#la sals

[thomaswaynewolf]

[thomaswaynewolf]

[thomaswaynewolf]

[alluneedissunshine]

Godfather Land by Courtney Meier Via Flickr: Rich, afternoon light collides with snow-clouds and creates dramatic shadows in front of the distant peaks of the La Sal Mountains, Arches National Park, Utah. The Windows section of the Park lies in the middle distance on the left, and further out is the Porcupine Rim and the upper reaches of the Mill Creek watershed. My godfather has a small homestead on public land in a bend of canyon way up Mill Creek. He lives alone in a canvas tent heated by a single wood stove, and his horses are his most constant company. He has a small garden and an apple orchard. He also works an active claim for precious stones and searches for meteor fragments, which he fashions into jewelry that he sells in nearby Moab. For the small mine, he has filed the proper paper-work with the BLM in Denver per requirements laid out in the General Mining Act of 1872. It is via this loophole that he resides year-round with his horses in a place that currently sports a 'Wilderness Study Area' designation. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the local BLM rangers do not communicate with the Denver office, and they often hassle him about his horses after recreators log complaints about livestock being in their playground. Until this past spring, I last saw my godfather in 2007 in a chance encounter at the breakfast bar in the Aarchway Inn in Moab. Though I have been to Moab many times since 2007, I failed repeatedly to get in touch with my godfather, as he is a hard man to reach unless one simply walks up the canyon to find him. The trouble is, there is no trail to his homestead that is on any map, although it turns out there is a common use path, most likely primarily established by him and his horses. Several years ago, a mutual friend was able to point to a promising bend in the canyon as we looked at a satellite map of the Mill Creek drainage together. Using the map, we tried to find him in December 2019 and failed after hiking five miles up the canyon into a snow-storm. It snowed over 8 inches before we finally made it back to the car as it was getting dark. We didn't find him but we knew we were close because we met his horses. All six of them gathered round us and nosed in close to investigate if we had any snacks. This past year a paradigm shift occurred that allowed us to get in touch with my godfather in real-time (more or less), and to coordinate a visit. He is 78 years old, and his older sister who is 82 worries he might die alone in the desert. Because there is actually a modicum of cell service within a reasonable proximity to his cabin-tent, she recently gave him his first smartphone. I think my godfather knows he will die alone in the desert, and this pleases him; nonetheless, he enjoys connecting with people via his new portal to the outside world, and we were thus able to tell him that we would be visiting and that we wanted to find him. He instructed us to take the Sand Flats road out of town and to pull off onto a four-wheel drive road at a certain mile post. We parked the EuroVan and walked down the road, and when we passed a small drainage, we were instructed to leave the road and find the canyon rim before the road began to descend significantly. At this point, he told us, we would notice an old rusted out bulldozer that was tossed over the cliff in the 1970s during a rowdy moment of the Sagebrush Rebellion. Here, we would find the trail into a lovely grotto at the confluence of two desert streams. We would find him at the confluence: An eight-mile round trip walk for him and a four-mile journey for us (my 71-year-old mother was also with us). His wrinkled, bearded face, now missing some teeth, seemed to be filled with delight when we finally saw each other. He didn't want to hug because he was afraid of getting Covid, a reasonable fear since no vaccines were available at that point. I brought a bottle of cider I made to share with him, and he remarked that it tasted "like heaven in a bottle." My wife and I foraged all the fruit two years ago from trees growing near our home. We stayed and talked with him in the afternoon sun until the light began to fade and he needed to turn back to camp before it got too dark and cold. As we gained the canyon rim and stopped near the old dozer, I could see him moving purposefully through the pinyon and juniper over a mile away, his faded Carhartt jacket blending easily into the landscape.

[thomaswaynewolf]

[thomaswaynewolf]

[thomaswaynewolf]

[thomaswaynewolf]