What had brought me to Muddy Creek?

A big reason is that I had quite a bit of time on my hands--the result of losing my job several months earlier. And I had just finished competing in the whitewater slalom national championships on the Kern River in California, for which I had trained for months, and was ready for a break from paddling. I knew about the creek because I had seen a photograph in River Runner's Guide to Utah and Adjacent Areas that shows author Gary Nichols paddling through The Chute, the narrow box canyon that the creek cuts through the San Rafael Swell formation in central Utah. Finally, I had spent recent weeks rereading my Edward Abbey books, and was taken with Abbey's infatuation with the desert lands of the American Southwest.

A major theme in Abbey's writing is the simple, efficient way of life that the plant and animal life must follow in the desert, in the presence of limited food and water sources. The efficiency requirement became all too clear as I drove my Chevrolet Astro van into this sizeable wilderness area northwest of Hanksville, Utah: the roads in this area are not well marked, and as I groped my way about, backtracking several wrong turns while cross-referencing the information in a guidebook with two different road maps, I watched my fuel supply shrink to an alarmingly low level. As the needle crept menacingly to the left, toward "E," I fixed my piercing stare upon it, determined to will it back to the right.

My destination was a place called Tomisch Butte, a hulk of mini-mountain with numerous old uranium mine shafts drilled into its side. When I finally found the Butte, I made camp in the broad valley below its southwest flank. Muddy Creek runs along the far edge of this valley, overlooked by Hondoo Arch, a hole in the cliff face above that reminded early explorers of the knot in a cowboy's lariat, which the Spanish call a Hondoo. An inspection of the creek revealed a muddy bed in which the very dry summer had allowed only a trickle of water to flow, but I could see rain falling in the mountains to the northwest and anticipated a rise in the river.

The result of the mining activity was a network of "improved" gravel roads into the area, negotiable by light-duty vehicles, and the valley contained evidence of the consequent yokel invasion: an occasional beer can littered the ground, and the tracks of one of those abominable ORVs (off-road vehicles) criss-crossed the dirt where I parked my van. But on this day, I saw no other human being, and hadn't seen one since leaving the main highway some 30 miles back. And I was glad. One of my purposes on this excursion was to see and speak with no one, to experience the awesome quiet that can be found in so few parts of what some people call the civilized world.

I slept in the van with the doors and windows open, the bold desert breeze grazing my body. The next morning I ate breakfast and loaded my pack with water, camera, snacks, and a long-sleeve shirt. The creek had indeed come up overnight, and true to its name, it was the color of dark chocolate, making the Mississippi seem crystal-clear by comparison. It looked paddleable, in fact, and if I had had a shuttle vehicle parked downriver, I would have grabbed my boat and descended into The Chute the easy way. But this area boasted better scenery than whitewater--Muddy Creek is Class I with a few Class II riffles--so I consoled myself with the knowledge that my feet would serve me just as well.

Anyone planning to hike into The Muddy Creek Chute should expect to get very wet and very dirty. The trail crosses the creek many times as it follows the insides of meanders, and the first dip of my legs into the chocolate-grey water left them covered with a gooey film that would not be removed until I had returned to the clean bathing water at my campsite at the end of the day.

Wading across the creek became old in a hurry, and I found myself avoiding another crossing by sticking to the outside of a meander. The next thing I knew, I was tight against the canyon wall, slipping and sliding on unstable debris slopes. It was then that I looked across the creek and saw two other hikers sauntering along the trail. I had been singing out loud and clapping my hands so as not to surprise any rattlesnakes, and I wondered if they thought I was crazy.

Much as I had craved solitude, in a way I was relieved to have some company, as well as some reassurance that I was going the right way. I blundered over that last of the soft slopes and back onto solid ground to meet this couple. The girl's name was Leah, and she was a nice-looking, strong, athletic girl with curly brown hair. With her was her boyfriend, a lanky guy named Nate who seemed nice enough, but didn't talk much and mumbled most of what he did say. How do guys like this get such cute girlfriends? I wondered.

Leah, who had made this hike before, suggested that I stick to the cow paths to avoid getting hung up on another steep slope. "Oh… yeah, I know that," I lied, "but I was trying to avoid wading across the creek again."

"Might as well get used to the wading," Leah said.

We continued deeper into the canyon, which began to box up after another hour or so. The first narrow section was some twenty feet wide with sheer vertical walls, and as Leah had implied, wading was mandatory. A small cave would occasionally appear in the canyon wall, and at one point we found a steep U-shaped wash coming in on the left side with a bowl-shaped shelf halfway up. I climbed up to inspect the shelf, and found pools of water left over from the last flash flood.

By and by the canyon opened up again, and we again stuck to the insides of the meanders. Occasionally the creek would make a 180-degree loop around a butte--a "butte loop," I called it in one of my more clever moments. The previous box canyon had forced the cattle to abandon the riverbed and blaze their trail up onto higher ground, and here we found a greater abundance of what Leah told me was "cryptogam" soil--soil that had built itself up into turret-like formations. Leah explained that it takes many years for soil to achieve this state, and once it does it resists erosion and supports diverse plant life. However, it is very fragile, and one must take care not to walk on it when hiking. Leah's lecture underscored the damage the desert landscape has suffered since the introduction of cattle ranching to the American West.

After a while The Chute narrowed up again, and we hoped to get far enough to see a log jam that a flash flood had reportedly wedged between the canyon walls some 20 feet high. But it was getting late, and we knew we had to turn around soon if we were to get back to our campsites before dark. A long view down canyon revealed no logs, so we turned back.

Patches of quicksand were common in the creekbed, most of them no more than shin-deep. But at one point, as I waded the dense waters, my right leg sank up to my crotch, and only because I had bent my left leg for greater resistance did I not sink deeper. "Help," I uttered meekly to my fellow hikers, and Nate pulled me out of this predicament. I wondered whether I would have been able to get out if I had not run into this pair; I'll have to refine my wilderness savvy before I retire to a permanent life of solitude in the desert.

We were tired and hungry and yearning for the comfort of camp. It had taken us five hours to hike down into The Chute, but we rejoined the cow path less than three hours after turning back upstream. Sure enough, the cryptogam had been trampled out of existence by the grazing cattle. Soon we entered the valley where my campsite lay, and I said goodbye to Leah and Nate and returned to my van to clean up. Fortunately, I had put my solar shower out, greatly simplifying the task of removing the thick grey mud from my body. My once-white shorts and socks were now a deep grey color--permanently, I suspected.

I went to bed hoping to get plenty of rest, since the next day threatened to put me on a hike to Hanksville for gasoline. Exhausted, I dozed off immediately. I rose the next morning, packed up, started the engine, and began to climb the hill back to the Reds Canyon Loop Road.

I had bought my van just over a month earlier, and thus far the longest I had traveled on a tank of gas before refilling had been about 430 miles. On my current tank, I had traveled 400 miles, and Hanksville was about 50 miles away by road. I drove on, my eyes glued to the fuel gauge. The needle crept into the red zone indicating a near-empty tank, but I made it out to Utah 24 with enough of a gap between the needle and the "E" to believe I had a good chance. Sure enough, when I rolled into Hanksville, 453 miles after my last fillup, the needle was still at least one hash mark above the "E." I needed only 22 gallons to refill the tank at the Hollow Mountain Phillips 66 station; on my last tank, I had needed more than 23 gallons to go only 430 miles. Perhaps the van, too, had sensed the urgency of the situation.

I headed off to the east, bound for Colorado, with supplies to burn, free of the scarcity of the wilderness. But the bounty of "civilization" may or may not last my lifetime, and I felt that my two days studying the lessons of the desert had been time well spent.