Getting a permit is unlikely.  Only twenty people are allowed to visit Coyote Buttes North a day, and travelers from across the world vie for these permits.  The area, part of the Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness, is one of the most unusual places in the world, and also incredibly fragile.  The permitting system means a four month wait.  Something about this weather, though, gives me a hunch.

I drive to Kanab in Utah, and stop in at the BLM station.  "You've come to the wrong place," the ranger says.  "but just so you know, I don't think people are able to get down there right now, House Rock Road is too muddy."
She sends me to the old ranger station in Kanab, where, it turns out, somebody had turned in their permit for tomorrow.  "That's because nobody can get in," the ranger says.  "With all this rain and snow, its real slick on the road.  You need a high clearance vehicle, but even then?"

I decide to just buy the permit, even though we had walked out and looked at my rental truck, and decided it would be a bad idea to even consider taking it in that mud. 
Then, possessing a permit I had wanted for years, I ask around about the possibility of a driver.  "Betty," somebody tells me at the ranger station, and hands me a number.
The next day, I meet Betty in Page, Arizona.  Betty walks with a cane.  She has been driving people on rough roads for seventeen years.  We agree that if at any point the road looks unsafe, we'll turn back.

On the way to the House Rock Road, she shows me a number of gullies, slot canyons, and desert roads which she says, "are virtually unknown." 

In a dry future, I say to myself, these cracks in the Earth would house people – protection from wind, sun, and cougars.

We turn left onto House Rock Road.  I've driven this road before several times before.  Nothing out of the ordinary about it, as far as dirt roads go.  But it becomes clear after a quarter mile that were I to have attempted this road on my own today, I'd already be stuck. 
I realize: the mud is almost a foot thick.  And the last set of truck tracks turn around right here.

Betty carries on, but it's clear that the the slick mud keeps veering us toward the edge of the road.  "Like driving on ice," I say.  But Betty says, "except that ice is predictable.  Here you slide and then it just throws you a surprise."

Next

123456