I got lost in the desert and had to spend the night without any equipment. It could have been a disaster. We had no gear. No food. No water. Just our bikes, an empty backpack, and each other.
There were five of us. My dad, two of my uncles, my younger brother Chad, and me. We set out to ride the Steel Bender trail outside Moab on a summer evening in July. The weather was typical, hot and dry, but like every evening in the desert, the sun goes down and the air cools and it turns into a perfect time to ride. It didn't take long to realize we had two skill groups. So we split up. My dad and one uncle. My other uncle, Chad, and me.
We took off and enjoyed the ride. We had an amazing desert sunset, the clouds reflecting pinks, oranges, reds, and blues. Somewhere along the way, the trail split off to the right, down a wash, and we lost it. The bottom of the wash was sand and loose rock. Nothing held a tire mark. There was nothing to follow and nothing to follow back.
We stopped and talked about it. Chad and I thought we should turn around. My dad had the map. He had food. He had a filter. If we went back the way we came, we would find them, or we would at least find the part of the trail we knew. Our uncle thought we should keep looking. The trail had been obvious the whole way. We had covered a lot of ground to get where we were, and turning around meant giving all of it up for a trail that was probably fifty yards ahead of us.
He is a doctor. He was in the military at the time. He is the kind of man you want with you when something goes wrong, and all three of us knew it.
So we kept going.
I want to be fair about this, because it would be easy to tell the story like somebody made a dumb call. Nobody made a dumb call. The trail was very defined, and then it wasn't. Everything we knew right up until that moment said the trail was still there. Keeping going was the disciplined answer. It just wasn't the right one.
So we wandered. The color went out of the sky and the rock went gray and then we couldn't see the ground. We continued to wander in the dark desert night, without flashlights. Without a match or lighter. Yet we hoped that my dad and my uncle had made it back to the house and were out looking for us. We could see and hear a Jeep working somewhere out there, headlights swinging across the rock, and we were hoping help would find us. It never did.
The longer we walked, the more lost we got. About midnight, we got to a certain point and heard water. We thought, hey, maybe we can down-climb this little section and get to it. We stood there in the dark and talked about it. And this time we decided that since we couldn't see, it was better to wait. So we decided to just spend the night.
I curled up in a ball on the cool sand and tried to sleep. It wasn't very restful. I was worried about scorpions and rattlesnakes looking for a warm, comfortable place to stay, and the coyote or cougar hoping for an easy meal. I stuck my arms in my brother's empty backpack for warmth. That was the most use it got all night. We were told as kids that we always needed to carry a backpack. Nobody ever asked what was in it, including the kid wearing it.
The rock gave up its heat a little at a time. I've spent a lot of cold nights in the mountains in January when the temps were well below freezing. That summer evening in the desert was still cold.
As soon as it was light enough to see the next morning, we walked over and looked at the little section we had almost down-climbed. It wasn't little. It was a straight drop onto rock, and we would have gone off it one at a time in the dark, each of us following the sound of the one before.
We tried to backtrack to where we got off the trail. We finally found it and wandered back. The trail follows a stream, the one we heard in the night. We stopped. Filled water bottles and drank straight out of it. It was the best water I've ever had.
Different parts of our bikes had come apart over the course of the night. Once we had water, we pieced together a working bike and I rode the trail back to the house. Just as I turned up the driveway, my dad, my grandpa, and two of my uncles were on their way out to meet with search and rescue.
My dad and uncle lost the trail too. Same wash, same wrong turn. They picked up our tracks and followed them for a while, and then they stopped. It was getting dark and they didn't know where they were, so they quit moving and spent the night.
They stopped next to a pothole, one of those pockets in the slickrock that holds rainwater for weeks after a storm. My dad had a filter straw and some snacks. They were just as lost as we were and they had a fine night. They were back at the house hours before I came up the driveway.
There are so many things I can take away from this. We should have known the trail. We had never ridden it before. Trying to ride fourteen miles in the few hours before dark isn't the best idea. A simple lighter would have made the night so much easier, and we had a bag big enough to carry one.
But being prepared wasn't the difference between the two groups. Both groups got lost. The map didn't stop it. The training didn't stop it. Preparation didn't keep anybody from taking the wrong wash. It only decided what taking the wrong wash cost.
The difference was that one group stopped.
We stopped too, eventually. We stopped at midnight, standing at the edge of a drop we couldn't see, and that stop is the only reason I'm here to write about it. It just came six hours later than it should have. I'd like to say we got smarter in those six hours. We didn't. At dusk we could still tell ourselves we knew where we were. By midnight the dark had taken that away from us.
How often do we keep going when we should have stopped to figure out where we are? And how often do we actually turn around? I do it all the time. I stay with things well past the point where they stopped working, because of what it took to get them that far. I keep pushing a conversation that is going nowhere. Because we're moving, it never feels like being lost. It feels like progress.
I often think about my uncle's credentials. We trusted him, and we had good reason to. He had every credential you could want in an emergency. None of them were about finding a trail in the dark. The man who made the right call that night was my dad, who years later spent a long time on Grand County Search and Rescue. He was in the other group, where we couldn't hear him.
I'm the one with the title now. There are rooms where people have gone along with me because of what I am rather than because I was right, and I can't tell you which rooms those were.
My dad and uncle stopped when they didn't know where they were. Where they stopped, there was water.
We kept going and walked right past it.