If bonding with underwater species is your idea of a good time, various commercial and educational opportunities exist worldwide to study, swim beside, dive next to, and possibly even communicate with a variety of large, friendly, dangerous, and/or simply curious sea creatures.  In fact, outfitters may promise to put you in the water with just about everything but the Loch Ness Monster.  And you don’t even have to have a C-card (scuba certification)—just a few C-notes: Many outfitters offer trips for snorkelers and swimmers.

David Fishman, formerly editor-in-chief and publisher of Fathoms: The Magazine of the Underwater World explains how chance encounters have led to a new type of tourism.  “It begins with people who have a passion for the oceans and get excited seeing underwater habitats,” Fishman says.  “They start by cruising a coral reef and seeing a whole other world teeming with life.  From there, they seek out trophy experiences that take their interest to the next level.  Instead of a chance encounter with a dolphin or a turtle sweeping past, they ask: How can I get in the water with a whale shark?

“A whole industry has grown up around offering as much of a guarantee as is possible to encounter underwater animals in a wild environment.  Dive and tour operators provide expert guides who know when, where, how, and at what depth you’re likely to see various animals.”

Bill Acker, owner and CEO of Yap Divers in Micronesia, adds,  “It has never been easier for guests to enjoy safe, responsible animal encounters.  There are excellent resorts and operations all over the world and with airlines improving and expanding, even remote areas are relatively easy to get to.”

But just because a dive shop or tour operator has a slick web page and makes a few promises doesn’t mean that the company will act responsibly to protect both you and the animals it makes its living off of.  Ron Steven, a dive instructor and environmental artist (www.rogest.com) suggests that consumers ask a lot of questions of outfitters. “Most operators offering an interactive experience with any critter in the wild must have accreditation, be permitted, and have a trained crew and an appropriate craft,” he says.  “They should have an operating manual that thoroughly explains what you’re getting into and an outline of what’s going to happen, how they’re going to deal with an emergency or accident or if an encounter gets too close.  Ask an outfitter if it has the right permissions, staff training tools, and procedures for interacting with wildlife.”

Bill Acker adds that “Word of mouth is huge, so if potential visitors know someone who has had a positive experience, that’s one way to tell who is really operating responsibly versus just talking responsibly.  Having been in business in one location for a long time is another fairly good indicator.”  Consumers can also consult dive websites, and seek out operators who’ve received awards from consumer publications and environmental groups.  And oh, yes—watch out for a guy named Gilligan peddling a three-hour tour.

Finally, you may be wondering just how dangerous these outings really are—to humans and to the animals.  Although some of the animals do pose a potential threat, adventure tourism is still tourism— which is to say that in most cases, many people have already safely enjoyed the trip you’re on.  Talking about a particular lemon shark dive he participated in, Ron Steven says, “Any shark in the water is potentially dangerous, but they’re not that interested in humans.  We don’t look like anything they should be eating.  They won’t come up and savage your leg off.  We do more damage to sharks than they’ve ever done to us.”  And from their perspective, if animals really don’t want to spend time in our company, they can swim away—and they’re much better swimmers.

In addition to the thrill of swimming with the fishes, such experiences are important for another reason.  Bill Acker reflects,  “These encounters are magical when done right and people who have experienced these magical moments with under-water animals come away dedicated to preserving the experience for future generations.”

Following are ten examples of sea creatures great and small (and just plain strange) that you might want to meet.

Green Adventure

In the Galapagos Islands, divers and snorkelers have the rare possibility of getting in the water with dozens of three-foot green sea turtles with prehistoric eyes and graceful flippers.  What’s attractive about this adventure is that since the turtles have no natural underwater predators they’re not afraid of humans.  You can watch them eating jellyfish or sponges or nibbling algae off stones, oblivious to you.

Next Best Thing to Law School

Off of South Australia, certified lunatics (certified by a dive organization, that is) can spend more time with sharks than Maria did in West Side Story.  Divers wearing dry suits are suspended from the dive boat in metal cages while fish guts are placed in the water like a shark smorgasbord.  ‘It’s right out of a sci-fi movie as these luminous shadows come closer and closer with speed and grace,” says Ron Steven.  “As the powerful, fierce-looking creatures nose and rock your cage you realize how vulnerable and out of your realm you are.”

Corralling Coral

Each fall off the coast of Bonaire, nearly a dozen species of coral spawn at an exact time that’s synchronized with the phases of the moon.  Divers can get in shallow water and enjoy a pristine night dive while waiting for the appointed moment.  David Fishman describes it thus: “You can see the translucent orange eggs in the coral polyps’ mouths waiting to be released.  Massive brittle stars and other predators come out and move to the top of the coral heads.  There’s an eeriness and sense of anticipation that all the animals are waiting for something special.  When the packets of sperm and eggs start to pop and float to the surface its like an incredible upside down snowstorm of sexual energy.”

Mixin’ With Mantas

Bill “Manta Man” Acker, owner of Manta Ray Hotel and Yap Divers, explains the exhilaration of diving with manta rays in Micronesia.  “There are no words to describe kneeling on the sand when the 82-degree water is crystal clear and 10 or more garage-door-sized stealth bombers glide in so close that you could literally reach up and touch them.  The mantas are cleaned by very colorful small wrasses darting in and out of their mouths and gills, and the surrounding coral is covered with every color and size of tropical fish.”

Pass the Peanut Butter Fish

Jellyfish Lake, in Palau, is one of very few places worldwide where snorkelers can mix it up with five million golden jellyfish.  Eons ago, a geologic upheaval trapped ocean jellyfish in lakes still influenced by the intrusion of seawater through limestone fissures.  The resourceful jellyfish evolved to survive in the lake environment, and in the process lost its powerful stinging capability.  Diving is not allowed in the lake because the water is toxic below a certain depth.

Spotting Leopard Seals

For most folks, seals are those cute creatures that swim inquisitively up to them at the aquarium.  But leopard seals are 9-10 feet long, weigh 800 pounds and sport large, sharp teeth.  Intrepid divers can watch them chase and feed on king and emperor penguins.  “Diving with these powerful, curious, playful creatures has become a real prized expedition for those willing to don a dry suit and get on an expedition to Antarctica,” reports David Fishman.  “Its like going to the bush in Kenya and watching a lion take down a gazelle.”

Hangin’ with Humpbacks

“This was the single best adventure I ever had,” says Ron Steven, of being in the cold water off Vancouver Island with humpback whales.  “First we could hear but not see the humpbacks and orcas.  Then we got in the water to snorkel when they were cruising around our boat.  They’re very inquisitive.  It’s a goose-bumpy experience; their sheer size and grace and comfort are mind-boggling.  And the acoustics were like a cross between Enya and Space Invaders.”

A Congregation of Cuttlefish

Divers off the southern coast of Australia can watch hundreds of thousands of cuttlefish dating and mating.  David Fishman describes “the haunting style of obvious intelligence of the cuttlefish, which has an ability to mimic other creatures, change color, texture and shape, and watch you with its large eyes.”  Photographers and environmentalists have undertaken a grass roots effort to make the cuttlefish mating a tourist attraction to protect the creatures from fishermen, who are also drawn to the large aggregation of protein.

Nailing Hammerheads

In the Northern Triangle between the Galapagos Islands, Cocos Islands, and Malpeo in the eastern Pacific, dozens— even hundreds— of hammerhead sharks school during the day, sleeping and socializing with their own kind before feeding at night.  Divers can swim right into the middle of the parade with little risk, as long as they get back to the boat before the evening meal.  Or they may be the evening meal.

Sting Ray City Slickers

Years ago, fisherman off Grand Cayman, in the Caribbean, noticed that when they cleaned their fish, platoons of giant, graceful sting rays would swoop in to snack on what they threw overboard.  Today, snorkelers and divers can both swim with these creatures on the site.  As Ron Steven describes it, “Imagine taking your nephew or Mom for a nice day sailing, arriving on a sandbar, and popping into the water with a snorkel.   Slowly, six-foot rays come in and scoot between your legs and bump and nuzzle you in the water.  You can take great photos and get to see wild marine life up close and personal in a situation that’s not stressful to the ray or the guest.”

Sometimes we find ourselves in the most unexpected places without any notion of how we got there, or why we’ve come.  Confused by our own lives, we construct metaphors; if we stare hard enough at these, circumstances often converge into clearer perspective and we see beyond entropy to a gleaming horizon of meaning.

One night last winter I found myself in such a place.  Dressing to go out for dinner with friends I was visiting– fresh from the shower and wearing only polka-dotted boxer shorts and a pair of argyle socks– I found myself standing on top of an end table in front of their guest room window eighteen floors above 97th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, watching wet snow falling past in huge, clumsy flakes.

I slid the window open to feel the tingling, ionic moisture in the air.  The extra height afforded by the end table streamlined my view of the precipitous fall line in a way that standing on the floor never could.  My feet were just above the level of the window sill; no barrier separated me from the open space.  Looking straight down at the wet street far below me, watching the yellow taxis and the tail lights moving along Broadway in long red tubes, a tracer bullet of fear shot upward through my legs.  I felt bedazzled, dizzy with altitude, mystified by what I might do, by what I might be capable of, by how and– especially– why.

In that moment of suspense and impending terror and utter faith in my own rationality, as the end table shifted slightly, like the best dancing partner, each time I rearranged my weight, I felt the potential for a recklessness so pure it clenched up my heart the way vapor lock seizes a car engine.  While my friend and his wife dressed for the evening in the next room– unaware that I was perched atop their end table so close to the window, in my socks and underwear, dreaming of a free-fall through that swirling space– I watched a doorman across the street and far below me striping the slushy pavement with the blade of a long-handled shovel, and I began constructing a metaphor for suicide.

I have always been afraid of high places.  Once, stuck for forty-five minutes on a swaying chairlift in a stiff wind too high above the Colorado Rockies, I realized it was not the height itself which frightened me, nor was it a fear of falling.  What scared me then was the same unsought notion that revisited me on top of my friends’ end table in Manhattan: the possibility of spontaneously deciding to jump.

But not even the idea of jumping chilled me as much as the potential for acting on this sudden impulse before the analytical side of my brain had the chance to slam shut the door on irrationality, before I could de-code such a convoluted message from my own subconscious and deduce what it was really trying to say.   There is something desperately compelling about the urge to sneak up on our own limitations and charge past them, the way Eastern Europeans once crossed beyond their nations’ borders and sprinted for the west.

In most cases, spontaneity is an affirmation of self, even as it represents a shift in the direction of the radical.  To step outside the circle of the familiar means moving into a wilderness of non-definition where the warmth and light cast by popular fires cannot penetrate, but where adventure assumes spiritual dimension: into the unmapped territory of pure freedom and individuality.

We all dream spontaneous lives from the comfort of desk chairs or sectionalized sofas, believing something will spur us to pursue adventure.  In my own life, I’ve performed modest acts of defiance, moving outward in small, shuffling steps toward edges, like driving away from a large city early in the morning, as all of the traffic flows the other way.

Still, I have never slept suspended by ropes in an 800-year old Douglas fir tree to stop someone from logging it.  I’ve never performed stand-up comedy.  I hardly ever climb into my car, without destination, and just drive.  I have encountered limits– and not very distant ones– that have kept me from the free-wheeling insouciance I’ve always craved.  I envy the yee-haw wildness of the most aggressive skiers, rock climbers, and kayakers.  I am jealous, even, of the way some people dance— with such a total transcendence of self-consciousness that their actions ring with the esthetic purity of drinking cool spring water from a ceramic cup.

But spontaneity encompasses a dark backcountry, too, rendering the edges dangerous, suppressing our migration.  Moving beyond the familiar involves abandoning the very reasons behind limitations– reasons of safety, sanity, and order.  Which is the point of impulsive action, and the threat.  We risk losing control in order to experience the ecstasies of discovery and release.

To exercise pure individualism we must maintain the most abiding faith that something inside us will prove powerful enough to recognize that transitory moment when we’re about to go too far, that we’ll know its time to plant our flag, define the outermost reaches of the territory we can visit, and accept the limits of our own range.  For some people that moment never comes.  Some people hike out along that steep arete which crosses between challenge and self-destructiveness; they hedge their bets.  They splice thin slivers of daring until the knife scrapes bone.

If you read the newspaper sometime in the middle of April–  when colleges are on spring break and students from the Northeastern states pack into their parents’ Oldsmobile Cutlass Supremes and drive straight through from Boston and New York to Daytona and Ft. Lauderdale, past the truck stops and sheet rock motels and the world’s biggest taco stand just over the border into South Carolina, driving with perfect, beachy images in their heads, and an unshakable faith in warm tropical nights and the likelihood of meeting the kinds of women who appear in beer commercials– you will come across a short item at the back of the national news which luridly describes that spontaneous extreme: an item that will eclipse your heart and set your head to shaking.

You will read about young men whose judgment was dulled by alcohol or pride or a too-strong desire to lean out beyond their own borders into that cold wind which blows most powerfully along the edges of things.  You will read about events which blossomed in the spirit that leads otherwise responsible young men to drink twelve straight shots of Tennessee sour mash whiskey at a palm bar, even when they don’t necessarily want to drink shots, when they really only want to go back to the motel room at the Pink Flamingo.  But they also want to be the kind of young men who are not boxed in by anything so trivial as convention, and so they step into the shadows to see what that feels like, certain they can step back at any time.

It’s easy to envy their reckless, broncing spirit if not their specific behavior, the way they respond to spontaneous impulses without forcing them through the clogged filter of consciousness and reason.  In this same spirit a young man slides open the glass door to the balcony of his hotel room, stands by the railing with a bottle of over-priced Mexican beer– wishing he had a lime crammed in the neck of the bottle not because he necessarily likes lime in his beer, but because it is the way young men like himself drink over-priced Mexican beer– and wonders how far it is to that next balcony, where that afternoon he saw three young women hanging their swimsuits out to dry.

He is about to invent the sport of balcony jumping, an activity lacking rules– which is the point– and the challenge of which is not complex, but if you flip through the newspaper in mid-April you will read about young men who just finished studying Descartes and plate tectonics, who play saxophone and run twenty miles each week, who dance with the grandmothers at weddings and who would charm you at a summer barbecue in Connecticut with their energy and sun-tanned good looks; if you page through the national section of the paper in the early spring in any given year you will read about how young men like these fell to their deaths in hotel parking lots as they were trying to jump from one balcony to another, for no other apparent reason than to see if they could.

It seems safe to guess that they were not thinking about suicide as they climbed up on metal railings, flexed their knees, and squinted across at the mirror-image safety of another balcony only eight or ten feet away.  Probably they were not even thinking about dying at a moment when they felt so alive, when they felt the naive invulnerability of smart, good-looking kids whose parents can afford to send them to prestigious colleges.  Most likely their brief flights across short, precipitous spaces were metaphorical statements about the way they wanted to live, analogies for moving toward the edge, for the kind of spontaneous, symbolic leaps that the most ambitious of us must take if we are to strike a blow against being average and constrained all the rest of our promising but mostly unremarkable lives.

Some years ago I had a very bad winter.  Heavy clouds settled in over the Pacific Northwest in early November and it rained nearly every day for four months– a rageless and unnerving rain which slowly leached out any foundation of hope that summer might come again.  I clung to a failing relationship through those dim months, which ended badly in March.  I could not work at anything, and wished to escape from my own self, and from the grey world pressing down on me.  I grew despondent to a degree I cannot even comprehend now, and craved some highly impractical action which would transport me to a fresh and unfamiliar periphery.

So I bought some backpacking supplies– a small stove, freeze-dried food, a water bottle, two packages of cigars– although I had never gone backpacking before, and drove my ailing Toyota south for two days into the Utah desert.  I parked in the scant shade of a stunted Cottonwood tree thirty miles by gravel road from the nearest town, slung on my pack, and disappeared over the edge of a huge scrub-covered mesa into the redrock canyonlands that drained into the Escalante River some fifteen miles away.  I chose the desolation of a route whose name implied the kind of patently western ruggedness I’ve always associated with individualism, and because it seemed like the farthest place I could possibly go.

I hiked for six days along slow-running water which cut gentle S-curves in the sandbars and embossed the mud with lovely patterns.  I explored gullies and side canyons and ancient Anasazi Indian ruins, slept under great slickrock overhangs, wandered through a landscape so hauntingly beautiful, so unlike anything I’d seen before, that sometimes I felt I’d lost myself.  Sometimes I felt as if I’d fallen over backwards, begun tumbling through a limitless space of sun and shade, past the greens of cottonwood and box elders, prickly pear and cholla cactus, the reds and oranges and purples layered in the sandstone, past the polished spires and domes, posts and lintels, archways and ells of the architecture of water and stone.

Those days in the canyon depths moved me in a way I can’t begin to describe.  I rose out of myself and toward that metaphorical edge that has always represented the way I most want to live.  I felt bleached clean, like old bones atop some mesa,  growing lighter with the suns of each successive year until their dust blows across the ridges and into the canyons and water courses of the desert.

On my fourth morning out, I woke early and drank a strong cup of cowboy coffee.   Then I filled my daypack for a long hike up to the rim of the canyon, where it overlooked the khaki waters of the Escalante River rolling lazily toward Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam somewhere to the west.  I left the pastel cradle of the canyon bottom and climbed up through notches in the sandstone to a plateau thirty feet higher.  Above me sprawled a huge bowl of rock filled with sand and speckled with red and yellow wildflowers.  Higher still, the dune topped out against another shoulder of nearly vertical rock which cast a deep, cool shadow on the upper reaches of sand.  Beyond that stripe of red rock was the canyon rim, and I suddenly became confused by my own metaphor: I was climbing up toward the edge of something, rather than out laterally and beyond it. This unsettled me until I recognized that the very structure of my metaphor might be worthy of pushing beyond– a realization that may have saved my life.

Two hours later, after a lunch of smoked oysters and dried fruit, after gulping an entire quart of water and singing all of the old Eagle’s songs I could remember, the canyon suddenly fell away from me.  I took a last upward step onto the rim.  The sun blared with the brassiness of a trumpet solo, and the expansiveness, after four days in the narrow confines of the canyon, was explosive.  I spun slowly around to view the Kaipairowitz Plateau and the Henry Mountains rising along distant blue horizons.  I looked cross-country at the rolling, frozen plains of stone hillocks pocked with potholes, a surface of wind-blown dunes petrified by years of unrelenting heat, a grey-green dermatology that was at once ugly and yet possessing a purity so deep that it was also very beautiful.

Up on the rim, on the edge of those deep, secretive canyonlands, I found myself smiling.  I was singing again, too, though not in a recognizable language.  I felt so deeply grateful for this place, for having chosen the unlikely option of coming here to an oasis of such stark and limitless beauty, that I wanted to cry out.

I gave a Mexican yell that shorted self-consciousness with an incandescent pop.  Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ee-ha, I cried, and the sound took flight and swooped in and out of side canyons, moved cross-country out to the plateau walls and hump-backed mountains, bounced off the topography and flew back in a hundred fluttering versions of itself, chilling me with the utter limitless self-consciouslessness of the sound.

In this moment of denouement I drifted out onto a small peninsula of rock that extended over the canyon like an open palm.  I stood on its chafed fingertips and looked straight down to the green scarf of salt cedar along the Escalante River, which flowed the color of wheat beer a thousand feet below.  I stood very close to the edge; the familiar trajectory of fear ascended through my legs.  I had traveled a long way from the heart of the familiar to a landscape so bizarre and captivating, to a place so remote, to an edge so palpable that it was no longer a mere analogy for outward movement.  It was the thing itself, and confronting it I knew I was straddling the border between darkness and light.

Standing on that ledge of warm rock, a pocket of helium rose in a column through my solar plexus as I realized that this notion of expanded limitations, of pushing beyond– that this metaphorical road I’d been moving along– led right here to this place and this moment, where, faced with the outermost landmark of spontaneity, I recognized the inherent danger in the impulse, and in my metaphor.  I heard it ask me, ‘Just how far will you go?’  I felt the cool breath of shadow, although the sun was high and strong.

And I knew that to experience the ultimate release, the most complete freedom– out here in the Utah desert where no one would ever find me, where the flora and fauna live in thirsty impatience, where coyotes bark their doggie ballads in the evenings and the moon reflects pale light off the water and rock in a glowing patina– meant throwing myself down from the rim toward the muddy Escalante before I could think about the implications.  I wondered if, with a running start, I could drop clean into the river.  I was as far out as I’d ever been, and the joy of it was so immense that I wanted only to take the next step.  I wanted to jump because it symbolized a commitment to living in a way I’d always dreamed of.  It meant that I’d have lived, if only for a moment, without holding anything back.

There must be a kind of suicide born not of sadness and despair, but of possibility, when somebody wants so much out of his life he’s willing to unhook the safety net of his own self-preserving instincts and leap out into a void of pure potential as giddily intoxicating as oxygen.  In the realm of metaphor, gravity is negotiable.  But for someone who’s mistaken the metaphorical for the actual, who’s forgotten that we create analogies not to live in them, but to help us live better in the real world, cliff walls fly past quickly in red-orange streaks, and the ground rises up too fast.

Living by metaphors is in itself dangerous and spontaneous.  Sometimes, it’s difficult to know whether we’ve followed our imagery too far, or not far enough.  In Utah, I stopped on the very edge of the canyonlands and accepted that limit not because I was afraid of jumping, but because I didn’t want to die.  A road is just a road, and a man has choices.  Those choices determine the people we become.  I began the slow descent back to my waterside campsite thinking that merely by having found my way to that unlikely precipice above the Escalante, I’d already propelled myself over a different edge.

All photos by Leon Werdinger/Ottertrack Productions.

As a former professional whitewater guide I believe there’s no better way to travel than on a river—whether you’re after a white-knuckle adventure or a floating meditation.  If you’re searching for an international escapade that involves more than visiting crumbling churches, and want to combine thrills and culture on your next vacation, a river outing might just be your E-ride ticket.

According to Leon Werdinger, a professional outdoor photographer and long-time river guide, there are several great reasons for floating— and paddling— beyond our borders.         “On some outings, it’s a great way to connect with local cultures and meet villagers or sheepherders,” Werdinger says.  “And river trips allow you to reach locations where you can see exotic wildlife— on Africa’s Zambezi, fore example, you’re definitely going to see hippos and crocodiles— and to access places that you couldn’t reach even trekking or backpacking.  These trips also often feature an international clientele, which makes them even more interesting.”

If you’re considering an international river trip but don’t want to end up like Meryl Streep in the movie The River Wild, make sure to do your homework up front.  For many folks, choosing the right river can be more difficult than paddling through foaming whitewater. There are a number of factors to consider that might affect your safety as well as your enjoyment.

Rivers are a lot like people— formed by their surroundings and exhibiting personalities that run the gamut from frolicky to ferocious.  Rapids— the behavior manifested by these personalities— are rated according to their potential for upset and injury on a scale of Class I to Class VI.  A Class I rapid resembles, say, the water in a swimming pool when George Foreman wades in; a Class VI looks more like a frothing smoothie in a blender, and is essentially unnavigable.  Most active folks with an adventurous spirit will be comfortable on Class III and even Class IV whitewater.  Only real adrenaline addicts— and probably only those with previous river experience— should sign up for Class V whitewater.

Because these trips involve far more variables than a stroll through an art museum, be careful in choosing who takes you to— and on— the river.  Martha Gaughen, Vice President of Sterling Brownell, an upscale leisure travel agency specializing in soft adventure, offers this advice.  “It’s critical that you pick the right outfitter, and the more challenging the river, the more critical.  Perform your due diligence: find out what sort of equipment the outfitter uses.  Who are their guides?  What’s their experience level?  How long have they been in business?  What safety measures are in place?  Are helmets and life jackets required?  What’s their medical backup?  A lot of these trips are to very remote places, so every expedition needs to have a plan and a person on the trip who’s wilderness certified. Ask a lot of questions and get feedback from actual clients.”

Finally, the very styles of these trips, and the level of service offered, can vary widely.  On some expeditions you can practically get a pedicure while your guides are busy whipping up a seven-course dinner.  Other outings are more participatory.  As Lonnie Hutson, owner of Sundog Expeditions in Deary, Idaho explains, “I find people have a better time on our trips if they really contribute.  People like to get involved, whether that means helping with gear or chopping vegetables in the kitchen.  Passengers and guides really bond when they work side by side.”

From Canada to China to Costa Rica, here are ten international river trip choices that shouldn’t land you in hot water.

Tatshenshini River, Alaska, British Columbia, The Yukon

Hatha Callis, owner of Skeena Valley Expeditions, in British Columbia, recommends this relatively calm 10-day international trip closer to home.  “It runs through the planet’s largest UNESCO World Heritage Site, and two national and one provincial park.  You’ll see the world’s largest non-polar ice caps, lakes full of icebergs, as well as glacier bears, grizzly bears, and bald eagles.  And you can drink your evening scotch with 10,000-year-old ice.”  The Tat also incorporates layover days for great hiking.

Karnali River, Nepal

The fact that just reaching the Karnali requires an overland trek with porters should give some idea of how remote this big-volume Class IV-V waterway is.  The week-long trip flows through a series of narrow, forested canyons and ends in Bardia National Park.  Most of the gnarly whitewater occurs in the first few days.

Zambezi River, Africa

The day-long section at the top of Africa’s Zambezi river offers what photographer/guide Leon Werdinger calls “gnar gnar whitewater, with five gnars.  If your raft flips you’re instructed to stay in the main current, because the eddies along the sides have crocs and hippos— and they do flip rafts there.”  The overnight stretch farther downriver is mellower, and floats through rural villages.

Pacuare, Costa Rica

Martha Gaughen calls the Pacuare’s whitewater “fun but never threatening.  You can take 1, 2, or 3-day trips and combine them with other eco-tours to volcanoes or in the rainforest canopy.”  Highlights include the chance to see toucans and sloths and swim beneath waterfalls.

Upper Yangtze River, Tibet

Eric Hertz, President of Earth River Expeditions, describes the Yangtze as one of the most culturally interesting river trips in the world.  “The scenery is pretty— high, rolling, green hills— but the untouched Tibetan culture is unbelievable.  We see monks in red robes in stone villages cut out of cliff walls, amazing temples with paintings, and the people are really welcoming and thrilled to see us.  This is one of the all time great river trips.”

Upper Navua River, Fiji

An unusual island river trip, this one-day outing on the Upper Navua cuts through a gorge of black lava overgrown with ferns, vines, and other jungle flora.  The easy Class II whitewater is perfect for family outings.  Riverside waterfalls await around nearly every bend.

Shotover River, New Zealand

New Zealand’s fun, technical Shotover River is most often run as a day trip from Queensland in the company of Kiwi guides with ‘no-worries’ attitudes.  Highlights include a rapid that flows through a tunnel and then pours right into a Class IV drop back out in daylight.  Leon Werdinger rates the shuttle drive to the Shotover, on an eroding hillside, as “a Class V—it’s the scariest road I’ve ever been on.”

Futeleufu River, Chile

Describing the hard-core whitewater of the Futeleufu, Martha Gaughen quotes a client who told her, “If you swallowed a piece of coal before this trip it would come out as a diamond.”  The intense, challenging Class V river is often run as a day-trip in combination with such other adventure sports as rappelling and zip lines.  The river cuts through a beautiful mountain valley.

Magpie River, Quebec, Canada

Eric Hertz calls the Magpie the second best multi-day whitewater river trip in North America— and that’s saying something.  Guests are flown in by float-plane for a week of warm-water boating in a pristine area that “looks like Siberia.”  The Magpie has been run so seldom that the rapids don’t even have names.  One highlight is camping across from a 100-ft waterfall with a powerful volume of water.

Tombopata River, Peru

Ten- to twelve-day trips on the Tombopata carry travelers from the Andes to the Amazon along a river boiling with Class III-Class IV rapids.  It passes through two national parks.  Some expeditions are joined by a naturalist who points out such wildlife as monkeys, tapirs, macaws, and even jaguars.  Guests stay at lodges and camp out en route.

Photo by Leon Werdinger.

Introduction to “In a Dark Land: Murder, Mysticism, and the Militia in the Remote Desert Southwest”

In May and June of 1998, three men who had trained themselves in wilderness survival and military tactics gathered an arsenal of semi-automatic and automatic rifles, handguns, and pipe bombs and enough supplies to hold out through a prolonged siege, and then went on a tear through the heart of canyon country in the desert southwest.  What they had in mind when they stole a water truck, murdered a police officer, and disappeared into the labyrinthine wilderness has generated a variety of theories.  Some of these theories hint at the kinds of actions associated with militia movements and the homegrown terrorism of people like Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh.  Others suggest that the trio were generally disgruntled with their station in life and just plain not very bright.  Either way, their actions are alarming and dark-hued.

But part of what makes their story irresistible is the outlaw landscape that the three men disappeared into and the desert wilderness where two of them were found dead.  If these events had occurred in Chicago or Los Angeles they would have generated a passing interest.  But bad men committing acts of violence and disappearing into western wilderness puts a full-Nelson on the American imagination and doesn’t let go.  This is the stuff of a John Ford or Sergio Leone movie.  This is the Saturday western, fugitives in black shooting at the good guys while behind them the landscape—the real protagonist— recedes in orange hills and high buttes where the outlaws will lead the posse into danger.  It is John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and other dusty, unshaven men on horses pursuing justice on the wild frontier.  Exuding the toughness and independence that we all believe made this country great.

Even if you’ve never visited the Four Corners region where the state lines of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado intersect, you have seen this land recently: a dark sedan corners hard on a serpentine blacktop road or a gleaming SUV kicks up red dirt as it skitters through a sharp curve.  Impossibly beautiful humps and domes, hoodoos and escarpments, gleaming pinnacles and petrified hills and cliffs of polished red sandstone crowd the view.  Sagebrush and prickly pear cactus yawn toward the blue horizon.

Somehow a car careening through the redrock desert of the southwest has come to define the American ideals of freedom, frontier, and limitless wilderness the way Shane or The Gunslinger once did.  Car commercials have become 30-second mini-westerns that stand for the very things that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner once claimed helped to create the unique American character.  Of course Turner also said— in 1890— that the frontier which formed us had already closed.

But more than a century later we still cling to these ideals: we like to believe that rugged country still defines our spirit, that wide-open possibilities can still be discovered in the wild places on the map.  That the landscape is still untamed enough to harbor outlaws who can’t be found.  The notion that we can own a vehicle of such power and comfort and drive it through such a startling topography makes us feel larger than life— though how motorized vehicles and wilderness can exist simultaneously in the same place is beyond the heart-pumping half-minute of a t.v. commercial to explain.  Nonetheless, we want the car.  And the cartography.

Many folks have been drawn powerfully enough by images of the redrock desert to explore their own southwestern version of an American dream.  Possibly they’ve sat in an idling rig (nobody in the rugged west calls it a “car”) waiting to pay the entrance fee to Arches or Bryce or Zion National Park, munching power bars and sipping sports drinks before walking the 1.5-mile paved loop trail.  Mornings, they might pass through a motel lobby full of Kachina dolls and Kokopellis on their way to the free breakfast of sugared doughnuts and Tang and weak coffee.  After their five-day adventure they may return home with stories about how the brutal noon time temperature grilled their cheese sandwiches in the trunk of the car.  If they’re really lucky, they’ll have seen a rattlesnake.  They will feel wide and free ranging, having gotten in touch with the land.  Western land.  Desert land.  Ahhh.

Hundreds of books available at gift shops and park visitors’ centers natter on about the sacred this and the spiritual that in the desert southwest.  They describe modern white people performing Native American rituals to cleanse themselves because the Indians were so at one with the land.  So pure and good, living off the meager bounty of a hard but beautiful place.  Every pot shard and corncob and scribble of rock art the Indians left behind, these books pontificate, is the basis for a religious epiphany or worthy of ecstatic contemplation.  What are the dead Indians saying to us, such volumes ponder.  As if any of this could even possibly have anything to do with us.  They further romanticize the idea of the southwest and its former inhabitants up the frigging wazoo until there is nothing real or genuine left.  Except the land itself, which has endured eons of erosion, of battering winds and raging waters.  So surely it can endure an age or two of human yammering.

In fact, the Four Corners Region is as stunning and inaccessible as a supermodel.  Also known as the Colorado Plateau because its topography is influenced by the action of this once-mighty river and its tributaries carving through a vertical mile of stacked sandstone spreading like a huge pallet of soft red cake, the terrain has an ability to deliver a refreshing slap.   Like a cold plunge on a blistering day.  It brings on shudders the way a shot of mescal does.  It moves us, whether we’re prone to emotion, or over-dramatize our experience, or prefer not to be so moved.

But car ad landscapes and books and visitors’ center dioramas describe mere ghosts of the real southwest.  These images have no soul despite the fact that we have spiritualized the canyons and mesa tops beyond all reckoning, imbued them with fluffy power sanitized for our protection.  Sure, this still-wild west is beautiful and moving.  But it is also a humongous Indian graveyard encompassing enough bad juju for centuries of whoop-ass haunting.  It is a killing maze where modern men, women, and livestock, and a whole race of ancient Native Americans, among other things, have simply disappeared.  In a word, this land is dark— darkness being something that the most powerful forces always encompass as part of their alluring complexities.

Wilderness is more than an improved campsite with running water and an outhouse; if you wander off the blacktop path, if you touch the wildness in this wilderness, real dangers of every sort may take the opportunity to present themselves.

The car commercials and visitors’ centers and the happy-faced mystics never talk about the desert southwest as a land of death and hardship.  They never mention that humans have a history of vanishing here the way that water holes that appear after a rainstorm are shortly sucked dry by the relentless sun.  Unsolved mysteries rise from this sandy soil as prolifically as sage and yucca— beginning with the Anasazi, a race of ancient Native Americans who spent a millennium and ultimately built fantastical cliff dwellings in the canyons here and then evaporated into history before the European Dark Ages were even revving up.

The stories of this region are as twisted as the trunk of a hundred-year-old juniper tree.  Still, I must confess to having fallen under the spell of this land many years ago and being drawn back countless times to wander in canyons, to stumble dry-throated across mesas, to climb rock faces I had no business climbing just to reach some archaeological site abandoned by people who surely didn’t have me in mind when they left their mark here.  When they pressed handprints of wet red paint above their doorways 700 years ago.  And although I don’t claim to comprehend what three violent men were up to when they went postal here in 1998, I can relate to the way this place urges you to test your limits.  How it provokes you to discover what you can get away with and just how alive you can feel—whether that means climbing a dangerously exposed route across crumbling sandstone or something else entirely.

I must also admit to feeling some sort of bucking in my solar plexus in the canyons that I am not comfortable trying to explain lest I sound like one of the smiley spiritualists I’ve grown so weary of.  Like them, I also believe this land has a power— but not the benign hippie love-fest power that people speak of in hushed tones.  Okay, yes, I’ve even felt some of that.  But I also know how this land’s power has drawn and nurtured murderers, thieves, liars, and exploiters of every ilk and grand design.  It has attracted rebels and outcasts, raging fundamentalists, and a varied portfolio of hard cases.  Backpackers and river guides and other misanthropes flee here to escape the rampant commercialism and fast-food mentality of our nation.  And all of us—all the pilgrims who’ve felt the pull of this territory’s sun-drenched beauty—will admit that the heart of this land lies in shadow.  We carry a bone-deep understanding that canyon country may coax a person to do strange things.

From the earliest human inhabitants here, whose culture peaked seven hundred years ago and then vanished entirely from the earth; to the wandering explorers—Father Escalante, John Wesley Powell, the Weatherill family that was instrumental in discovering the Anasazi’s legacy; from loners and artists such as Everett Reuss who disappeared in the 1930s without a trace after last being seen in Davis Gulch, a tributary of the Escalante River, itself the very last river to be discovered in the continental U.S; to a trio of modern-day malcontents who carved a glyph of murder and hatred across our pure image of this land, men have acted badly or dumbly or both in the rugged southwest.

The story of these three recent fugitives, in particular, is a fine tale for exposing the underlying character of the canyon lands and the effect they can have.  To truly love a place we must recognize and accept its undesirable qualities as well as its many alluring attributes.  To love the desert we must acknowledge the terrible burden of its freedom.  The anarchy of its open spaces.  The geographic madness it sometimes inspires.

If there is a radical discontent fomenting in this nation, a movement that strikes against order and complacency and all the familiar comforts that most of us hold dear, it would likely find succor in the stingy, hardscrabble soil of the Colorado Plateau—in the heat of the sun and the shade of the canyons.  It would rise sharp and tough and unapproachable as a cholla cactus in a terrain so biblical it drew an entire religion—the Mormons—to call it their Promised Land.

What was this triumvirate of violent renegades up to when they cut loose from the reins binding them to society?  Were they would-be terrorists for whom things turned badly before they had a chance to act?  What had the land inspired in three men who already lived on the periphery before disappearing into the backcountry for three days, for seventeen months, and possibly forever?  How is their story relevant to our comfortable, well-watered lives?  What is it about the desert, and this particular desert, that exerts a power to both draw us in and drive us away?

Regardless of the fugitives’ ultimate goal, their own canyon country adventure led to senseless killing, mayhem, a good old-fashioned posse care of 50 U.S. government agencies, and—in the case of at least two out of three of the perpetrators—their own rather mysterious deaths.  The bleaching bones of the third fugitive, who has not been apprehended, may haunt the topography in some remote side canyon.  Or perhaps he escaped detection here, as did the outlaw Butch Cassidy, who often hid in this same wilderness between robberies and somehow became a hero.

The tale of the Four Corners Fugitives, as well as any story, communicates the dark history of this stunning, hexed land that wants neither to be discovered nor explored.  Juxtaposed against other little-known stories from the territory and some new perspectives on familiar stories, the saga of these men—their wrong turns and missed chances and deadly mistakes— fills out part of the incomplete map sketched by car commercials and coffee table books, by old westerns and the air-popped accounts of desert spiritualism and arid grace.  If anything, this place is more beautiful, more enticing, more powerful for being dangerous and dark.

If you’re the sort of person who’d like to attempt what may be the least-traveled day hike on the planet, don’t worry about visiting Bhutan or Ulan Bator.  Just book a flight to the Hawaiian Island of Maui.  And start saving your money.  And buy a pair of knee-high rubber boots.  In a world where few adventures are unique any more, you can still be one of only a handful of annual visitors welcomed to walk in this wild, private, 9000-acre tropical rain forest.

Owned and administered by the Maui Land and Pineapple Company, Pu’u Kukui employs two full-time field technicians and a supervisor who work to fence out pigs and cows and battle invasive foreign plants; protect endangered indigenous species that occur nowhere else in the world; and maintain the health and viability of an ecosystem that you’d otherwise have to visit in a zoo, botanical garden, or lab to see components of.  Once each year ML&P chooses by lottery or sells (as a fundraiser) as many as a dozen spots on a day-hike into the preserve.  In addition to these hikers, researchers and journalists are occasionally allowed to visit, which is how I manage to spend a long day walking Pu’u Kukui with photographer Ron Dahlquist, field technician Hank Oppenheimer, and intern Kainoa Marchella.

As soon as Ron— a long time Maui resident— lays eyes on me he gushes, “You’re a lucky man.  I’ve been trying to get up here for 15 years.  And I know the president of the Maui Land and Pineapple Company.”  Such is the success with which ML&P has kept the preserve off limits.  They have done so at least partly to honor the native Hawaiian land management practice of “ahupua’a,” in which the islands are divided into wedges—defined by perennial streams—that reach from mountain summits down past ocean shallows and encompass all topographies and microclimates and natural resources from rain forests to coral reefs.  The Hawaiian model calls for caring for each wedge in a sustained and holistic way.

In managing its own holdings in a manner that satisfies this cultural mandate, ML&P has created an engaging mystique around Pu’u Kukui.  Even most Maui residents know they’ll never get to see the place.  Still, Hawaiian culture has always valued the spiritual power even of land too remote or harsh or downright scary (such as active volcanoes) to visit.  ML&P also protects Pu’u Kukui because it is crucial to the island’s water supply, and therefore to growing pineapples, the company’s main business.

In the past, reservations on the one annual public hike through Pu’u Kukui were acquired by sheer luck through a lottery system democratic enough to exclude nearly everyone.  But in the year before my visit, the first eleven folks to pony up $1100 were helicoptered to the summit of Pu’u Kukui and allowed to descend 1500 vertical feet of boardwalk built to protect the fragile soil and prevent disturbances that might allow weeds and other invader species to thrive.

On the day of my separate July hike, Hank— a field-trained naturalist whose weathered features and wild blond hair make him look more like an aging rock star— picks me up in his muddy truck outside a coffee shop near the upscale, ML&P-owned Kapalua Resort.  The morning is postcard Hawaii, warm and tropical.

Ten minutes later we are standing on a concrete helicopter pad pulling on yellow rubber rain suits (mine is borrowed) and tall rubber boots (which I’ve bought just for the occasion).  Ten minutes after that we ascend via helicopter past fields of ripening pineapples into a fast-moving river of clouds rippling above a wild and foreboding alpine environment.  Canyons and waterfalls fly past beneath us.  In the distance, aureoles of light occasionally remind me that somewhere nearby perfectly normal folks are slathering on sunscreen and snorkeling in the blue sea.

A ways up the mountain the nose of the helicopter swings from side to side in strong gusts above a tiny platform that we seem unlikely to hit— but after a few tense moments we manage to land on it with a loud thump.  Exiting, I crouch low to the ground and scurry away from the prop wash.  Though the annual Pu’u Kukui hikers are usually flown to the summit and then descend several miles through cloud forest to this platform at First Bog, 4500 feet above sea level, weather doesn’t permit our group to fly any higher.  We’ll get to climb the last 1500 feet of elevation and then come back to First Bog to meet the helicopter— if weather allows it to retrieve us.  Otherwise, we’ll have to hike additional miles down to an old cabin accessible by four-wheel drive vehicle far below.

The weather at First Bog is cool and moist, the air like another atmosphere altogether, as if scoured of all impurities by wind and water.  Whereas the air on Maui’s beaches is clean in a baked, salty way, breathing here is like inhaling pure, chilled oxygen.  Or ether.  We hike single-file up the boardwalk (which is covered in a metal grid to prevent slipping) through the tundra-like landscape, gulping air by the euphoric lungful.

The higher reaches of Pu’u Kukui are often battered by trade winds that reach 50 mph, hence most of the diverse flora here lives on the ground rather than in a canopy, as in most rain forests.  It’s also the second wettest spot on the Hawaiian islands, receiving as much as 600 inches of rain in one record year, not counting fog, condensation, and the drool of hikers lucky enough to imbibe this breathable cocktail.  En route to the summit, Hank informs us that we are passing through a rare series of montane bogs, home to miniaturized plants such as the ohia tree, which normally grows to from 40-70 feet in height; in Pu’u Kukui it barely manages 12 inches.

He also points out a rare native daisy, an endangered plant called snakeroot, and other local treats—the preserve is home to as many as 30 rare and endangered species.  As we stand in a suddenly pelting rain that sounds like tiny firecrackers against my rain suit, Hank explains the importance of this natural community for water storage, for the native Hawaiian culture, and for the potential of endemic plants to form the basis of pharmaceutical drugs.  In fact, several major drug companies have sent biologists to Pu’u Kukui to prospect for plant compounds that might help cure or treat diseases such as cancer and AIDS.

Hank also explains that the native forest here remains intact because rough terrain, inclement weather, and dense vegetation have usually proven enough to discourage visitors of the human and even animal kind—although wild pigs and loose cattle have wandered into the area in the past.  As have a few dedicated (and demented and law-breaking) hikers drawn by said mystique.  “The land is very susceptible,” Hank says.  “A seed has the potential to go crazy.  That’s one reason the preserve is closed to the public.  Every year Hawaii has more weeds, insects, birds, and lizards that come as hitchhikers or are brought in from other countries.  Those species are unraveling the integrity of these forests.   Our job is to mitigate any threats or prevent threats from entering.  Because the world is shrinking.”

Which also explains why I had to turn my pack and clothes inside out before even boarding the helicopter this morning: to shake out any seeds or other plant material that may have clung to my gear on previous hiking trips.

As if to prove this point, Hank gestures toward elegant stalks of Japanese mat rush popping up beside the boardwalk.  The plant was brought to Maui 100 years ago because it provided a good weaving material.  It now grows sporadically in Pu’u Kukui where soil has been disturbed.

Up above us, for a fleeting moment sun shines on the summit like the light in an Irish fairy tail.  Plants along the boardwalk weep golden drops.  The wind calms and we hear snippets of bird song.  And then seconds later the wind and rain ramp up anew—so much so that I’m blown off the boardwalk and into the bog.

Ron and I—newcomers to this cross between hiking and tightrope walking—are knocked off the skinny boardwalk by wind or edged off by thick vegetation several times during our ascent.  At the summit we all duck into a crude shelter that Hank refers to as the “Pu’u Kukui Hilton.”  To the sides, 2000-foot drops plunge away into the clouds.

As we share a lunch of smoked marlin and chocolate biscuits we talk about the paradox of advertising a hike to a place that so few people will ever be allowed to visit.

“Any publicity if it’s done right is an educational tool,” Hank says, explaining the company’s reason for allowing a limited number of hikers to tour this pristine ecosystem.  “But this is too fragile a place to say ‘come one, come all.’  And it is private property; there’s no mandate to make it a playground for everyone.  With some places, if you really love and respect them, the best thing you can do is stay out.”

With rain pounding on the roof of the shelter we eventually ready ourselves to hike back down to First Bog.  The weather has closed in and we descend through clouds, our yellow rain slickers the only brightness amid the gray sky and brown-green flora.  Upon reaching the helicopter landing pad Hank makes a cell phone call and then reports that the chopper will not be able to pick us up; we’ll have to hike another three hours to the cabin.  Ron, who has a bad ankle and is wearing tennis shoes unlikely to remain on his feet in the thick mud, groans.

Not far below First Bog the boardwalk gives way to a swampy trail that often shows glimpses of steep drops into deep bowls of unbroken forest on each side.  Near one such precipice Hank warns me to be careful, joking, “That’s where I lost my first journalist.” If I were to slip over the edge at one of these spots, I think, it is unlikely that anyone would ever find me.  Hiking down the seldom-traveled mountain I take an odd sort of comfort in this.

Whereas the upper reaches of Pu’u Kukui were open and windblown, the lower “forest” is tight, insular, almost Hobbitlike.  Trees are furred with vegetation.  The route reminds me of a backcountry climbers’ trail where the word “trail” is almost meant sarcastically.  While an overgrown path wanders through the thick growth, at times it is really only a whispered suggestion of a path.  Once or twice, when Hank has disappeared ahead of me, I stray into unmarked forest and must backtrack to find the route.  When I ask if anyone ever maintains this trail he tells me that we are doing it right now.

Setting a brisk pace up front he also warns us each time we approach one of the wire traps (set to catch wild pigs) that we must step over to prevent becoming ensnared in their tightening loops.  But avoiding these obstacles is no tougher than high-stepping over roots, slogging through mud, down-climbing slippery rocks, limboing beneath over-hanging limbs, and performing other requisite contortions necessary to negotiate our way down the mountain, all in a cool and relentless drizzle.  We soldier on in silence for a while, each at our own pace, lost in thought in the insular, wet, and sweet-smelling jungle.

When we are close to the cabin where we’ll be picked up by Randy Bartlett, the preserve supervisor, Hank gathers our foursome and warns Ron and I that Randy may well be lurking behind a rock by the edge of the trail, waiting to scare us with his dead-on imitation of a wild pig.  And sure enough, with the cabin nearly in view we hear the snort of a huge beast.  It startles me even though I’ve been warned to expect it.  In fact, for the past two hours, I’ve half expected to come upon a triceratops snacking on the dense foliage.  Because in this pristine and primitive and nearly unvisited jungle, absolutely anything seems possible—except, of course, getting another chance to hike here.

After hunting dinosaur bones all morning with paleontologist Jack Horner and his wife Celeste in the badlands of eastern Montana— tramping through slick gullies and across crumbling plains silly with prickly pear cactus, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes– we stopped for lunch and a geology lesson atop a high escarpment.  As I dug into my sandwich, Horner pulled a rib out of his battered green army pack and commenced gnawing.

Although this particular rib did not originate in the Cretaceous period (it was from last night’s barbecue), Horner considered it thoughtfully between bites.  “Ee-yup,” he said– an indication that he was thinking deeply.  “Yup yup yup,” he added, as if to clarify.  It turned out that he was thinking about why the Hell Creek Formation stretching before us seemed to contain more dinosaur bones than a strip bar contains drunks.

“This was a lowland area of river flooding where sediments covered things,“ Horner said, picking clean the rib bone.  “They stayed covered for 65 million years– long enough that they haven’t eroded.  But erosion had to begin so that the right level is weathering out right now.”  Lucky for Horner he grew up in the right place at the right time.  Eastern Montana has proven to be a mother lode for uncovering dinosaur bones, especially those of T-Rex.  Finding them—as I learned from watching him and Celeste in the field– often involves walking slowly through the badlands, traversing steep ridges, and looking down at the ground as if you’re inconsolably sad.

A veritable dino divining rod, Jack Horner has uncovered more dinosaur fossils than anyone else in history. The uniqueness of his finds (a bone bed containing more than 10,000 duckbill dinosaurs; the world’s first dinosaur embryos, e.g.) and the theories he’s drawn from them have led us to begin looking at dinos as more than just big, clumsy, often-violent creatures who were too dumb or too unlucky to survive.  It is astounding what Horner has deduced from dinosaur bones—that they were social animals that traveled in herds; that they raised their own young; that T-Rex was a scavenger, not the fearsome predator it’s been miscast as in popular culture.  Horner has also contradicted accepted theory by hypothesizing that dinos were warm-blooded and could shift their metabolic rates as they grew older, which may account for their tremendous size.

I traveled to this godforsaken locale not far from where the radical Freemen cult made their stand years ago to spend a couple of days with this Master, who each summer welcomes 30-50 dedicated volunteers to help with his research.  Why would you go?  Because dinosaurs are cool, huge, and gone, and working a dig combines the adventure of a camping trip with the chance to play detective in a case that’s gone unsolved for millions of years.

But volunteers must prove themselves self-motivated, fast learning, and physically fit—and that’s just to reach the site, which in this case is a long and lonely drive even from the remote city of Billings.  In addition to my hunting dinos with Horner and Celeste, I also helped a handful of other volunteers and staffers excavate one of the project’s more recent finds– a 40-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex.

In a field where academic credentials are like a secret handshake, Jack Horner can offer only the high-five of a high school diploma.  Yet even without the degrees he’s a Regent’s Professor of biology at Montana State University; Curator of Paleontology at Bozeman’s Museum of the Rockies; author of many books including “Digging Dinosaurs” and “Dinosaurs Under the Big Sky”; and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius” grant.  He’s also consulted on the three Jurassic Park movies (and admits to rooting for the dinosaurs).  Not bad for a guy who describes himself as “a glorified ditch digger, squatter, and beggar.”  Physically, his beard and sunglasses make him look both scholarly and dangerous.  One of his colleagues calls Horner “the Hank Williams Jr. of paleontology”– and not just because of the resemblance.  In his earlier years, Horner earned a reputation as camp wildman.  But these days, Horner’s young staff and visiting volunteers ratchet up the beer drinking and dissonant country singing when Horner’s not in camp.

On the day I spent with him in the field, Jack kicked off our afternoon adventure by exclaiming– like one of the Hardy Boys– “Let’s go explorin’!”

Not knowing exactly what to look for at first, every rock, stone, pebble, and twig appeared to be a dinosaur to me.  When I picked up what I thought was a gorgeous fossil, Horner identified it immediately.

“That’s a really nice rock,” he said.  “You could take it home . . . and make believe it’s a Triceratops horn.”

In the course of the day, I learned to discern between bones and stones after Horner pointed out that any “rock” above a certain size had to be a bone because there were no big rocks here, and that bones have texture—marrow space—whereas rocks don’t.  Each time I presented a genuine specimen, Horner quickly nailed it– a champosaur rib; a prehistoric turtle shell; a bone fragment from a modern buffalo.

But we were looking for more than scattered fragments.  “I’m not interested in single bones,” Horner said.    “I want to find more than one bone weathering out in the same place.”  That afternoon, dragging packs full of water, snacks, picks, brushes, shovels, a portable GPS system, and other gear that volunteers will grow familiar with,  we (Jack, that is) stumbled upon three new dinosaur skeletons—“associations of bones,”– although he appeared to be simply wandering absent minded through the topography.  But I knew that he was thinking about what the climate was like here millions of years ago, asking himself how bones might have come to rest in a particular place or position, at a specific angle.  Had water moved them here?  Had they been scavenged?  He pursued his forensic detective work silently as he picked at the dirt around them.  Volunteers—who mostly work the sites that Horner now devotes most of his time to finding– have even more time to decode stories as they spend hours communing with bones.

I tried to walk out in front of Horner for awhile so I’d be likely to spot a juicy find first.  But where a hillside looked like a hillside to me, Horner spied a black rock poking out ten feet up the slope.  When he finished examining it he said, “Yup.  I’m beginning to think Tyrannosaurs are a dime a dozen.”  Soon after, he also spotted three ribs from a triceratops lying on the ground imitating rubble and stones.  Horner asked me to name the site, which I called “Triceratropolis.”

The next day I experienced what occurs after Horner finds a worthwhile specimen– by spending eight hours on my knees with one of his crews of about eight people essentially chipping away ground like hard-frozen chocolate ice cream using a chisel, awl, and paint brush, and being extremely careful not to hit any part of the Tyrannosaurus that lay buried in the hill.  Which is what most volunteers will find themselves doing most of the time.  The field crew chief on this excavation also taught me to mix plaster and water into a gooey paste to apply protective casts around bones for when they’re carried out to a museum for further study– and possible reassembly into a threatening museum dinosaur.  Horner’s more permanent workers—grad students, mostly—demonstrate a technique once and hope you’ll catch on.  Horner currently trains all his crew chiefs who then train inexperienced volunteers such as myself.

When I asked Horner how he’s managed to find so many more dinosaurs than anyone else (he’s uncovered fully one third of all the Tyrannosaurs ever discovered), several geologic epochs seemed to pass before he responded.  “Maybe nobody went looking, or they didn’t know what they were seeing,” he said.  “Dinosaurs might be everywhere.  There could be T. Rexes all over the place.  I don’t want to predict.  I just go out and find stuff.”

Although this may seem obvious, the one essential ingredient of a great river trip is an adequate river. Paddling an inflatable kayak down a stream without enough water, I’ve discovered, demands the combined skills of mogul skiing, skateboarding, stick fighting, pole vaulting, and bobsledding.

My friend Leon and I faced this riparian pentathlon one April on southern Utah’s Escalante River. When we reached the Escalante after driving one of the most dramatic routes in America, down Utah Highway 12 from Boulder Mountain–where bare aspens waited patiently for spring and a lone coyote stared at us from a snowfield–we searched for any sign of a river moving between its banks.

“It’s certainly well camouflaged,” I said.

Leon just whistled, then looked up at the sky as if expecting rain.

At the highway put-in, neither of us mentioned the obvious water shortage. I paced amid our chaos of kayaking and backpacking gear while Leon sat on the hood of his truck performing surgery on a pair of Teva sandals with dental floss, pliers, a sewing needle, and a spoon. We ate three-day-old sourdough bread, hard as a tire iron, and imagined mighty rivers: the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Colorado. Beside us, the Escalante doddered like a friendly drunk, just able to muster the energy to slide over shallow stones.

“I’ve seen more water flowing across my kitchen floor,” Leon finally said, “one time when the washing machine backed up.”

If you consult a highway map of Utah and place your finger on the point farthest from an interstate, you’ll end up either on a missile-testing range or in the Escalante River. Named for a Spanish cleric who got nowhere near the river while searching for a new route between Santa Fe and Monterey, California, in 1776, the Escalante defied discovery by whites for another 100 years. John Wesley Powell twice floated past its mouth while exploring the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871, but never realized it was a major tributary. A year later, the Thompson-Dellenbaugh party mistook the Escalante for the Dirty Devil River and then, recognizing their error, claimed credit for finding it. It was the last river to be discovered in the contiguous United States.

Bordered by the Circle Cliffs and Waterpocket Fold to the east, the Straight Cliffs of the Kaiparowits Plateau to the west, and the Aquarius Plateau to the north–and offering rim views of Navajo and Boulder mountains, and the solitary Henry range–the Escalante canyon is difficult to reach and well protected from sight. Before being uplifted some 60 million years ago, much of the region lay under an inland sea, collecting the colorful sediments that running water has since carved into fins, domes, alcoves, arches, and natural bridges, in shades of red, brown, purple, gray, and green. Side canyons branch off side canyons as if in some geologic pyramid scheme.

Every year, millions of visitors to Bryce, Zion, Arches, and Canyonlands national parks follow the examples of Father Escalante and Major Powell in bypassing these canyons on their way to other places. Yet a few backpackers do find their way here, and unfortunately that’s all it takes to shatter the isolation of the river and its tributaries–the visiting of which Leon and I selfishly, whole-heartedly, and hypocritically discourage. We worked hard to devise a way of having the Escalante to ourselves: the hanging gardens of purple columbine clustered around seeps in deep-red rock, the whispers of perfume from sage and desert holly, the rounded streambed stones that feel so smooth in your hands. And above it all, the slices of star-flaked sky viewed from sandy alcove camps, illuminated by a goofy, lopsided moon.

The Escalante is nearly always too shallow for rafts or canoes, and hard-shell river kayaks would have been too small for gear and too clumsy to pack out at the end. So we opted for inflatable kayaks, which seemed to us, planning from afar, to be custom-made for this trip. They would enable us to get to our designated take-out at Coyote Gulch, 80 miles downstream, far faster than if we went on foot, maximizing the amount of time that we could spend hiking the deepest sections of the Escalante’s otherwise inaccessible side canyons.

But the most compelling argument for this particular scheme was that we’d never actually heard of anyone traveling the Escalante by boat.

Yes, information on floating the river does exist, but it’s scarce; simply finding it constituted the first stage of our expedition. In his 1978 book Canyon Country Paddles, Verne Huser reports that “the Escalante has probably not been run by more than a dozen parties to date. It is a real wilderness river, tough to get out of once you are in it or on it… totally isolated most of the time. It is only for the adventuresome.” Many years after admonishing his readers to treat the Escalante “with reverence,” Huser still hadn’t gotten around to it himself.

Huser’s warnings were and remain on target: since the Escalante descends nearly 2,000 feet between the Highway 12 bridge and Lake Powell, river runners must either portage and paddle down to and then across the reservoir, or climb out from the depths, lugging their crafts through one of only two negotiable side canyons. In the event of a minor injury sustained by a person, or an irreparable one suffered by a kayak, the hike back to civilization could take days: the sheer walls would dictate a circuitous route, and once out of the canyon one might have to trudge as much as 50 miles on the desolate, dead-end Hole-in-the-Rock Road west of the river to Escalante, the nearest town. Because Leon had borrowed our $700 kayaks from the river outfitter he guides for, leaving them behind would be an option only in the most life-threatening emergency. We knew we’d have to lug the boats up to the canyon rim eventually, but treated this fact like an inevitable root canal, putting it out of our minds until we had to confront it.

The only other information I uncovered was a two-page pamphlet bearing the logos of the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. That so many government agencies even knew about floating the Escalante was discouraging, but I thoroughly approved of the text’s pessimistic tone: “The river’s potential for river running is of a limited nature,” it reads. “It will be extremely important to plan your float to catch high-water periods. This will require flexibility in your schedule and frequent updating of river conditions.”