Lost and Found: Part II

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself. (Groucho Marx)

When your dad starts yelling for help while you are in the desert, kind of lost, it can be very disconcerting. If you are the dad that is yelling, it is even worse. We weren’t really lost, I knew we were on Gooseberry Mesa. I just had no idea where the car was located or how to find it. We won’t have a car on the GD to find, but the route requires serious navigation skills which I’m hoping to improve so we aren’t lost like I was on the mesa.

The afternoon started nice enough. We drove from my parents house in St. George, past Hurricane to Gooseberry Mesa. I’d discarded the Garmin (see Part I) but had printed off a set of paper instructions for a relatively short MTB loop on the mesa. Knowing how to read instructions better than use the Garmin, I was confident in my route finding. My teenage son, trusting his father, was excited to ride and I was glad to have a partner. Parking the car at the end of the dirt road we jumped on the trail and began a great ride over the top and near the edge of the mesa.

The instructions were clear but the trail not so much. As it traversed a fair amount of sandstone, the trail wasn’t always obvious. There were a few rock cairns but in southern Utah there are so many interesting stacks of rocks that some have been named national parks! Rock cairn or stack of rocks – who could tell? The other problem, I realized too late, was twofold. 1 – it was late, in the day and 2 – there wasn’t a slope home. When lost on (m)any of my front range trips, I just headed downhill. In Utah, we were on a mesa. The only downhill was a cliff off the side of the mesa. There wasn’t an up from which to see down and the rocks and junipers all pretty much looked the same. And some of the game trails were clearer than the real trail or was it the other way around?

The screaming began in earnest as the sun set and I hadn’t the slightest idea of where the car might be or for that matter if we were on the right trail. The yelling for help startled my trusting son who assumed his father would keep him safe. I was in fact, trying to keep him safe by having someone find us that could keep him safe, from me! I had plunged him into unknown, desert wilderness with an empty water bottle, t-shirt, shorts and a fist full of useless paper directions.

After stumbling for an hour or two across trackless desert in the dark, further losing ourselves, I called a halt as I remembered that we really didn’t know where the mesa edge was located. The air temperature dropped with the sun and the wind began to blow. I’d saved us from falling off a cliff, but likely we would now die of hypothermia. The paper directions finally had purpose: we stuffed them under our t-shirts and it helped block the wind along with the rocks we stacked together as a windbreak. Likely they will someday be discovered and named Anasazi Windbreak National Park.

Cell phone? Now where’s the adventure in that? Even if we had a cell phone we couldn’t have told anyone more than “we are on Gooseberry mesa….somewhere”. Meanwhile my mom – apparently with no faith in my wilderness skills – had called my wife in Colorado and told her to prepare for the worst.  We had been lost for all of 4 hours.

It was a bit of a rough night as we clung to each other for warmth and maybe a little from fear on my son’s part. I mean how often do you hear your dad yelling for help? At one point we thought we heard a four wheeler, but couldn’t see it. We realized later it was the local search and rescue my mom had called. We were cold but not frozen and with the sunrise our body temperature and hopes rose. We prayed and began anew looking for something recognizable in the maze of rocks and desert growth.

Miraculously we found the car not a mile from where we were sleeping. We threw in our gear, put the bikes on the rack and shot down the dirt road leading off the mesa. Sure I was in a hurry to let my family know we were safe, but I was more worried search and rescue might find us. That embarrassment I just couldn’t bear.

The GD trail has 2700 miles of opportunity for adventure and for me to get us lost. While, prayer will still be a part of our travels, I’m also planning on taking maps, compass, GPS, cell phone and actually knowing how to use them. All my “recoveries” have unfortunately left me feeling not too worried about being lost in the woods, but I am terrified of having my wife hear me scream like a baby in the woods.