Exploring Utah’s solitude: Personal account of a desert excursion and tips for taking your own trip

If you’re ever looking for solitude, go to the desert.

At night it gets so quiet that you feel disrespectful just rustling in your sleeping bag. You feel glad when you find a water hole foggy with gnats, not because of the quenched thirst but because of the company. As Edward Abbey wrote in the introduction of Desert Solitaire, “There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing.”

For me, my first brush with the desert was with a companion — someone I hadn’t known very long but with whom I had the common desire for adventure.

“Who wants to go to Utah?” he asked offhandedly one day.

I did.

I remember most vividly the sunrise that first morning. We — or I should say, he — had driven 18 hours straight to get us there by dawn. At one point, just south of Salt Lake City, we stopped in the middle of the freeway and got out of the car, in awe of the sleeping, shadowy mountains thrust up on either side of the road. Each road we followed only led us to another spur, and we seemed to drive for hours past our original destination.

The place we slept had no nightly purpose, just a vast and dark abyss. After some cold, restless sleep, morning revealed an expanse of hundreds of nameless canyons, rivers and rivulets: the Needles Overlook in Canyonlands National Park.

With that began my discovery of the land of drought and sand — the most beautiful place I have ever been.

We were headed for Bullet Canyon, part of the Grand Gulch Primitive Area in southeastern Utah. If you’re a beginning backpacker like me, this part of Utah is a great place to start. Despite its ruggedness, the desert can be forgiving to overpacking, new boots, and inexperienced clothing choices. Lucky for me, I had an experienced Bullet Canyon hiker with me who remembered most of what I forgot.

Bullet Canyon forms a 22.8-mile horseshoe with another canyon called Grand Gulch. The loop is accessible in about three or four days, but requires an 8-mile shuttle between endpoints. The most unique aspect of the canyons is the array of prehistoric ruins built by the Anasazi Indians. Dozens of clay and stone cliff dwellings hide in the canyon walls and are easy to miss, creating a natural treasure hunt for hikers.

However, if you keep your eyes open, you’ll be rewarded with perfectly intact kivas, houses, storage areas and even kitchens used by the Indians. You can hike right up to the ruins and explore — just please leave everything the way you found it.

We spent five days in the canyon, exploring the man-made and natural beauty inherent in the desert. The canyons are like a natural art gallery, holding one-of-a-kind sculptures carved by wind and water. The trees bend, twist and curl in a constant battle for water. Boulders the size of houses rest peacefully on the canyon floor, reminiscent of a more chaotic time when they broke free of the canyon walls. At night, when the sun dropped below the rim of the canyon wall, we lit fires and went to sleep early. In the morning, free from the constraints of time, we woke with the sun and continued our journey. The canyon gave me a new perspective. It was something I had never known existed, a place of mystery and exploration.

“This is the most beautiful place on earth,” Abbey wrote. “I don’t mean [Moab] itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it — the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky — all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.”