walled canyon filled with cottonwood trees. We walked beside a small creek, stopping to take pictures. But I kept wishing I'd see something familiar. This canyon didn't look like my canyon.

"Shouldn't we be going upstream if we're heading for the mouth of this thing?" John asked. "Look at the stuff washed down in the creek bed. We keep going downstream."

"It's not far to the mouth of the canyon now," I said.

We came to a small side canyon on the left. "We've been walking too long," John said. "Maybe we should try to climb out here."

I insisted we stay on the bottom. We were on a trail where feet clad in Nikes and tennis shoes had recently trod. Real live people were coming and going from somewhere, which meant there had to be an entrance and/or exit somewhere.

The shadows got longer. The cliff walls got higher. We walked faster.

The sun slipped behind the cliffs.

Around a bend, we were relieved to find two young men who had set up camp. They shared a map of the Big One with us. The canyon we could not possibly be in, but were in. "You're seven miles from the trailhead," said one, "and too far from where you came down to go back. You've got about 45 minutes more of daylight. You're not going to get out of here tonight."

We went on, searching for a possible way up on the left and east side of the canyon. According to my reckoning, my canyon with our car sitting at its mouth was in that direction.

"We'd better find a place to camp and gather wood," said Dottie.

It got very cold when the sun went down. We needed a fire.

There was no time to select the ideal campsite. Dusk was upon us, and darkness falls swiftly in canyons.

Waters flowing downstream had tossed the remains of huge dead cottonwood trees into an irregular stack. "Here," said John. "On that side, the tree trunks will give us some protection, and we'll have a backrest."

We scavenged for wood. John and Kyle built a fire, and in a few minutes we were warming cold hands over the flames.

We were hungry. I had four cookies in my fanny pack. Dottie found two granola bars, an apple, and two oranges in hers. Kyle's pack was empty, and John had an orange. No one mentioned the turkey, which had probably now roasted to a mouth-watering golden brown.

It was 6 P.M., and we had 12 hours to go before morning light. Poor Addie. She was probably starting to worry.

We sang Christmas carols. I dredged the depths of my memory and came up with folk songs my mother used to sing. No one remarked that remembering the location of a specific canyon might have been more useful than my recall of the words of old songs.

Finally we lay down in a sort of sandwich with John and me on the outside. "The end people get cold," John complained during the night. "They may be cold, but they can move," Dottie said. The end people tended to keep pushing toward the middle of the sandwich, seeking warmth.

Every time the fire died down, someone stirred and John fed the flames. At intervals I would hear his whispered growl, "Get your feet out of the fire."

When I awoke, I watched the flickering light on the ancient logs behind us, logs bleached bone-white by the elements. Vegetation with stalks five or six feet high, dead now, stood beside us. The stalks' featherlike fronds moved gently in the breeze. The immensity of total darkness engulfed our small circle lit by the flickering flames.

By 6 A.M. we stood over our dying fire as the world turned light gray. When we could see well enough to find the trail, we threw dirt over the campfire embers and started out of the canyon.

The sky was overcast, and it got even colder. The wind rose. "A front's moving in," Dottie said.

We had to find a way out soon. Our light jackets would offer little protection if snow began to fall. But there was still no break in the towering cliff walls.

Then around an outcropping we saw a talus slope. Loose rock, some soil. Vegetation here and there. The top of the canyon was about a thousand feet up. "We can make it here," John said.

We climbed. John and Kyle went ahead. John would call, "Come this way. Left of the dead tree you can get around that big rock."

The slope up which we struggled cut into a curve in the canyon wall, but on each side of it massive rock formations reached for the sky. Sometimes a hiker gets all the way up a cliffside to find slickrock close to the canyon rim, under an overhanging hard-rock lip. With luck the climber can "ledge-walk" one way or another, until a break in the top hard rock appears. But not this time. If we couldn't get up that last few feet at the end of our climb, we would have to retreat to the bottom.

I lacked the stamina of my younger companions, and wasn't sure I could summon enough energy for a second climb.

Finally John yelled, "Kyle's out."

We'd made it. Once one person was out, even the Senior Citizen would be able to scramble up the last few difficult feet with someone pulling from above and someone pushing from below.

The flat land felt wonderful beneath my feet as we stood on the rim of the Big One and drew a map in the sand with sticks. "Northeast," John said, and that's where we headed.

The wind blew and dark clouds scuded overhead as we trudged over the hill, cold and exhausted but euphoric with relief.

"Look," I said, "right ahead of us. That red sand by the white rock. I think that's the road, and our car is in those trees."

Finally, something familiar. A joy to behold. But we weren't home free when we got to the main road, piled into my truck, and headed out.

Several vehicles sat parked beside the highway. Pickup trucks and small white jeeps marked "County Sheriff's Department." Addie must have sounded the alarm.

I stopped, got out of my truck, and my heart sank as I saw the sheriff striding toward me. He was a big man, and he didn't look happy. I started backing up until my retreat was cut off by the side of my pickup.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

Before I could answer, he went on. "We've been up here since daybreak, and we couldn't even find your vehicle. Doris, when we get older, we have to use a little more common sense." He was gritting his teeth when he got to the "common sense" part.

Eventually my strongest memory was not of the cold and discomfort, the danger, or even the embarrassment at having to be "rescued." It was of the complete exhilaration of the adventure. Would I do it again? Well, no. Certainly not as ill-prepared as we were. That was foolish, and we were just lucky no one got hurt. Still I wouldn't have missed it for the world. We can eat turkey anytime.