The Moab Expedition, Vol. II: What the Desert Gave Me Instead

Before I left, I wrote that the goal wasn't to see another national park — it was to come home with a quieter heart. I meant it, but I still had a checklist in my back pocket. Trails. Summits. Sunrises on my schedule. The desert read that list, laughed, and threw most of it out.

What I got instead was better, and it took me most of the week to admit it.

Getting there

Seven hundred miles of thinking road

You land in Salt Lake at 4,226 feet and feel the altitude before you feel the heat. Then you point the car south and drive. Long, wide-open country — the kind where you pass a wind farm and watch a hundred blades turn slow across the horizon and realize you haven't checked your phone in an hour. That was the first thing the trip did to me: it gave me back the space between thoughts.

I stopped in Price at the Prehistoric Museum. Full skeletons standing in a quiet hall — an Allosaurus squared off with a Camptosaurus. Worth the stop by itself.

Then Green River, and Ray's Tavern. Sign out front reads "The Place for Everyone." Flags on the porch, stools at the bar, a burger and hand-cut fries that I'd drive back for. Nothing about it is trying to impress you, which is exactly why it does.

The part I didn't plan for

The smoke

I rolled into Moab and the sky was wrong. Not cloudy — yellow. There were wildfires burning across Utah and over into Colorado, and Moab sat under the drift. Air quality in the range where they tell people with any lung history to stay inside. You could taste it.

Here's the honest part. I'm a guy who owns a heating and air company. I don't train. I don't run. And I went out into 90-plus degrees at five thousand feet of elevation and sucked down smoke and ash for two solid days like it was nothing, because I had a checklist. My lungs let me know about it. If you're reading this planning your own trip: that combination — heat, altitude, smoke, and a body that sits in a truck for a living — is no joke.

So the big hikes came off the table. Which felt, at the time, like the trip failing.

And then the sun went down through all that particulate and turned into a blood-orange disc sitting on the rim of the rock, and I stood there like an idiot with my mouth open. The thing that ruined my plans made that. I'm still chewing on it.

Roadside find

There's a rock shop in Moab, and it is not messing around

Somebody told me to stop in at the rock shop in town and I figured, sure, I'll look at some geodes. That is not what this place is. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling: fossil cases, a mosasaur jaw the size of a truck bumper with the teeth still in it, a Hyaenodon skull sitting up on the top shelf with a hand-lettered price tag, megalodon teeth by the tray.

Then a whole case of pottery — ancient Pueblo and Anasazi pottery pieces, some of it labeled as collected out of bean fields over in Dove Creek, Colorado back in the fifties. Corn grinders worn smooth by hands. That stopped me longer than the fossils did. Somebody shaped that, used it, and set it down.

And then the uranium shelf. Chunks of bayleyite and andersonite the size of a forearm, crusted in a green so bright it doesn't look like it belongs on this planet, dug out of the D Day #2 Mine over in the Yellow Cat District. Propped behind them, a genuine RADIATION — CAUTION sign, and taped underneath in somebody's handwriting: "CAUTION! RADIOACTIVE. KIDS — DO NOT TOUCH!"

That's not a gimmick out here. This whole corner of Utah boomed on uranium in the fifties — Moab was a mining town before it was a mountain-bike town. The rock isn't scenery; it's the reason these towns exist at all.

Also, and I want to be clear that I am reporting this and not recommending it: if you have ever found yourself in the market for a human skull, they have some. For sale. On a shelf. I did not buy a human skull. I want that on the record.

Cool hours

The mornings were the whole thing

Moab runs 92 to 97 in the afternoon and drops to around 68 at dawn. That gap is where the trip actually lived. Every good hour I had out there was before nine in the morning.

I did make the climb to Delicate Arch, early, in the cool. Three miles round trip, five hundred feet up bare slickrock. And when I got there I did the thing I'm proudest of on this whole trip: nothing.

I sat down. For two hours. I ate a gas-station container of tuna salad and crackers and I watched people. And what I watched was a parade — march up, walk under the arch, hand somebody a phone, take the photo, turn around, march back down. Fifteen minutes, start to finish, in front of something God spent a long time carving.

I'm not judging them. I'm telling you I was going to be them. My own written mission for the week said "take fewer pictures and create more memories," and I only managed it because the smoke took away everything else I'd planned to do. God had to close four doors to get me to sit still in one.

Bad idea, in hindsight

The night hike

But I'll tell you why I went. This is what I came to see:

And here is what my phone actually got, standing out there in it:

That's the version in my head. The real one was rawer — grainy, cold-feeling even in the heat, the Milky Way a faint smudge you have to stand still for a full minute to even start seeing. And you know what? Standing in that much dark, in that much quiet, with that much sky over you, is the closest I've felt to genuinely small and genuinely held at the same time. Some things God whispers only where the world is finally quiet.

The trade

Fins N' Things, and the tent

Since my legs were off the menu, I put myself in a side-by-side and ran Fins N' Things out at Sand Flats. Slickrock that rolls like frozen waves — you crest one and the nose drops and your stomach goes with it. Best two hours of pure fun on the trip, and I never had to breathe hard to earn it.

Three nights, three very different beds. The first was Under Canvas, out past the light dome where the sky earns its reputation. Beautiful place. Also — and I say this with love — a tent in the desert is still a tent in the desert. It was hot. So I did what any heat-and-air man does: I soaked my bedsheet in water, laid down in it, and let evaporation do the work. I built myself a swamp cooler out of bedding.

It worked. Then an ant the size of a lug nut bit me and woke me straight up. The desert always gets the last word.

Night two I moved into town to the Hoodoo, and that place was great — I finally had a real air conditioner. Except the thermostat's calibration was off. It read 65 in a room that was clearly not 65. So I opened the cabinet, pulled out the iron, set it on the shelf under the thermostat, and let the warm air fool the sensor into calling for cooling. Compressor kicked on. Room got cold. I slept like a baby.

Night three was Salt Lake City on the way back out — a normal hotel room in a normal city, which after a tent, an ant, and a hand-calibrated thermostat felt downright luxurious.

The people

Seat 27B and a seed

On the way out I sat next to a young guy from Pakistan, an electrician in training, wiring up data centers. Two tradesmen at thirty-five thousand feet talking shop — him building the guts of the internet, me keeping Arkansas from melting. Good man. Sharp.

On the way home I drew a middle seat, which is usually a sentence, and instead ended up beside really good people. Somewhere over the middle of the country I got to talk with a Muslim man about Jesus. Not a debate — a conversation. I'm not going to dress it up and tell you anything dramatic happened. I just know we're not asked to close the deal. We're asked to plant the seed and let God do what He does with it.

My mission list for the week included "I meet interesting people." That one got checked twice at altitude.

Observations

A strange, quiet country

The culture out there is nothing like home. Heavy Latter-day Saints presence and a heavy progressive crowd, layered right on top of each other in the same small towns, and somehow both of them sharing the same gas station. Coming from Central Arkansas it's a real contrast.

And it struck me as a lonely place. Beautiful — staggeringly so — but lonely. Enormous distances between anything. I don't mean that as an insult. Some of the best hours I had all week came out of exactly that emptiness.

The last morning

My body woke me up for the sunrise

By the end of the week something had reset. No alarm, no notification — I came awake on my own about one minute before the sun cleared the rock, and I was up and out the door fast enough to catch it.

A week earlier I would have slept through that, or seen it later on somebody's screen. That's the whole trip right there, in sixty seconds. I'd asked God to quiet my mind and open my eyes to His creation. He answered by re-tuning me to the sun.

If you go

Go in October

Learn from my August. Go in October — cool days, genuinely cold nights, fire season winding down, thinner crowds on the trail. Everything I fought for out there in the heat and the smoke, you can have easy in the fall.

One more test

The airport had something to say too

The desert wasn't finished with me. I missed my connection, and the rebooked flight slipped, and slipped again — 8:55 became 11:09 — and I ended up parked in a terminal from two in the afternoon into the night. Eight, nine hours of gate carpet and departure boards, watching the same status line move further away from me, landing back in Arkansas around one in the morning.

Which was funny, in the way that isn't funny yet. My mission list for the week had "I slow down" and "be more patient" written on it in my own handwriting. Moab taught the first one. The airport gave the final exam on the second. I'd like to report I passed with honors. I passed.

I came home with sore lungs, a bug bite, a sunburn, and a quieter heart. Trip succeeded.

Adventure with gratitude. Walk with purpose. Return with peace.

Volume I — written before I left, with the plan and the reason — is here. And while I was gone, the crew never stopped: the 24/7 emergency line stayed covered and same-day AC repair kept rolling across Central Arkansas.

The album

Four days, in frames