There’s a slipperiness to the landscape of the southwestern desert if you’re used to navigating a city. Scale works differently. There aren’t the usual buildings and trees to indicate how near or far you are from something.
Take Coyote Buttes South, in the Vermilion Cliff Wilderness of Southern Utah: the towering forms of undulating sandstone, striated in pink and white, shaped by a millennia of wind, were unlike any landscape I’d ever traversed. To get there, my husband and I had obtained a hiking permit through a lottery system from the Bureau of Land Management, and hired a guide to drive us over the ribbon of sand through wilderness to the trailhead, for fear that our rental car wouldn’t make it over the terrain and we’d have to pay a steep fee to get it towed. The guide, an easygoing lapsed Mormon with a cross tattoo that took up his whole calf, had told us that he would let us wander and would meet us at the spires where we’d entered.
Once we were swallowed up by the rocks, there was no landmark to look toward to know what direction we were going in. With the exception of some footprints we followed through pink sand, there was no evidence of other humans anywhere. It was very beautiful and very strange.
The rock formations looked like something from another planet. There was no trail. There was no cell service.
When we arrived at what we thought the correct location was after our wanderings a couple of hours later, the guide was nowhere to be found. Were .