To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

Descending toward the river the junipers become scarce, give way to scrubby, bristling little vegetables like black brush, snakeweed and prickly pear. The bunch grass fades away, the cliff rose and yucca fall behind. We topped out on a small rise and there ahead lay the red wasteland again—red dust, red sand, the dark smoldering purple reds of ancient rocks, Chinle, Shinarump and Moenkopi, the old Triassic formations full of radium, dinosaurs, petrified wood, arsenic and selenium, fatal evil monstrous things, beautiful, beautiful. Miles of it, leagues of it, glittering under the radiant light, swimming beneath waves of heat, a great vast aching vacancy of pure space, waiting. Waiting for what? Why, waiting for us.

Beyond the red desert was the shadowy crevasse where the river ran, the living heart of the canyonlands, the red Colorado. Note my use of the past tense here. That crevasse was Glen Canyon. On either side of the canyon we saw the humps and hummocks of Navajo sandstone, pale yellow, and beyond that, vivid in the morning light, rich in detail and blue in profile, the Henry Mountains, last-discovered (or at least the last-named) mountain range within the coterminous United States. These mountains were identified, as one might expect, by Major John Wesley Powell, and named in honor of his contemporary, Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Beyond the mountains we could see the high Thousand Lake and Aquarius plateaus, some fifty miles away by line of sight. In those days before the potash mills, cement plants, uranium mills and power plants, fifty miles of clear air was nothing—to see mountains one hundred miles away was considered commonplace, a standard of vision.

We dropped down into that red desert. In low gear. Moved cautiously across a little wooden bridge that looked as if it might have been built by old Cass Hite himself, or even Padre Escalante, centuries before. Old yellow-pine beams full of cracks and scorpions, coated with the auburn dust. Beneath the bridge ran a slit in the sandstone, a slit about ten feet wide and one hundred feet deep, so dark down in there we could hardly make out the bottom. We paused for a while to drop rocks. The sunlight was dazzling, the heat terrific, the arid air exhilarating.

I added water to the radiator, which leaked a little, as all my radiators did in my student days, and pumped up one of the tires, which had a slow leak, also to be expected, and checked the gas tank, which was a new one and did not leak, yet, although I could see dents where some rocks had got to it. We climbed aboard and went on. Mighty cumuli-nimbi massed overhead—battleships of vapor, loaded with lightning. They didn’t trouble us.

We jounced along in my overloaded pickup, picking our way at two miles an hour in and out of the little ditches—deadly axle busters—that ran across, not beside the road, heading the side canyons, climbing the benches, bulling our way through the sand of the washes. We were down in the land of standing rock, the world of sculptured sandstone, crazy country, a bad dream to any dirt farmer—except for the canyon bottoms not a tree in sight.