By Tim Homan
Due to conflicts with our work schedules, we paddled at the wrong time of the year. The latte-colored Green flowed high and freighted with silt from snow-melt mountains far to the north. The fast-moving sediment ticked audibly against our paddles with every stroke. The cloudless days were hot as a firecracker in hell, especially in the side canyons, and the mosquitos were troublesome near the bottoms, where the river had risen into the lower ends of the side-canyon washes, creating warm, slack-water conditions just right for a wriggler-larvae factory. But the Green's cold current offered instant relief from both mosquitos and sweltering sun.
Each day Labyrinth Canyon grew higher, more complex, and more richly colored. Each day the sightlines to the rock rims rose to a sharper angle while the wedge of visible sky narrowed.
First three days the Green's curving brown ribbon sliced deeper and deeper into the primeval chaos that had metamorphosed-through the Earth's ancient alchemy of long heat and compaction-into today's color-coded geology, writ large and layered within Labyrinth's river-carved canyon. Each day the river cuts deeper and deeper into that chasm of time known as the Jurassic Period, which lasted from approximately 200 million to 145 million years ago (plus or minus 2 million years). And now all this ancient tumult and violence lies silent and still in the dinosaur-track cemetery to either side of your paddlecraft, the peaceful stasis of the scene a trick of perspective, an illusion compressed through the lens of a baseline not yet a week old.
Late in the afternoon of day three, after our canoe passed a dozen kayaks hauled out on river-right, we noticed a small sandbar sheltering shallow still-water between the bar and a relatively low cutbank. Finally, after 26 fast-flowing miles for the day, we had found an easy and safe landing leading to a memorable camp: a low-cliff alcove for sheltered cooking, a wide open and flat site on the rim of the first bench back from the river for the tent, and an easy scramble up boot-gripping rock to a high perch with a great view of the Green up and downstream. We immediately agreed on a layover day, so we could slow our trip down and dayhike up Twomile Canyon, its mouth only a few hundred yards downstream on river-right, first thing in the morning.
After supper, while we were sitting in the cooling breeze well above the pale brown river, a muscular and tattooed young man of medium height climbed the rock up to our sunset spot and began chatting us up. He was from the kayak camp over 300 yards upstream, and he was a reluctant participant in one of those wilderness outreach programs for troubled teens: backcountry boot camp for juvenile offenders, hoods in the woods. He had punched out his high school football coach during his senior season back home in Colorado. Now he was supposed to be spending the night alone at least a mile from camp on "a solo, soul-searching, bullshit quest sort of thing." But as we quickly discovered, his most immediate quest was to find out if we had a couple of cigarettes he could buy for a dollar. We didn't. Page had wine, and I had whiskey and some bare-bones cheap cigars, but we weren't about to let those three cats out of the bag. He quickly moved on to meet up with a couple of guys from his group.
Early the next morning, we climbed the jumbled-rock rise behind camp and quickly picked up a path leading toward the entrance of Twomile. Less than 100 yards from our tent, we spotted the fresh and well-defined parallel lines of large and unfamiliar tracks also following the path toward the canyon. We stopped and closely examined the footfalls deeply imprinted into the register of the path's soft soil. The tracks were round and four-toed with no claw or toe-nail marks, a little over 3 inches in both length and width. They were roughly the same in size and shape, showed long stride, wide straddle.
Page asked what I thought. I translated the wild script of last night's silent wandering; it was an easy call. The large, round, and perfect footprints belonged to an apex predator with retractable claws: a cat, and only one candidate has feet large enough to fit. Here, right at our toes, a mountain lion, a cougar, had recorded its passage upon the land. The loose soil was no longer just loose soil; it was soft lion-tracked soil. The path was no longer just a convenient way to Twomile Canyon; it was the route of a big and long-tailed feline, the first of its species we had ever seen, a lucky find.
Page placed our compass beside a paw print for size perspective, then took a few photos. I sketched several tracks in my small notebook. We talked through a quick process of elimination just to make sure our excitement was warranted. Black bears are rare or absent from the dry, rugged, and frequently rock-bound terrain just north of Canyonlands National Park. Besides that, bears have five-toed feet conspicuously different front to back and would leave obvious claw marks in soft soil. Nope, not a bear.
No wolves roam southern Utah, and all canids including dogs and coyotes mark their travels with tracks showing toe nails poked into loose soil. Bobcat tracks are even smaller than coyote tracks, which are the size of medium-sized dogs and far too small to match the signature heel pads and the oval-shaped toe pads at our feet. This spoor marked the nearly effortless travel of a cat, a big-footed and long-bodied cat. That narrowed the possibilities to one again. We were definitely trailing the tracks of a mountain lion, the ambush predator with legendary leaping ability and short-range speed, mythical stealth, strength, and flowing grace closing in on the kill. This same wild cat is so well adapted to its primary prey that the gap between its long-fang canines fits lock-and-key tight to either side of a deer's neck vertebrae.
Up close from our knees, we noticed slight size and shape differences in the tracks which we attributed to slight anatomical differences between the cougar's front and back feet. All of the tracks exhibited a slight concavity scalloped out in the front of the pad, and the two indentations in the heel dividing it into three shallow lobes.
We followed the obligate carnivore's backtrack for close to 100 yards to where it had stepped down onto tattle-tale soil from higher and much rockier land upslope. Page and I followed the footprints forward from where we had first noticed them. The cougar sign continued straight ahead for another 120 to 130 yards before veering to the right and up toward Twomile Canyon at a higher trajectory than we wanted to take. The lion's stride length remained evenly spaced throughout, a slow and unhurried pace, no distortion of the prints from hurry or sudden changes in direction.
Before we left the lion path, I knelt down and traced the outlines of one of the large tracks with my forefinger. A second-hand touching of its strength and stealth, its predatory prowess? Pleistocene ancestors-who live full-blooded in our genome-wanting to know more about the animal, to touch its spirit? I don't know. I touched and traced without forethought. But having slid my finger around all parts of the paw print, the simple act felt like it satisfied some unknown urge, some ancient curiosity still crouched close to the bone.
The two of us entered the lowest end of the side canyon. We didn't see anyone else or any more tracks larger than a rodent's except for a few pointy-hoofed mule deer tracks higher up Twomile. We thought we might find some water and the lion's tracks again further up, but we found neither.
The spare country of brown river and red rock had come alive. The cougar tracks had given the landscape graceful ferocity to accompany the novelty of its layer-cake geology. The seemingly empty country had filled up with a newfound wildness, become more formidable knowing a sleek and powerful predator had passed us by in the starry night and entered the canyon we were exploring. The deep shadows now hid fangs and claws that could clamp and rip at the deadly end of a spring-loaded leap. The lion made us more alert, made us search for more large round tracks, made us keep a sharp eye out for tawny movement up ahead.
