Day 325 – 22 June 2010: ‘The Om Portal’

We rise at six o’clock to hike to the ‘Gold Bar’ from the campsite. This is less than hour to a huge arch that looks as if it is defying gravity. When I arrive at the top of the rise to the bottom of the arch, I am surprised to see some small figures walking on top of the arch, as if it was a bridge. I can just about make out that it is artist Neil and Johannes, who are both over six foot tall, but don’t look so big in the context. Of course, as they have done it, I have too, though the slope up is a smooth slippery one marked by carabiners (climbing hooks). When I get to the bridge of the arch, I am alone and my nerve fails me a little and I am only able to go about a third of the way across before I sit down for a while as my legs shake.

For lunchtime we head to Recapture Reservoir to go swimming. Jimmy has been talking about this for a couple of days, saying we will be entering an ‘Om Portal’ and that we’ll all go skinny dipping. Nobody even bothers to ask what he is talking about. In the event, Charlie drives us to the opposite side of the reservoir that Jimmy had intended to go to, Jimmy stays in the drivers bunk at the back of the bus, and nobody goes naked, not least because there is a family there when we arrive. The water was cold anyway, but not cold enough to stop Marion the blonde Swiss doing the backstroke all the way across and back.

Next we visit the ‘Mexican Hat’, a formation with a flat peak with erosive gaps beneath it that have left it standing on a pole of rock. In the background the mountains are red with white zig-zagging lines.

Another one of the oddities of this part of the US is the random placement of shiny new motels, both big chains and local independents, which stand out in the middle of nowhere like they were waiting for a town to be built around them.

Our campsite for tonight is at Goosenecks State Park, which Jimmy describes as the ‘end of the world’. A stream has, over the course of millions of years, created a deep valley creating an oddity where the peak of the valley is flat plain. We stand looking 1,000 feet down into the meandering San Juan River, with thousands of layered lines marking the water’s slow carving of the valley.

'Mexican Hat'