GUNNISON BLACK CANYON

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.”

—Georgia O’Keeffe

A 72-ounce steak is a hard no. I’ve been seeing the billboards for miles, and after I finally hit Amarillo, they were at every exit—a restaurant advertising a free meal, if you can devour it. What an American concept. No thanks to stopping now, anyway, since I’m at the halfway point between Houston and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, on Colorado’s Western Slope. The stretch of the Gunnison River through this 48-mile-long defile is one I have always wanted to fish. I just wasn’t sure how I could make the hike down into the abyss—2,700 feet deep at its most profound point—although I had notes on a few possible trails. The canyon looked mildly terrifying, to be honest, though this likely also meant solitude.

A drive out of Texas takes a good part of the day. By the time you hit the Panhandle, you have pretty much thought about everything one could and caught up on the latest birding podcasts. A highlight is passing through a town named after Quanah Parker, the famed Comanche warrior who fought to legalize peyote for vision quests, feeling like it could open the portal to another world within. In 1897, he sold a dried sack of it weighing 50 pounds to the Smithsonian Institute ethnologist James Mooney, who even took a few buttons to Washington, DC, to share with the Department of Agriculture. Quite an interesting day at the office, I am guessing. Eventually, it was renamed mescaline and is, to Western science, the first known psychedelic.

I left early enough so that I could witness the sunset in the southeast corner of New Mexico, which is not to be missed, since you can see for miles. Fifty-two miles northwest of Santa Fe is where you find Abiquiu and the fantastical sandstone formations of the Ghost Ranch, which Georgia O’Keeffe famously painted. Does it get any cooler than O’Keeffe? Doubtful. I’ve done my best to see any work of hers when I can, in whatever city. She had a two-year stint teaching art in West Texas, which is where she experimented with abstraction through charcoal drawings to show her innermost feelings. With her vision failing, she still was painting into her nineties, with assistants, from what she saw in her mind—“The thing that makes you want to create is still there,” O’Keeffe said. An oil painting she made in 1962, at age 77, called “Above the Clouds I” looks like pastel icebergs floating in a horizon seascape. For dreamers, to stand in front of it is unforgettable. Ghost Ranch, however, is closed by the time I pass by after 7 p.m.

When I reach the open entrance gate to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, 300 miles later, there is nowhere to pay since it’s long after midnight. I find a spot in the parking lot nearby and inflate a sleeping mat, throw it in the truck bed with the tailgate down so I can really stretch out, and use a backpack for a pillow. The stars are glistening away. Even so, I use a headlight to read Audrey Sutherland’s third book, Paddling North. She’s an inspiration. When a boss didn’t accept her leave request for a solo kayaking trip through Alaska’s Inside Passage, she gave him the bird and quit, knowing that life is meant to run full-bore.

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