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By Golden Webb
I was first introduced to Canyonlands by my uncle in the spring of 1989. Fifteen years old, my heart pumping boiling hormones through my veins instead of red blood. At that age my paradigm of life was shaped more by beer commercials and Bruce Willis movies than by maturity or common sense. I usually spent my weekends with friends dreaming up (but usually, luckily, not carrying out) stupid, macho stunts that would make us feel like real men. So it was with a little reluctance that I agreed to spend one particular weekend with a group of Scouts from Salt Lake on a mountain biking trip to the White Rim Trail near Canyonlands' Island in the Sky.
We arrived at Dead Horse Point after nightfall, looked over the edge into inky blackness, then drove back onto Big Flat and entered Canyonlands. Just inside the boundary we took the dugway that drops off the mesa top near Red Sea Flat and descended thousands of feet to the ledge of the White Rim. To the west soared the walls of Aztec Butte and Grandview Point. To the east yawned a chasm containing the vast loop of the Gooseneck of the Colorado River.
We set up camp in a howling desert wind and, as everyone dropped off to sleep, I found myself wide awake, not because I wasn't tired but because I had never heard music as strange and beautiful as the melodies of that singing desert wind.
The next day we biked the first few miles of the White Rim, and no landscape has ever had such a staggering impact on a young person's perceptions of the world than that stunning landscape had on mine. By the time the trip was over and we pointed the station wagon back north toward the Wasatch, I was sunburned, hungry, exhausted and in a serious state of wonder.
Many of the Plains Indian tribes gauged the passing of time by recording what they called Wintercounts, the important, significant, life-changing events of a particular season, for example a drought, a flood, the death of a great warrior, or a successful hunt. That trip to Canyonlands was an important Wintercount in my young life. I have looked at the world with different eyes ever since.