The Silence is Deafening

We spent an afternoon at Turk's Head, a huge peninsula sticking out into a gooseneck of the river. A trail leads from the river's edge through the tamarisk, which chokes the riverbank along much of the Green River. Beyond the tamarisk, a broad flat leads to the Turk's Head formation--a cap of tough, erosion-resistant White Rim formation perched atop softer Organ Rock Shale. We found more rock granaries near the base of the formation, where imprints of fingers from 2,000 years ago are still visible in the clay that holds the rock together. We clambered up into the Turk's Head rocks to a broad, flat expanse of rock that is littered with piles and piles and piles of flint chips. The amount of chert available makes this one of the largest chipping stations in the park. The immensity of the landscape here is almost overpowering. It's hard to imagine people sitting here on this arid, treeless flat, hundreds of feet above the river, chipping away to make spear points and arrowheads, but the evidence is clear.

From Turk's Head we floated a short way down to Deadhorse Canyon, then followed a trail back up across the Turk's Head peninsula to find a big boulder covered with petroglyphs. You can pick out people and a sheep, and what looks like lizards, and something that looks like a bicycle, and spirals, and other geometric shapes. We sat for a long time, thinking about the people who had made these images so long ago.

That night we camped on a sandbar in the middle of the river just beyond Horse Canyon. The wind came up as we were setting up our tents, and we scrambled for big rocks to tie to our tent lines, then buried them deep in the sand to hold us in place. Sheltered from the wind behind our canoes, we ate and hit the sack immediately. It was an awesome night, with howling wind, rain, thunder, and lightning all crashing around us as we huddled on a sandbar in the middle of the river, deep in a canyon, deep in the wilderness. But the sandbar was big enough, and the river didn't rise, and our tents stayed tied to the rocks we'd buried. There's immense satisfaction in being warm and dry inside your tent while the weather rages outside.

The next day was idyllic, with a lazy breakfast and an easy float to Jasper Canyon. We hiked up into an amphitheater of red slickrock. On one side of the amphitheater, the overhanging rock formed an alcove. We leaned back against the rocks and caught water droplets in our faces, falling from hundreds of feet above, glistening in the sunlight. That night we camped at Water Canyon, and the next morning spent hours wandering over slabs of limestone littered with marine fossils.

We camped for the last time at Spanish Bottom, below the confluence with the Colorado, and rose early on our last day to hike up to the Doll's House formation. We climbed 1,700 feet to wander amidst rock columns that did indeed look like toys for giant children. We had a fast hike back down to break camp and meet the jetboat, which would whisk us and our canoes up the Colorado to Potash Landing. It was a quick and noisy journey back to the present, but even sitting here at my desk I can still call up that sense of ageless silence that I found on the Green River.

Robin Stanton is managing editor at Canoe & Kayak.