A Belvedere Over Windy Badlands

I won't apologize for my long-standing fascination with desert arroyos, especially when they develop into small canyons. Of course, readers should be warned that you should begin by hiking 'upstream', with the main branch resembling a forearm, which then subdivides into fingers, which further split into sub-fingers. At some point, you turn around and return to your starting point. It is mathematically (topologically) impossible to get lost.

Ahh, but what if you are camped on a mesa that lords over eroded badlands? Then you start walking downstream. A mistake.

Normally I feel an urge to dismantle rock cairns. What gives people the right to rob a route of its mystique and aura? But in this case, I was happy to see two cairns, at the first important junction on my first downstream walk. After all, I was out of practice.

The technique that works for me is to renounce the mindset of a tourist. Stop calling things 'beautiful' just because they are freakishly large and vertical. Instead, focus on topography and geology as active processes that occur on the time scale of a human being. Try to visualize how a certain feature was carved out. Sometimes my favorite features aren't even as tall as a person.

A vertical arroyo-bank made of agglomerate.

Once you go in with an attitude like that, Mother Nature takes a perverse pleasure in dazzling you on the upside. 

How COULD it be so vertical?

It was cool and breezy on the mesa. Down in this hellhole, there was no wind, and I started getting warm as I always do. 

On the way back, I walked right by the two rock cairns that were trying to be helpful. By now I was suspicious of this canyon system. And yet, nature is more interesting as a dark-haired femme fatale -- named Natasha -- than as a dumb blonde pin-up girl, named Betty. Claustrophobia and heat, and now getting lost, were giving the canyon-maze a vague aura of malevolence.

In fact that is one way to relate to a canyon-maze: think of it as a type of film-noir. In Wikipedia's article on film noir, they say:

The low-key lighting schemes of many classic film noirs are associated with stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning—a style known as chiaroscuro (a term adopted from Renaissance painting).^[c] The shadows of Venetian blinds or banister rods, cast upon an actor, a wall, or an entire set, are an iconic visual in noir and had already become a cliché well before the neo-noir era. Characters' faces may be partially or wholly obscured by darkness—a relative rarity in conventional Hollywood filmmaking. While black-and-white cinematography is considered by many to be one of the essential attributes of classic noir,

Well, there certainly is a lot of that in the canyon-maze at sunrise and sunset.

But let's let the imagination run. (Otherwise, why do this? Why not just go to the gym and work out on the Stair-master?) There is something about a canyon-maze that is lewd and feminine. Nature, here in this canyon-maze, wasn't just a femme fatale in a film-noir; she was a succubus, a woman who has had sexual intercourse with the Devil.