Encounters With the Seldom Seen

The exact year escapes me—maybe 1990, maybe ’91. Time was slippery then. I was still tearing around in my beaten-up ’73 VW bus, blue and white, with a ski pole for a shifter—a rolling scrapbook of dings and scratches that chronicled my own chaotic coming of age. Montana winters chasing powder. Oregon summers chasing wind and skiing volcanoes. Utah in between, my home a sun-faded van idling somewhere along the way. That spring, it was Moonflower Canyon outside Moab—a cracked desert paradise where I spent days climbing sandstone walls, biking trails that felt endless, and living off cheap burritos on a budget so tight it squeaked: seven bucks a day.

My orbit that season? Maybe twenty miles tops, anchored to that canyon. Thirty-five years later, working on a project with Science Moab, I came to learn that most visitors to Moab don’t venture farther than thirty miles from the town center. For three weeks the van barely moved. I biked everywhere,