I parted and in the morning I was driving through the northern tip of Arizona; this section was always my favorite from Jesse and my trips back and forth between California and Minnesota. One early morning, maybe 4:30 AM, I was half asleep in the passenger seat; I looked out and saw two beautiful long-tailed blue birds with intricate markings. "Jesse, look at those birds!" I said and fell back asleep. 40 miles later, at a rest stop, Jesse said, "Erik, hey you better come take a look at your grill." And there they were, two blue birds cropped - splatted maybe - in perfect harmony against my grill, wings still spread. We argued for some minutes about who would take them off. "Its your car!" "You were driving."

After a while, we found a 10 foot stick and scraped them off.plop, plop. Soon, I was in Zion Canyon; steep cliffs and deep canyons and twisted pines and rivers and striated buttes. It was - maybe - themost beautiful place I had ever been, ever. But I didn't stop.

The river Paria called, and I remember Conrad droning on about the lure of the Congo. I drove onpast the Coral Pink Sand dunes and into our newest national monument; the gigantic Grand-Staircase Escalante. The Grand Staircase is actually a term referring to the northern steps of the Colorado Plateau. Millions of years of heavy vegetation breathed the oxygen out of the air - suffocating the plants until they oxidized all the soils of the triassic into varying shades of red. The Colorado Plateau is an uplifted plain from Zion to the Rockies. Sedimentation from those red ages produced steps as the middle of the Plateau sunk under its own pressure.

The top step of the Plateau is Bryce Canyon. After that it's the pink cliffs and then the grey cliffs and then Zion Canyon and the white cliffs. After that it's the Vermillion Cliffs and the chocolate cliffs before, finally, the Grand Canyon. In the middle of all this chaos is the Paria River, at the heart of the Paria-Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness District of the Bureau of Land Management in association with the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which is managed by both Utah and Arizona. Really, it's a free-range cattle country, and from the road, doesn't look like much.

For some time however, I had looked at the topo-maps of the Colorado Plateau; following the long snake-like route of the Paria. Twisting, writhing and lashing until finally it settles and gives way to the Grand Canyon at Lee's Ferry in Glen Canyon.

I had read about it and studied the different types of lizards and rattlers and scorpions who thrived in it, and about the people who had died there; trapped in slot canyons to face a wall of flash flood water - 50 feet high, and how the cattle fell into its canyons, and drowned in its quicksand.

I drove on, miles from nowhere and when the land was scorched with toppled boulders and balancing hoodoos and mushroomed cliffs in pink and mustard and orange, Paria made itself known - a rather insubstantial trickle of a river. A creek really.