The Narrows & The Narrows

When I went to Patagonia, there was a lot of down time to read books. My dad had a book that we both read entitled The City & the City, which was a Hugo Award Winner in Science Fiction. In this book, there are two parallel universes existing simultaneously within the same city. In plain sight when you are in one city, this other city with a different culture and completely different universe exists in a different reality. People are not allowed to look over and see what is going on in this other city or bad things will happen to them. So the characters talk frequently of "seeing without seeing", meaning that as they walk by they know out of the corner of their eye what is going on in this other city but they block it out to keep bad things from happening.

I have been working in Zion for 6 years by this point and going up in the Narrows is never on anyone's list of high priority activities to do for work. There are too many people, there is too much chaos, but most of all to me, there is too much resource damage that is uncontrolled and abundant. So, as I walked by all this resource destruction for years and years, it was like the City & the City as I was "seeing without seeing". It is so easy to just look at this majestic place with the extremely high walls of Navajo Sandstone and this awesome river pouring right through it and ignore the fact that vegetation is being destroyed at a rapid pace. There are trails built specifically for people to take a poop. Anyplace where there can be a trail out of the river, people take advantage of it without the thought of what they are destroying. Why? Because no one is stopping them. I know that my thought process would be if I was hiking in this area and not working in this area. "If the Park Service didn't want me to walk here, then they would have stopped me from walking here in some way." As a park employee, I would take the time to throw a few sticks and logs on these trails and to try to encourage folks to find a different way. But it never worked and I never really thought that it was my responsibility to make it work. None of my bosses were telling me to get this job done, so why should I take it too seriously.

But coming down from Deep Creek two weeks past, it finally clicked with me that why couldn't it be me to lead this charge. I have realized throughout my life that no matter how big a project if I was willing to lead the charge and it was a good idea, others would see that and get behind it. When I brought it to my bosses, they were nothing but supportive, but with the attitude of it's going to be a BIG project taking lots of time and muscle. Still, I was ready and willing to get the job done. Now I just had to see what amount of effort it was going to take.

So I decided to give it a try. I started amazingly early and at 7 am, I was driving up the scenic drive to park at the Temple to get a head start on the Narrows hikers. My goal with this was to avoid the big crowds of people because all day long I was going to have answers questions about what I was doing. I hit the Riverside Walk and it was refreshing to only have a few souls on the trail in the morning.
I already had a social trail picked out. It was in the perfect spot. This trail started on the left side of the river climbing up to a flatter spot and then branching off in three directions below. It also had a second trail lower down that connected with these other branches. It was completely useless because if you went around the corner instead you stayed at the same elevation with the river instead of going up and coming back down. No one would disagree with me that this trail was absolutely useless, so I was determined to get rid of it. To top it all off, there was a log jam right downstream, where piles of logs were laying there waiting to be used to block people's progress.

From what I have learned from years of blocking social trails is only when you make the trail more difficult for people to continue using then to not use, will people stop using it. So the plan was to use as much material as possible to dump on the trail in order to keep others from using it. So I set about collecting material. I crossed and re-crossed the river multiple times carrying the heaviest logs I could possibly lift. Why not carry a whole bunch of sticks instead? Because if there is anything that I have learned with the Narrows is that if something is the size of a walking stick, it will vanish instantly. So I carried logs that honestly should have been lifted by two or more people at once. Sometimes there were entire trees that I dragged across the river. I worked on this for two hours straight and physically, there is no better workout then to carry heavy logs across a river time and time again.

The fun part was that after those two hours I got to then carry those logs up and down the hill dumping them strategically in places that would keep people from using these routes and instead use the river. When I ran out of logs, I started moving rocks. I spent about an hour moving the logs and then another hour moving the rocks. After that I put up the five signs that I had brought with me.

I was exhausted, but when I looked at it my first thought was: It is not enough. There were many signs of that like while I was working people walking right through the trails I am blocking, most of these people being foreigners. Most people when talking to me kept asking me what I was doing, as they were honestly seeing without seeing. I did even get a little help moving the largest of logs from some women, but really I was out here alone and I needed someone else in my corner. This was not a project that I was going to accomplish alone. But what I could do is see if how the work I had done would hold up in the next couple of weeks to see just what kind of effort and time commitment would be required to accomplish a project of such large proportions.