We marvel at our species’ capacity for knowledge and our feats of engineering, but before us is a jumbo-sized puzzle no human could complete or improve upon by placing a corner-piece in one place or a bit of sky in the other. Yet someone has tried to build onto this puzzle, to tame the land here. The crumpled piles of barbed wire and bleached cow skulls say this place would not go easily.

Apart from the artifacts of defeat, here are some of the things which make this cliff-side canyon a place defined on its own terms, resilient to man:

• A pair of eagles swooping down, searching for food or shelter after a long day’s flight.
• Breezes and gusts split from the prevailing wind and sent swerving around basalt obelisks that rise from the flat grassland.
• The sweetly surprising softness of soggy ground in low places.
• Frail trees holding talus slopes in place against gravity’s anxious call.
• Water that once flowed 300 feet above the escarpments.
• The neon-glow of the lichen scattershot across the eastern cliff-face.

This hanging canyon is a home, a refuge, a restaurant, a pasture. For us it will be subject to a few hour’s study. It will not change (much) before our eyes, yet our sense of what it is will expand exponentially in the finite time we have.

When we leave, this place will have changed within us more than we will have changed within this place. It has seven billion years left, in theory. The land will change, species evolve and life be renewed for another eon. We each have only our lifetime, our small pieces of the puzzle to wander around and wonder at and interpret. So far there are only smudges of humanity’s fingerprints here, leaving the view clear. Sadly it is hard to believe that our species – enfant terrible to the world— will not break this piece to fit the others tossed in a pile nearby.

I stand in a hole created by a giant’s footstep.  The crater 50 feet wide and 30 feet deep. It smells of dry grass. It feels of damp stone. The walls rise, cracked in near perfect hexagonal prisms, reminiscent of Easter Island, faces facing me with some unknowable wisdom in their eyes. Stone eyes. Nonexistent eyes. It evokes an awe, a godly air. Damp stone columns become temple pillars. Red Indian paintbrush becomes stained glass. This crater is not alone in the landscape, clusters dot it in the distance, witness to water’s power.

It is hard to imagine that a gigantic flood carved this place. Several great lakes worth of water rolled over this land, creating vortexes of compressed water, huge tornados with enough force to rip through rock. Where they touched down, however briefly, stone was flung aside and these craters were left behind, massive monuments to its force. How fast did the water rush over the landscape?  What obelisks did the flood crash into, creating the vortexes that drilled out the earth?  It is hard to imagine, yet somehow I can almost sense what I have in fact been told.  I see water rushing in, smashing and splashing angrily at the land.  This giant’s footprint still contains the force that created it. Somehow here, in damp stone and dry grass a tornado still coils.

You are in the hole.  Looking up at the cliffs rather than looking down from upon them. Gaze limited by stone walls, cracked, and segmented in squares and pentagons. Broken off rock piled halfway to the top at times, sagebrush craning for the sky while reaching for dampness with its roots. My attention is drawn here and then out again. The sky informed by a lens, the kind only a limiting enclosure of stone can create. Is it that it is a circle that evokes such sacredness from this place? It is sacred. A temple built like an Anasazi Kiva, a place to connect with the earth, and perhaps the tornado that still coils within.

This is a pothole, oddly named, found in Dry Falls National Park where I am. Why a pothole?  This hole is considerably larger than any pot I’ve seen. It is too large to be a pothole, too large to be anything save sacred in my eyes. This is a giant’s footprint. Here I am insignificant. Standing in the wake of a giant, awed by its vastness.

In the hole I am in awe.Around me I see rock that was carved out in an instant by a twister of bubbles, burrowing into solid stone. As I feel the rock with my hand I imagine the bubbles bursting – creating enough force to carve out the stone. Within the pothole, there is life flowing everywhere. There are grasses on the ground – lichen and moss, growing up the side of the walls.Trees sprout from the ground trying to reach the sky. I feel like I am in a giant planter pot and I am a bug looking up at the plants above

Green Lake did not strike me as particularly green, or at least not when we were there. Perhaps earlier in the year green graces the lake’s banks and waters, yet for us it was in mourning of summer’s passing. White mud stretching ice-like all across the dry bed. Unmistakably a lake, yet the oddest sight to behold. Our group walked for about a mile through the dry scablands, sun warming our heads. When we first arrived, we rest on a hill overlooking the white flat plain.  After much pulling grasses out of our socks, we went down to investigate.

The Lake’s surface seemed covered in powered sugar. I could see the tall yellow grasses surrounding and decorating the lake. The grass near the lake was green and as it receded, the color turned from a bright green to a beautiful golden yellow. When observing the lake I couldn’t help but feel like an explorer. Like I had discovered something important past compare.

Beyond the lake are cliffs, boulders piled halfway up its base, massive, majestic, more than a hundred feet tall. I could not capture all three sides in one tiny photograph as much as I tried, and it is the cliffs that make this place as much as the lake itself. Jagged shapes appear on the cliff face, the rock is too brittle to climb yet I cannot help but imagine doing so. I would stand at the top and shout. Voice echoing out across the wide winding plain, and down below absorbed as if by felt. It is quiet on the floor of the lake. I find my instincts piqued, my ear expectant of some danger in silence such as this.

I ended up exploring the lake with my feet. Barefoot I could feel the soft first  layer, white as snow yet warmer than what lay beneath. As I stepped down I could feel the moist gushy mud molding around my foot, squeezing through the small cracks between my toes. Mud almost up to my knee, I could now feel my feet getting the warmth sucked out from them, and the cold darkness started to creep in. Wanting to keep going forward I pulled my leg out of the abyss and back to the surface. Walking on the surface of that lake was fascinating. The only thing comparable to it is a giant ice cream cake.

There was a chill in the air as the snake came out of a hole on the saddle.  The blood of the snake as cold as the earth beneath it.  The creature moved with a slowness that seemed as if the only thing moving it forward was the incline of the saddle.

The snake licked the air, searching for food or warmth, but warmth was hard to come by on the saddle, the season changing.  The snake found a shrub to twirl around, lifting its triangular head it lowered its body off the cliff of Umatilla.  It licked again furiously for some small taste of something, but no such luck.

A break in the ice, A rush of water too great to fathom, and now I share this place with a snake, slowing from the cold.  It is impossible, but it’s not.  I know something happened here that shaped this land in an outstanding way, but I can’t see it.  I see the snake, and the towering sides of the saddle, with their cracked surfaces. Umatilla rock built high above our camp and the lakes. These old brick like stones laid on top of each other, built too high to even make sense.

Slowly, almost infinitesimally, the snake slid in between the butte’s cracked rocks.  Disappearing under a cracked boulder that looked as if it had crushed itself under its own incredible weight.  The snake’s tail only rattled once as it hit a dried branch before it disappeared entirely from sight.

Flinging our shit across the world, we are the monkey on this planets’ back. We burn our fuels, our oils, our coal and our wetlands. What does it get us? Electricity? Transportation? These fuels have already been deemed inferior to greener technology. Why not return to when we relied on the power of flowing water and constant wind to keep us going. Why can’t we stop being the monkeys that we are, and start being the humans we ought to be? We can, the only problem is we are just too stubborn to change. We believe that it is our right to exploit the world, when our real duty is to protect her from such terrible exploitation.

We cannot protect her because we are humans. We are dumb and ignorant humans. Monkeys are far more intelligent than us. If we were being monkeys there would be no issues. There would still be forest and lush lands for miles to see. There would be no cars, and there would be no toxic waste. The world would be how it naturally should be. She would be going on her natural cycle, not the cycle humans have set up for her.

The earth is sunbaked, wind streaked, snow crushed, and ice cracked. This land is subjected to harsh enough natural factors without us riding on her back, hooting to each other like the apes we have evolved into. We are the monkey on this planets’ back, if we don’t lose weight soon our steadfast support system will have her spine broken. The earth will be disfigured, and we have already started to see the nerve damage that we have caused. We see the damage in the gully. We see the trampled land, lined with our foot prints, and the footprints of the cattle that we brought up into a foreign land. Sadly, there is no cure for what we have done; there is only treatment, then hospice.

The plants fought back.  They are just as alive as you and I, but we always forget that.  They start out just as small as we do: as pollen.  They grow through the years, just as we do.  These plants are tough.  They can live many months without water.  Some of these plants go into hibernation, and some of them just sit, and wait, and never change.  The structure of these plants is fascinating.  How, in an area that is so dry, can they live?  They are so close to dust as it is, when the wind blows how are they not taken away, bit by bit until only dead limbs are left?  Some of them do though.  Some are dead and gone forever.  How come they couldn’t survive?

Perhaps survival lies in being a product of the place where one grows. The shape and composition of this place is reflected in the life it gives birth to.  Tough rock, gritty soil, dusty valleys give rise to rough leaves, crisp stems, scratchy blooms, thin membranes, and desperate roots.  These plants pool together where water gathers.

There is surprising gentleness too, sage blossoms and dandelion-like wisps that blow in the winds, fluffy blue flies by the thousands.  Where do they go at night?  How can such soft life hold on in such angry terrain?  The moss too, harsh and black under noon sun, will be green and spongy after a nights rain.  What fresh relief for the eyes now adjusted to the colors of drought and fire: orange yellow, black, earthy.  How fresh and important the small gushings of life are in this vast inhospitable canyon. How sweet the taste of water in a desert.

Rain; a recurring theme in the story of life.  Rain brings life so easily.  Just yesterday this place was dying of thirst, calling to the sky for help.  The sky answered.  The land revitalized, ready for a new season.  It is hard to think that at one time this place was so overwhelmed with water that almost all the life that is here now could not survive.

Not only could the living not survive, but the inanimate could not hold on either.  The Earth as a whole was ripped apart by this flood of Biblical proportions, leaving deep scars that after 15,000 years have yet to heal.  The sheer breadth of the time is staggering.  After 15,000 years this land is still a dry, unforgiving landscape with sharp cliffs and massive granite rocks tossed about as though a child had been playing with his toys and left them scattered about the lawn.  But this force—unstoppable as it is, is the most powerful force on Earth.  It can instantly bring life, while taking it away just as quickly in this harsh world.

It is difficult to not be consumed by the vast and seemingly endless space out here at Dry Falls. I find myself searching for anything that will give me comfort: A pair of trusting and safe eyes or a friendly hello that echoes its way to my ears, but there is only thick silence. The air is dense with insects; each breath is protein-filled and uncomfortable. This factor makes the search for familiarity urgent. A pair of deer eyes find mine, observing my every move with a heightened sense of awareness and curiosity. The desire to find another human being is replaced with the excitement of life in any form acknowledging my existence. This interaction is short but satisfying, for it proves that if I can remove my urban-dwellers lens, I can see t his place as it is. It was then that I realized I was at a Spring in the middle of a desert/ex-mega-flood, staring intimately into the eyes of a deer. The lens that had kept me from experiencing the present moment began to flee. As I sat down in attempts to put this space into words, I wondered if this place had anything to say for itself. I wondered if this place could speak, what would it say?

“I am a home, to the quail and the deer and the basalt and the scab. I am a subjective land open for observation. I am a mystery, but only to the human eye. ”    

This mesa is very similar to the one East of the cabins that we explored the day before.  The plant life is similar and the ground is covered in the same basalt rock chunks and pale brown soil.  This one however is covered in longitudinal grooves that include there own slightly different ecosystems.  In the small valleys that these grooves form there are huge sage brushes and game trails winding through the relatively dense vegetation.  There are cattle hoof prints made when the soil was muddy, they are deep and offer shelter for spiders to build there webs in.  I feel exposed here and yearn for the safe secluded feeling I get in the valley.  Although the view is absolutely gorgeous I feel somewhat out of place as I see cars roaring down the highway.

Sunlight.  There is sun here.  I descend to the largest rock, giant and glowing in it.  Rocks of all sizes, twisting squares in layers neither random nor predictable, accrete protectively around this small home, bringing water here, ringing this curious sky.  I leave my rock to look under one of the larger bushes, finding some small seeds among the roots, blown here by the wind.  I smell the place where there is water.  I scurry up to the edge of this place in the mornings, watching others come and go, scattering their cans and poison and taking their fish and thoughts.  At night I curl into my safe, warm place in the dark rock, nestle my nose into my breastfur, and dream.

We have explored this place.  In the morning we set out on a long walk, snaking over bluffs and valleys, allowing our landscapes of thought and place to merge. Passing over, under, and through a barbed wire fence we wander up a grassy ravine toward a cliff. Droplets fall on our dirty heads and birds cry.

We take refuge from the storm under an outcropping, allowing ourselves to fall deeper into the trance. As the space between droplets increases we venture from the cave opening, pulled by the landscape up the cliff, over ridges and along the curving swales and ripples of the land. We come together quietly in an open circle of pebbles, taking our places to listen, beginning to feel our surroundings as we unclench our thinking minds and allow our senses to guide our perceptions.

Everything is round, flowing channels twisting and circulating, expanding and contracting.  It is easy to see the movement of water here. The rock escarpments break in tessellations, spreading and scattering. Sagebrush, grasses, bushes at edges of elevations, reeds and forbs in the potholes.

Everything grows in rings and patches.  We sit in a similar manner and are here.