On expeditions through the Chihuahuan, Colorado, Moab, Mohave and Sonoran Deserts

In 2008, I devised a pioneering route through the labyrinthine core of Southern Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. The park superintendent and rangers told me the terrain was so rugged and remote, and the required navigation so daunting, no backcountry permit had ever been issued for the area throughout the park’s seventy-one-year history.

In order to climb into the high country, expedition buddy Ted Greenwald and I (pictured) first had to cross the desolate Lower South Desert. We had to carry five gallons of water, as there would be none along the entire route I had planned.

Ted studies a topographic map at an overlook (altitude 7,100 feet) along our cross-country route through the mazelike core of Capitol Reef National Park.

At the end of our trailblazing traverse, Ted and I each had only one quart of water left to drink. We needed to find a way down sheer cliffs—several hundred feet high—lining this canyon, in order to get to lifesaving water.

My buddy Ted Greenwald (shown) and I take a break while climbing out of a remote canyon in the Moab Desert. Each of us was hauling a backpack weighing sixty-five pounds, including the five gallons of water we would depend on to sustain us through rugged, waterless wilderness over the following three days.

Ted Greenwald (bottom right) and I backpacked down this remote unnamed canyon from a high basin in the Colorado Desert. Based on what a ranger told me, it was highly likely no one else in recorded history had descended the canyon before us (which was partly our motivation for taking a crack at it). The going was so rough, we nicknamed the mile-long defile “Short Motherf**king Canyon.”

While crossing Death Valley, Ted Greenwald (pictured) and I stumbled upon an exploded bomb.

On expedition in the Sonoran Desert, Ted Greenwald and I climbed this rocky outcrop for the view. The remnant tracks of the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach service, which last carried passengers and US mail in 1861, clearly show as a horizontal line traversing the base of a pyramidal hill in the photo’s left middle ground.

During my first expedition in the Colorado Desert, Tony Morel (L) and I found the bullet-riddled cab of a truck miles from the nearest road and trail. The doors, seats and dash were long gone. Using my camera’s timer, we posed as sightseeing tourists leisurely motoring through the area, my right hand perched on a phantom steering wheel.

The trail-less core of Zion National Park is visited by very few backpackers due to perpendicular cliffs blocking ostensible routes into the high country. In a remote area deep in Zion’s interior, my buddy Ted Greenwald (shown) and I stood on the edge of a sheer 1,800-foot drop-off to survey Zion’s breathtaking scenery.

A long stretch of our route into Zion’s interior was virtually waterless. I recorded a GPS way point to mark the location of a pothole filled with recent snowmelt (and dead bugs) in a slot canyon we descended—a fail-safe should we run dry in our bid for the high country and need to retreat to water.

Ted and I explored the rugged canyon shown just left of center in this photo (and a basin that lay beyond) for a couple days. Unfortunately, I was sick with gastritis from taking too high of a dose of anti-inflammatory naproxen the previous day for an ailing ankle.

Ted (shown) and I navigated a narrow break in high cliffs to descend 2,000 vertical feet from the high country to parched desert below. The previous day we had explored the white domes seen on the skyline at the center of this photo.

Over millennia, flash floods have carved dramatic pour-offs in the Colorado Desert’s dry canyons. During an eleven-day backpack off-trail, Tony Morel (center) and I clawed our way down this dry waterfall—the first in a series we tackled—in the San Ysidro Mountains. We saw no sign anyone else had ever been in the canyon.

Ted Greenwald reconnoiters a way around a forty-foot-high dry waterfall (bottom-right corner of photo) in this canyon we backpacked down, part of a forty-two mile route I had devised to take us through the Colorado Desert’s Vallecito and Tierra Blanca Mountains. It rained an inch and a half the next day, spawning flash floods.

I survey the austere terrain two buddies and I crossed in the Mohave Desert. Even in powder-dry weather, the Mohave can be bitterly cold in the dead of winter. For an entire week during this trip, nighttime temperatures plunged with wind chill to below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Our single-pole Chouinard tent couldn’t withstand the nonstop high winds—to 45 mph — forcing us to sleep out in the open.

Early May, Moab Desert, Utah: Ted secures his gear outside our tent (photo left) in brutal weather. Four inches of snow fell in just a few hours. We had to clear the roof of our three-season tent every 45 minutes to keep it from collapsing. Having left the tent stakes at home to decrease backpacking weight, we anchored the tent against the 45mph wind with guy lines wrapped around large rocks.