Reflection.

We arrived exhausted as usual, ready for the desert, set up camp and slipped into our cozy bags. The morning brought welcome sunshine, and the chaos of first day organization: packing and unpacking and repacking, and shuttling people and cars and bikes to the appropriate start and end points. Then we biked into the canyons once again.

Our first night of camp was at Airport, our intended camp for our last night on the white rim last year. We couldn't resist the temptation to find the place where my mom fell last year. After all, that had been the plan for nearly a year: find the place, measure the fall, measure and weigh the rock that fell on her. We searched the edge of the rim, looking for the right spot, recalling where Nick, Jules and I had been sitting when we saw my dad call for help, trying to remember exactly what it had looked like.

We found it without too much trouble, and my sister and I climbed down in. We each took turns trying to lift the rock, but it was too heavy. When sitting upright, it measured up to my thigh. Tomorrow we would come back with the scale, measuring tape and some strapping.

We wandered back and set up our first nights camp, talking about last year, and confirming over and over that it was definitely the right spot, no doubt. On day two the rock weighed in at 200+ pounds, almost double what my mom weighs. She was flattened, quite literally, under a giant rock, rupturing her quad, bruising her entire body one year ago. She was in the hospital for nearly a week, suffering from a head injury (that, as we have discovered, resulted in some minor brain damage), and a squished body. Yet, this year she biked nearly the whole white rim, almost all 100 miles of it, and some of it pulling Alex behind her on his mini bike while he put on the brakes. She is most definitely superwoman.

Andrew and I set out for an all day hike on the third day, down 1,000 feet to a wash, and an overlook of the Green River. By day four we were adequately sandy and embracing the unique opportunity to avoid bathing for DAYS. On day five we reached the slot canyon. Everyone had paused there to take a look, as usual. Andrew and I headed down in. We climbed, hiked and slid down into the curves on our way to the end of the canyon: a 300+ foot drop-off into a wash that leads to the river. We were only about two curves shy of the end when we were stopped by a giant mucky puddle. It was too wide to span and of inestimable depth, so we turned back, satisfied and cold.

The rest of the trip seemed to be a quiet, pensive passage through the canyonlands. We cooked and slept and wandered through the desert. We watched the stars and the moon move through the sky, and the moon shadows walk across the landscape. The ravens were there, and the lizards, the bighorn sheep. And this year the leaves were peaking out of their buds for the first light of spring.