Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, the canyons of the lower Green River, evoke stories. The ancestral Puebloan and Fremont people, who made their homes along the river, painted and carved their stories on walls just above the waters edge and on boulders overlooking valleys below. Utes, Navajos and Paiutes followed and added to the stories, turning walls and boulders into cryptic panels of their past. Fur trappers and explorers came next and carved and painted their names into the walls. John Wesley Powell was moved by the canyons and penned 300 pages of notes during his three month 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers. His book The Grand Canyon Expedition: The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons is considered one of the great works of American exploration literature. In 1982 Edward Abbey published Down the River with Henry Thoreau, a 35 page essay where Abbey contemplated the life of Thoreau while rowing down the Green. I read the essay in college and reread it on my first trip down these canyons. I left the book in the sand at night because it never rains in the desert and now the pages are swollen and wrinkled from rain. When you peel the pages apart sand spills out as if evoking some cosmic link from the river to Abbey to modern times where pumpjacks are slouching towards the canyon rim. 2013 brought us Fedarko’s The Emerald Mile. The story revolve around Kenton Grua’s speed run down the Grand Canyon in a dory, but the book is about the waters and people of the Green and Colorado Rivers: the Native Americans, the conquistadors who stumbled upon the “profitless locality”, Powell’s journey, David Brower’s fight to preserve the canyons and ultimately the power of the waters subdued under the direction of Floyd Dominy. I read the book tucked against a campfire while floating these canyons in October 2018. The stories evoked memories of McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, a book where McPhee records the conversations between Brower and Dominy on river trip, a book that has stayed with me for decades. On the river I am lost in the words and lost under the canopy of stars, the walls of sandstone, the murky waters, the twisting side canyons. Memories become lost in time, one trip blending into another and I forget the years but remember the important things: the days and the nights and where we pitched our tent and where we saw ruins and a collared lizard and where my daughter caught a lizard and when my daughter first picked up the paddle and pulled it against the water.

Stillwater Canyon. October 2019.

Back home I pass the long winter nights perusing the channels for movies filmed in Canyonlands. While Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was filmed in Mexico, the Wild Bunch Gang crisscrossed the Green and Colorado rivers in their evasive maneuvers to escape law enforcement. Peckinpah’s story of violence is a story of Manifest Destiny that parallels Dominy’s quest. In a retelling of the same myth, Thelma and Louis drive their car off the canyon rim and into the murky waters in a spot just downstream of the Potash boat launch near Moab. Moving into murkier territory Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi opens with scenes of Canyonlands pictographs and stunning desert landscape and over the course of 80 minutes transforms the world into a chaotic world of shopping carts and atomic blasts.





This is followed by more desert footage in Ron Frick’s Baraka. Frick was Reggio’s cinematographer for Koyaanisqatsi and his film, which is meant to be a sequel, attempts to return some of the balance that Koyaanisqatsi ripped out from under viewers. Top it all off with George Stevens’ 1965 epic The Greatest Story Ever Told where Max von Sydow plays Jesus and the desert landscape becomes the Holy Land. The canyons evoke stories.

Satellite view of the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. Stillwater Canyon is immediately upstream of the confluence (the river to the West). Labyrinth Canyon is 50 miles upstream.

We launch on warm October day. Our shuttle driver gives us the usual warnings about our young child, Isabelle, on a river trip and tells us that she won’t be able to do any of the hikes he recommends. Isabelle, 5 years old, is a river veteran with close to 1000 miles and over a 30 nights of river trips under her belt. She has grown accustomed to my, and other adults, continued worriedness when she is near moving water and has reached the age where she shouts, “I KNOW” and stomps away. Our shuttle driver watches her with an amused smirk and then, wishing us luck, drives away leaving us along at the launch. The sun is hot and air is warm, but the river is cold and I forgot my boots and my feet are already cold before we even begin the trip. I raise my arm to wave down the driver. Another warm October day we sort through gear with another family. Another shuttle driver offers tips but the children ignore him. Isabelle has aged a year and her independence grows by the hour. She and her friend, Aven, poke around in the bushes near the launch looking for things that crawl. The drivers sees that we’re fine and drives off leaving us before I can see what I forgot. “Wait,” I say as the bus pulls away. I need something else. Maybe socks, more ice, another roll of toilet paper. Something to hold us back. But the shuttle is gone. No turning back now. The river will not wait. We push our loaded aluminum canoe into current and begin our float.

We glide down the golden waters of Labyrinth Canyon. The water here is smooth as oil, the current slow. The sandstone walls rise fifteen hundred feet above us, radiant with sunlight, manganese and iron oxides, stained with old tapestries of organic residues left on the rock faces by occasional waters. On shore, wheeling away from us, the stands of willow glow in autumn copper; beyond the willows are the green-gold cottonwoods. Two ravens fly along the rim, talking about us. – Edward Abbey, Down the River with Henry Thoreau

Labyrinth Canyon Labyrinth Canyon starts a few miles below the launch at Ruby Ranch, a flat oasis of irrigated green ranch-land surrounded by desert. A mile below the boat launch we encounter the beginnings of the canyon walls that will eventually build to 2000’ tall. The windswept multicolored Navajo Sandstone (the topmost layer of the Glen Canyon Group) only rises 100’ above the river at the start of the canyon, but the walls rise steeply with every passing mile and by the time we have paddled 30 miles the cliffs rise 1000’ above us. The first day is always difficult but even so we manage to make it 15 miles. The jackets we need are packed at the very bottom of the dry bag and the sunscreen (that was put somewhere we could find it easily) has disappeared. It is too hot in the sun and too cold in the shade. Isabelle whines and whimpers until curling up on top of a dry bag and falling asleep shortly after lunch. We paddle the remainder of the afternoon in silence, dipping our paddles gently to avoid waking her. We reach our campsite in mid-afternoon, spill the entire contents of our boat out into the sand and repack everything for the third time. We fall asleep early under a canopy of oak trees and are woken in the early morning hours by coyotes yipping in the hills above camp. By the second day we are deep into the canyon and Navajo sandstone has risen a few hundred feet above our heads and the deep red Wingate sandstone juts out of the waters. For climbers the beautiful fissures of Wingate sandstone beckons and conjures thoughts of legendary Wingate climbing areas like Indian Creek. We pass beautiful handcracks practically jutting out of the water and in places we can see climbing anchors 100’ above the waters edge. We stop at Register Rock, a wall of stone at a bend where river runners have been inscribing their names for over a century and we find chiseled initials that are over 80 years old. Later that afternoon we pitch the tent underneath cottonwoods on a large sandy bench and walk around in the desert looking for snakes and spiders until the cold night drives us in the tent. Family portrait at the launch. Near mile 89. Labyrinth Canyon. Near mile 74. Register Rock. Isabelle at Register Rock. Lunch at Register Rock. Labyrinth Canyon camp. As we go on the days easier. We pack the jackets in the right place, find our rhythm in the water and supply Isabelle with a steady supply of snacks. The skies are sometimes rainy and cloudy and sometimes clear and hot. Early mornings are crisp, the afternoons hot. We rise early, stop for a long lunch and a mid-afternoon hike and pull the boats out of the water by early afternoon. One morning we stop at a wide meander known at Bowknot Bend (click for an image from NASA) because of the way the river doubles back on itself. From the narrowest point and around the bend and back is a distance of 9 miles, but from where we park our boat and it is all of a 1/2 mile / 1000’ hike to reach the saddle where we peer down the other side at the river just below. We eat lunch on a rock overlooking the river we floated on one side, and the river we need to float on the other. It would almost be faster to carry the boat to the saddle and pitch it off the cliffs and scramble down the other side then to paddle the slow moving river around the bend.

Looking upstream and downstream from Bowknot Bend. October 2018.

Labyrinth is only 50 miles and we paddle it in 3 short days. We camp just upstream of the Mineral Bottom boat launch on our third night worried that the trip is moving too fast. Mineral Bottom marks the half way point and just downstream marks the beginning of Stillwater Canyon. Our camp is a large open sandy desert bench with little shade, but the days are shortening and the camps quickly become shaded by the canyon walls. We eat dinner and spill into the tent as the temperature drops and lay in our sleeping bags listening to the sounds of the desert. We hear more coyotes and an owl calls in the distance. In the river we can hear beaver smacking the waters as they ferry across the river under the cover of night.

We launch the boats early in the morning and an hour later we drift by Mineral Bottom where a shuttle bus is parked and people are pulling boats into the water. We are worried that we are both going too fast and too slow.

We climb a hill of clay and shale and limestone ledges to inspect at close hand an ancient ruin of stone on the summit. An Anasazi structure, probably seven or eight hundred years old, it commands a broad view of river and canyon for many miles both up and downstream, and offers a glimpse of the higher lands beyond. We can see the Great Buttes of the Cross, Candlestick Tower, Junction Butte (where the Green river meets to Colorado River), Ekker Butte, Grandview Point, North Point, and parts of the White Rim. Nobody human lives at those places, or in the leagues of monolithic stone between them. From this vantage point everything looks about the same as it did when Major John Wesley Powell and his mates first saw them in 1869. – Edward Abbey, Down the River with Henry Thoreau

We find pictographs and petroglyphs here, pictures of deer, bighorns, warriors, and spectral figures representing – who knows – gods, spirits demons. They do not trouble us. We cook our dinner and sing our songs and go to sleep. – Edward Abbey, Down the River with Henry Thoreau

If there is a point to being in the canyon, it is not to rush but to linger, suspended in a blue-and-amber haze of in-between-ness, for as long as one possibly can. To float, to drift, savoring the pulse of the river on its odyssey through the canyon, and above all, to postpone the unwelcome and distinctly unpleasant moment when one is forced to reemerge and reenter the world beyond the rim-that is the paramount goal. – Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile

A man could spend the better part of a life exploring this one area, getting to know, as far as possible, its broad outline and its intimate details. You could make your summer camp on Pete’s Mesa, your winter camp down in Ernie’s Country, and use Candlestick Spine all year round for a personalized private sundial. And die, when you’re ready, with the secret center of the Maze clutched to your bosom. Or, more likely, never found. – Edward Abbey, Down the River with Henry Thoreau

The shadows rise and the valley floor darkens yet we continue to linger. I want the inevitable loss of youth slowed to a geologic crawl. I want to hold up my arms and stop the sun like Joshua and remain standing here for hours in the perfect light. It is nearly dark when we finally descend. The canyon walls glow in the golden light and the shadows of the Dollhouse climb the walls on the opposite side of the river. Stumbling back to camp in the dark Isabelle comes face to face with a fawn that still has her spots. I look into the brush nearby and can see the mother deer looking at me in concern. The young fawn and the young girl stare at each other unmoving. The mothers ears twitch nervously. Staring at the mother deer I hold up my arms to freeze the passage of time.



