Here’s a sign you don’t want to see while you’re out on a hike.
I was watching a show about Glacier Nat’l Park the other day, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. They have lots of both black bears AND grizzly bears wandering around there. I remember when I hiked four days and nights on the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina, we hung our food from a tree limb so that it would be out of the reach of hungry bears.
There are no bears here in south central Utah to worry about when hiking, but there are other, more difficult to spot, dangers. Once a few years ago I was hiking alone in one of my favorite places – Red Canyon, about seven miles west of Bryce Canyon Nat’l Park – ascending toward the crest of the trail, when I heard a sudden rattle. It was quite loud and very distinctive, as well as purposeful. The rattlesnake was warning me to stay back. Naturally, I froze in my tracks. As I watched the brush, a long rattler slithered across the trail path five feet from where I stood transfixed. Live and let live.
My worse run-ins on the trail have been with other people. It is like the line in Jean Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit.” It goes: “Hell is other people.” This past October my wife and I were hiking in the Devil’s Gardens portion of Arches National Park. Suddenly we heard a voice coming up behind us. It was a young couple from Europe (we couldn’t decide what country, tho’ my wife guessed it was Danish), and the female was yammering away, hardly taking a breath between sentences. This went on for quite awhile until we finally stood aside and let them pass us. Then we caught up to them at an arch and ended up on-and-off along the trail with them for the next mile or so. It destroyed the serenity of the hike. She never shut up.
That’s why I do more hiking in early winter and early spring, to avoid encountering tourists. On my favorite trail in Red Canyon – Golden Wall trail – I’ve only seen another human being once.