I am lost in the dark in a vast, empty wilderness. I must have been here for an hour already. I was sure I knew the way to go.

I jump over a small gully and stand on a flat rock in the dark. With my headlamp off I can see the stars in full. They are obscenely bright, despite desert haze.

Retrace your path again, I think. Around and around over a small patch of ground I sneak between shrubs, hop on firm rock, and talk to my balloon.

I look down at the balloon and remember the path that led me here.

I found the bulging white balloon when I set out on this journey through the Canyonlands of Southern Utah one late August.

It had been resting in a row of short shrubs that were growing between long rock shelves. When I slid down the slope to reach it, I noticed that his fallen brothers were still tied fast. Purple, orange and green, they didn’t survive the journey to this place.

To ward off the ghost of Leave No Trace, I clutched Balloon under my arm and led him over the red and white plateaus. We peered down in to the caverns cut by thousands of years of flash flooding and water runoff.  We crept toward lazy sunbathing lizards and watched them take flight in fear.

Balloon liked his perch above my head, swinging freely from his leash fastened tightly to my pack.

I headed for Druid Arch. I had no map, so I looked at the picture on my camera I took of the generic guide at the trailhead. Nothing but a thin dotted line.

“We’ll get there by nightfall,” I told Balloon. 
He nodded with the breeze.

It was a splendid evening for hiking.

I wanted to pitch camp at the end of this journey, but the volunteer ranger at the visitor’s center decided against 
issuing me a backcountry permit that night for fear of an incoming thunderhead.

Undoubtedly, the ranger would not 
want a solo hiker to venture out into a thunderstorm 
in an area prone to murderous flash flooding.

There were clouds, of course. But I saw nothing in 
the way of a thunderhead, or even impending drizzle. 
As I stepped down into the first of many canyons, I looked up and saw the sun.

“Well! Looks like I shoulda brought my sleeping bag 
anyway,” I said to no one in particular. Balloon 
nodded in time with my steps.

It really didn’t matter if I would be sleeping out here tonight. I was out here. As I pulled myself out of a deep canyon, I stood on a high point of the rock shelf.

I saw dusty white and burning red rocks inset with dark speckles of green and brown flora crusted over by a thin layer of living soil. Living soil — the cryptobiotic crust — was everywhere. Massive colonies spread out in all directions from the trail, prompting a chorus of “Don’t Bust the Crust!” to bounce around in an explorer’s empty mind.

A quick sip of water and I was off again. “We’ve got to be careful, Balloon, I don’t see many water sources around here. Maybe we’ll find some at the Arch.” (Druids! Druids drink water; we’ll get some from them.)

Balloon bounced in approval.

The sun was getting quite low, and occasionally ducked behind stripes of dark grey clouds. My best guess put us at a few miles to go.

I passed through several canyons at this point, steeply downward and then steeply upward. The trail wound through all manner of spires, hoodoos, caves, riverbeds, boulders and inclines of rock so slick I climbed them twice.

I paused to check my camera-map.

“I think this is the last trail. Just 1.9 miles to Druid Arch.” Balloon remained still, even though we stood in a veritable wind chamber.

“I know, it’s getting dark and we’re far from the car. I’ve never been on a night hike.”

In a quick panic reserved especially for moments like these, I thrust a clutching hand into my pack in search of my headlamp before the pack even hit the ground.

“Yessss, I’ve got my headlamp. Let’s do it, Druid Arch by nightfall. Maybe we’ll catch the sunset.”
If Balloon could talk, I’m certain he’d have said something along the lines of “Whoooozzish.”

It would translate to “Keep dreaming.”

My feet marched quicker now. The sunlight was hitting the earth at a small angle. Surrounded by spires on all sides, I stopped for a minute to assess my surroundings. The sun had illuminated the towering rock spines while the stone floor was shrouded in shadow.

“Wow.”

It’s a simple word, really, and on the page remains as banal as a written word can get.

But, wow. What else can you say? Balloon said it too, as he did a soaring back flip and bopped me on the head. “Whoooozzish,” whispered Balloon.

I was nearly jogging now. The trail had found its way out of the slot canyons and into long, thin labyrinths of river-carved rock. Then the rock ended, and I found myself in a field.

I wanted to say something, to ask why we were in a field and not under the Arch. Balloon was quiet; he would be no help.
Lucky for me there were some people camping high up on a boulder.

They were up so high they didn’t see me approach. I circled their boulder and wondered to myself where I went wrong. I knew enough to realize that my precise mapping instruments led me astray.

I walked out into the field just in time to catch the sunset. I envisioned Maximus walking with outstretched hands through fields of wheat under a Roman sun. Everything was gold, even the red and white stone spires seemed to glow with new warmth.

My face began to hurt from the wide smile I hadn’t noticed. Those Druids would have to wait another day for me; I was content watching the sunrise over a field of gold. (And I would find out later that I took a wrong turn a mile back, and ended up three miles out of my way.)

“Helloooo!” I yelled at my fellow wanderers.

“Hi!” they said.

Over the next several minutes I found out that I was in Chesler Park. There were two people on the boulder, a young man and woman roughly the same age as myself, and they had attained a permit without trouble for the night. As they offered to put me on theirs, my chagrin was easily apparent as I informed them of my lack of a sleeping bag or any cool weather clothing.

I bid them good day and let them return to their camp stove.
The twang of regret hit me again for that specter of a thunderstorm. I wasn’t ready to leave Chesler Park just yet, so I wandered around a bit more and found several campsites scattered about the boulders.

“I’m coming back here,” I said to Balloon. I forgot that I offered him up to the campers on the boulder. I spent the walk along the Devil’s Kitchen Trail explaining my actions.

I also spent the walk back singing. I perceived desert predators would not like my singing. I’m not scared of the dark. I’m not even scared of big, fanged animals. But I am scared of big, fanged, predatory animals in the dark.

The canyons I jaunted through in daylight were now becoming treacherous. The sun was far, far past the horizon now, so my headlamp was my guiding light.

And though a headlamp can be a lifesaver, it certainly leaves the mind to wander into the periphery of vision that remains dark.

Canyons are not all smooth-walled hallways. The canyons I trod through were cavernous, shrubbed, and very tricky to navigate in the dark.

Often, wailing out a chorus of pick-your-favorite-Dave-Matthews-Band-song, I would catch a glimpse of something I thought was a deadly cat. Shrubs and rocks have surprising likeness to big cats.

Balloon danced along behind me, unaware of potential threats to the surface tension of his luminous white skin. I could see him quite well in the dark.

I untied him from his perch on my pack and held him under my arm. The wind speed at the bottom of the canyons was threatening, and at Balloon’s continued bops on my head I brought him out of his frenzy

At a wind-blown section of trail I hopped frenetically from cairn to cairn, dancing with quick-stepped rhythm as I fled from that feeling you get when something is watching you. I didn’t want to wait around too long at the bottom of a blacker-than-black canyon while the wind knocked me around on the precarious crumbles of rock as I struggled to navigate from trail marker to cairn with the limited range of my headlamp.

And so I remained lost. I’ll keep stepping, and retrace my steps a fifth time.

And in an instant I look off to the side and see my path. It isn’t clear; it’s really just a guess. I take a few steps, leap over a chasm a few feet wide and land next to a small pile of rocks- the next cairn.

“Oh man!”

“Hisss,” whispered Balloon, which I believe meant “Woo!”

Within the next hour I find myself in familiar territory, sitting in my old Ford Focus, tying a dirty white balloon to the backseat.
“Leave No Trace,” I said out loud, again to nobody in particular. I laughed to myself.

In the stillness of my car, Balloon nodded in approval.

Scott King, 2009