Flash Flood
“Watch the sky,” says the man in the battered jeep, chin jerking skyward. “That canyon’s no place to be in a rain.” He switches into 4-wheel drive and guns his jeep along the sand-and-slickrock track toward the nearest paved road 10 miles away.
We look up and see only blue sky and white clouds. “Doesn’t look like rain to me,” I say, and my husband agrees. The air feels dry and hot. Our hike through Little Wildhorse Canyon will be an easy, shaded one-hour walk, plus time to squeeze through tight spots. After four hiking trips in Utah’s canyons, we’re ready for the most dramatic of them all — the slot canyon.
Little Wildhorse is a water-carved gash in Utah’s remote San Rafael Swell wilderness, about 150 miles from Salt Lake City, 80 feet deep and narrowing at points, we’ve been told, to less than a body’s width. Slot canyons are not for the claustrophobic.
But we don’t scare easily. Back home in New England, we’re considered experts on hiking in the Southwest. We pass out tips on avoiding heat stroke, coping with rattlers, and checking streambeds for quicksand — touch the surface with your toe and if it shakes like jelly, back away.
We’ve never yet experienced a flash flood. But locals have told us the warning signs: a sudden rise in the water level of a stream, the slight muddying of the water itself. By the time you hear a distant roar, the Utahns say, the wall of mud and debris may be upon you.
To avoid the risk of getting caught by such a flood, we camp high above streambeds, never beside them. And to bypass the midsummer thunderstorm season, we travel in May.
When the dust settles from the “Watch the sky” jeep man’s exit, we park our rented Cherokee under a cool rock overhang. We pack our lunch and set out toward the dark slit in the cliff facing us — the opening to Little Wildhorse.
Inside the entrance, the temperature of the air around us drops ten degrees. Sandstone walls, smooth and pink as nude bodies, rise up sharply to a narrow ribbon of sky, blue dotted with white. Ahead of us lies a long corridor of sandstone, billowing in graceful waves every few yards, like curtains in a wind.
Sunlight filters down from the rim. The bright light near the top washes the sandstone to pale pink. Further down, the pink changes to coral, then, in the shadowed depths of the canyon floor, deepens to a purple glow.
Walking is easy. Flood waters from the rainy season has scoured the hardpacked sandy floor clean. We can stroll and look around us at the same time, a treat after New England’s rock and root filled trails.
My husband, Jon, pauses at every turn to capture the play of light on film. He fiddles with his tripod, camera, and lenses while I meander on, absorbing the canyon’s sculptural walls with my eyes. I feel each plane of sandstone with my hands. I watch a spider slip on sandstone granules as it makes its way up the wall. It crawls two inches, slips back one — 80 feet to go. I stretch my arms to see if I can reach both walls yet.
The deeper we go into Little Wildhorse, the closer the walls move in toward each other. “Look,” I say, bracing my feet against each wall and hitching myself up a notch, quite like the spider. “A way to escape if it floods,” I say. Jon snaps a picture — “to scare our friends back home,” he says.
The rock corridor twists and turns. We amuse ourselves by pointing out flattish spots where we could perch “if we have to.” Local people tell tales of hikers stranded for days on ledges of canyons, waiting for floodwaters to recede.
We have this canyon to ourselves. We like that, but it gives us the jitters. We figure that we must be at the halfway point — no turning back. “Watch the sky,” we quip to each other. Our laughter bounces back at us against the hard rock walls. Above us, the slice of sky is milky white.
Gradually, the sandstone walls close in. We seem to be moving between two giant naked legs. Wherever the canyon turns sharply, the walls now join at the base. We clamber over “knees” of solid rock. Some are jammed with boulders. Others have trapped shallow pools of water, impossible to skirt and too long to jump over. We pull off our boots and wade through ankle-deep water, pulling our gear back on at the far side. Every few minutes, we repeat the ritual. It is tiring. We stop trading “watch the sky” jokes. We trudge on.
Around one bend, a horizontal shape looms. Twenty feet above us, a tree trunk is caught between the walls as if in a vise. A flood must have swept it here, then stranded it as the waters receded. “Do flash floods rise that high?” I ask with a twinge of worry. “How should I know?” Jon answers testily.
We reach the point where Little Horse Canyon’s walls close in to less than shoulder width. Slipping our daypacks off, we edge sideways through each tight passageway.
After dozens of such narrows, endless rock knee barriers and shallow pools, the canyon starts to widen again. The floor flattens out and walking becomes easy again. A glare of light appears. The canyon walls open up and we find ourselves in a clearing, at the point where two upstream washes meet in a wide delta before they squeeze through Little Wildhorse.
“Let’s eat,” I say and we take out cheese and crackers from our packs and flop down on the sand for a rest. But we do not feel relaxed — the air has turned sharply colder. A bank of grey clouds blocks the sun, emitting a harsh glare.
Just as we begin to eat, it starts to drizzle. Our crackers turn to mush. We reach for windbreakers but icy pellets jab at our heads and shoulders. The drizzle has turned to hail. The tiny pellets soon grow to large hard balls. “Let’s start back,” says Jon. We move at a slow trot back into Little Wildhorse. But the perpendicular walls that kept the heat away from us are no protection from the rain.
Slot canyons, after all, are created by water. Eons ago, the rain that fell onto the plateau above us raced across the seamless Navaho sandsstone until it found a fracture where it collected and softened the surrounding rock. Flash floods, churning with silt and debris, widenened the fracture, grinding out the beginning of a canyon — the slot we are walking through now.
We stride along the canyon’s twisting interior. Sheets of water pour over the lip of the plateau onto our backs. I feel as though I’m in a shower turned on full blast. A warning on our Utah map flashes through my mind: “If you get caught in a flash flood in a narrows, it will probably be fatal.” We splash through calf-high pools. The water slops into our boots, but we no longer care. We want out.
We stretch our legs as far as they can go. We thrash through pools whose water level is rising by the minute. It is now above our knees.
We spot the flat areas where we thought we could wait out a flood. They are now sluices of water. We pass under the log still caught in a vise high above us, but try not to think about it.
Our clothes are soaked, but we are exerting so much energy that we do not feel chilled. I feel my chest heave but the roar of water on rock drowns out the sound of my labored breathing. We do not talk, except for an occasional yell — “FASTER” — or, when I slip and thud to the ground, “OK?…SLOW UP.” I speed up, but hold my arms out to catch myself when I slip.
The canyon is filling up like a glass under a water faucet. We struggle now through pools which are flowing together, creating one wild river. The water level soon reaches our waists. We could swim if we must, I think. But what if the rainstorm on the plateau is widespread? What if a flash flood is sweeping down the web of washes, gathering force on its way to Little Wildhorse? Could we swim through a sea of mud, boulders and tree trunks?
Adrenalin and the nightmare of a flash flood drive us. We peer ahead, searching for a glimmer of light, the promise of the end of our ordeal. I’ve lost my sense of time, distance and the beauty of these sandstone walls. I can now imagine how Little Wildhorse got its name. The canyon that delighted us early in the day now menaces us.
The light from the canyon’s entrance appears suddenly, startling us. We emerge from Little Wildhorse drenched and blinking, as if flushed from a waterspout. The mile or so we spent an hour walking through, we’ve taken 20 minutes to escape.
We scramble up the bank to higher ground, as below us a channel of water rushes on. Oddly, the sun is shining. No flashflood pursues us. The clouds must have dropped rain on Little Wildhorse alone.
We stand looking down on Little Wildhorse, shaking from adrenalin and exertion. Our clothes are sodden. The film Jon took with such loving care may be lost. But we are safe — we are not drowned or smashed by trees. And we are smarter. Next time, we’ll watch the sky.
[published in the New York Times under the title “Hiking in a Very Tight Spot: A Slot”]