Like many important battlefields in America, the battlefield at Culloden is only part of where the fighting and dying happened. (Antietam and Gettysburg are the exceptions.) That the core acreage is reverently preserved and evocative is an achievement of which the Scottish National Trust can be proud.
The field is still cleared of sight-limiting vegetation, as it was on April 17, 1746, although the fringes, where fighting also occurred, are taken up by 5th and 6th-growth trees, and in some places, “holiday houses.”
Red flags mark the government (Duke of Cumberland) front line, blue flags the Jacobite (Bonnie Prince Charlie) line.
You could pay 5 pounds for a tour, and it was worth it. Our guide, a woman named Charlotte, was well informed and efficient. Her first big point was this wasn’t a battle between Scotland and England.
It was a battle over two royal houses–the Hanoverians, who were on the British throne, and the Stuarts, who’d been ousted and were the “pretenders.” The Stuarts were of Scottish descent and had a large following among the clan-based people of the Highlands.
She said tour would take 45 minutes–“about the length of the battle.” It was cool and breezy, as you can tell from her listeners’ dress.
All accounts of the battle say that part of was held on a “boggy moor.” Some of that remains. The water and mud slowed a Jacobite charge, making the soldiers easy targets for musket fire and grapeshot.
The Duke of Cumberland, who had just turned 25, sealed off the battlefield, gave his troops an order “to show no quarter.” The wounded died or were killed.
Several days later he went to Inverness, rounded up some Jacobite sympathizers, and brought them to Culloden to bury the Jacobite dead. About a dozen mass graves were dug. You can still see slight humps in the ground where they are. Charlotte said they’ve never been opened for archaeological or other purposes.
In the Victorian resurgence of Scottish clan pride, an aristocrat named Duncan Forbes put stones with clan names at the head of the graves. But in truth, nobody knows the identity of their occupants. Many are Irish, French, and English, as Jacobitism had international support.
Behind the government lines was a stone cottage with a thatched roof. Like the Dunkard Church on the Antietam battlefield, it is often described as the only surviving architectural witness to the battle. But Charlotte said it had undergone several rebuilds since 1746, and at most contains only some stones from the original structure. It was occupied until 1911; the people who lived in it were the first battlefield tour guides.
The official death toll was 50 government dead and 1,500 Jacobite dead. The numbers are imprecise; in particular there were probably more 50 of the Duke’s soldiers killed.
Nevertheless, there’s no question it was a Jacobite rout, and slaughter. At the visitor center there is a wall that has a raised stone for each of the “official” dead–the government on the left, the Jacobite in the distance on the right. It’s a moving linear tribute, a bit like the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, and the Flight 93 Monument in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
There are few material artifacts from the battle, mostly musket balls and scraps of metal. There’s a robust collection of post-Culloden knickknacks. One is this etched goblet that shows Bonnie Prince Charlie dressed in drag as the maid of a Highland woman named Flora Macdonald, who helped him escape west to a Hebridean island, where he was picked up and brought back to France.
Flora Macdonald is more of a hero than the prince. Her statue stands in front of Inverness Castle, a symbol of Scottish resistance and ingenuity more than of anything that might have been achieved by the strange and failed cause of Jacobitism.
One of the reasons I chose the route I’m on was so I could visit Culloden, the most famous battlefield in Scotland.
A few miles east of Inverness, it’s the place where Jacobite rebels (most of them Scots) who’d been fighting the government of England for half a century were defeated for the last time.
The details of Jacobitism are a mind-clouding mess of monarchs named James, Frenchified pretenders, Protestants who supported Catholics and Catholics who enlisted austere Presbyterians to fight beside them, tartan-wearing clans going at each other with broadswords, and other non-intuitive alliances and hatreds.
By the time I first heard the name “Culloden” all I could deduce was that it evoked a sort of “Lost Cause” Scottish resistance. It dinged a faint bell in Scotland’s campaign for independence, which was in the air when I did my first Challenge in May 2014. (The vote, on September 18 that year, failed; Scotland remains in the United Kingdom.)
Personally, I like visiting battlefields.
In the most self-conscious strategy of father-son bonding my father ever executed, the two of us spent the spring vacations of my 7th- and 8th-grade years visiting Civil War battlefields in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. These included Richmond, Petersburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Appomattox, Antietam, and Gettysburg. I’ve visited many others since then.
In the last three years I’ve gone to Antietam, Gettysburg, Petersburg, and the Little Big Horn battlefields. In keeping with the trend of more sophisticated interpretation of historical sites, all are fairer, more interesting, and more evocative than when I walked on them 50 years ago. I’m curious to see how Culloden compares.
I will leave it to interested readers to research the full backstory of Culloden. The minimum a person should know is that it was the last stop of a feckless campaign by Prince Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart, known to friends as Charles Stuart and to pamphleteers and historians as “Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
“Prince Charles Edward Stuart” by Allan Ramsay (ca. 1745)
He was the great-great-great grandson of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, the great-great grandson of a man who was both King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England, the great-grandson of King Charles 1 of England and Scotland, and the grandson of James VII and II. This was the “House of Stuart” line of succession.
The increasingly Protestant aristocracy and parliamentary establishment forced the Catholic James VII and II from the throne in 1688–an event that became known as the “Glorious Revolution.” The king and his wife fled to France with their infant son, also named James, who became the Pretender to the throne when his father died. His son was “Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
The Latin word for James is Jacobus; the people who wanted to restore these Jameses to the English and Scottish thrones became known as “Jacobites.”
They launched invasions in 1715 and 1719, which were not successful. In August 1745 they tried again. Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland with a small number of men. (A larger ship carrying most of the weaponry had been fired upon by a Royal Navy ship on the passage from France and had to return for repairs.) They were soon joined by 2,000 Highland Scots.
On the side of the English crown was Prince William Augustus, also known as the Duke of Cumberland (by which he was commonly known). He was the younger son of the sitting king, George II, who was of the “House of Hanover” line. The son, one historian wrote, was not “softened by gentle persuasive arguments by which gentlemen, particularly those of a British constitution, must be governed.”
Inexplicably, by late September Bonnie Prince Charlie’s shoestring army had beaten an English force outside Edinburgh and captured the city. The English army got suddenly serious as Jacobite forces–which had lost fewer than 50 men–headed south into England. London was 150 miles away.
What followed was a dispute over strategy in the Jacobite leadership that was to recur several times over the next year. Charlie wanted to forge ahead; his generals favored retreat to the Highlands to recruit more soldiers and consolidate power. With 5,000 troops to the crown’s more than 16,000, the prince reluctantly agreed to the latter plan.
What followed was several months of pursuit, with the Jacobite army taking and abandoning cities (as it had with Edinburgh), capturing one fort and putting another to siege, as the government forces followed it. The Jacobites also employed guerrilla tactics, angering the English army, which fought in ranks.
By the spring of 1746 the armies were milling around Inverness, where the Jacobites had stored supplies. A full-scale battle was inevitable, and it was shaping up to occur on a boggy piece of land six miles east of Inverness near the River Nairn. It was not a great place to fight.
The Jacobite army markedly worsened its chances by launching–and then aborting–a sneak attack on the Duke of Cumberland’s army, which was camped 10 miles away and celebrating the duke’s 25th birthday with extra rations and brandy. (Military commanders were young back then, and vain.)
In three columns over uncertain routes, they marched in the darkness and rain, with a plan to attack at 2 a.m. However, they didn’t proceed at the same pace, and three miles from the duke’s encampment the commander of the lead column realized an organized surprise was impossible. He called off the attack, the Jacobite troops turned around, and were back at Culloden at dawn, wet, hungry, and unrested.
The duke’s forces attacked, engaging the Jacobites shortly before noon.
It was Prince Charlie’s first battlefield command. It showed; parts of his army were attacked from three sides. In less than an hour in the afternoon of April 16, 1746, the Battle of Culloden was over. The duke lost 50 men killed and 260 wounded. The Jacobite army had 1,500-2,000 casualties, with the exact number killed uncertain.
The Duke closed off the battlefield. The wounded Jacobite troops were left to die or helped along with bayonet thrusts. Thirty-six government deserters to the Jacobite army were hanged on the battlefield the next day.
“The Battle of Culloden” by David Morier (between 1746–1765)
The significance of Culloden was not the battle itself, but what followed it. (Perhaps that’s true of every battle.)
The Jacobite army initially fled south to a designated rendezvous point, Ruthven Barracks, which they’d recently captured from the government. It’s a striking stone complex I’ve walked past on two of my Challenge crossings. About 1,500 Jacobite troops got there; many others, however, simply disappeared into the Highlands, heading home.
The ruins of Ruthven Barracks
The Irish and French troops captured at Culloden were generally treated well and eventually “paroled” and allowed to return home. The Scottish soldiers, however, had a different fate.
They were treated as rebels, and that identity was supplemented with the belief that clansmen in particular were an uncivilized, dirty, and inferior race (and in some cases Catholic). Highanders were viewed the way Indians were in the western expansion of the United States–barely human. Many of the fleeing Scottish soldiers were executed if caught. People suspected of harboring them, including some titled aristocrats, had their houses burned and livestock driven off or sold. Some were killed.
“In the months ahead, bloodshed would become the norm as the government army continued its pursuit of Jacobite soldiers and their supporters, mounting what would later be called a counter-insurgency campaign against the largely civilian population of the Scottish Highlands,” wrote Trevor Royle in his 2016 book, “Culloden: Scotland’s Last Battle and the Forging of the British Empire.”
The Duke of Cumberland became known as “Butcher Cumberland,” a well-earned sobriquet, the rest of his life. There’s a story from years later in which he’s speaking publicly about his desire, as a royal, to become a patron of a worthy guild of working men. “How about the butchers?” someone in the crowd called out.
“After Culloden, Rebel Hunting” by John Seymour Lucas (1884)
This reign of terror by an army considered well-disciplined and respectful of the distinction between soldier and civilian brings to mind the experience of Italy when it was a battleground for the Allied and German armies.
In its slow, bloody retreat northward on the peninsula, the German army was attacked from the front by the British, Canadian, and American armies, and from the rear and flanks by partisan forces. Historian Mark Gilbert, in a book published last year called “Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy,” wrote that in the last year of World War II “approximately 200,000 Italians fought in the resistance and tens of thousands of patriots assisted in non-combatant roles.”
German fear and fury knew few bounds. Hitler at one point set a policy (incompletely enforced) that for every Wehrmacht soldier killed, 10 Italians would be executed. The 2016 “Atlas of Nazi-Fascist Massacres in Italy 1943-1945”–a project of 120 Italian and German researchers–found “5,300 such [retaliatory] episodes with a total death toll of over 22,000 civilians, mostly children, women and elderly people.”
Memory of these reprisals has lasted into this century. The memory of Culloden also lived on for more than a century, not just because of its violent aftermath but because of the political and cultural changes it brought.
The power of clan leaders was legally limited; the wearing of tartan (except in certain circumstances) became a crime; 13 Highland estates of people involved in the Jacobite rebellion were confiscated and some owners were executed; a law was passed to suppress houses of worship where “the King and the Royal Family shall not be prayed for by name.” Nearly a thousand Jacobite suffered “transportation”–forcible exile to America or the Caribbean as indentured servants.
Culloden occasioned an assault on Scottish identity that still echoes faintly.
Although today’s Scots don’t venerate Bonnie Prince Charlie, they tell a story about him that venerates Highlanders. After the battle, the prince hid in the Highlands until he was picked up by a ship on September 20, 1746 and taken back to France. During that time there was a reward of 30,000 pounds to anyone who turned him in. That’s the equivalent of 5.8 million pounds today–about $7.9 million. Nobody did.
It’s not by chance that Jamie Fraser, the hero of the “Outlander” television series is a Jacobite survivor of the battle.
The Battle of Culloden also had a long military tail. Many of the men who were leaders in the wars of British North America were young officers on the boggy moor that day. Two of the more famous were James Wolfe and Thomas Gage.
Wolfe took part in the post-Culloden pursuit of Scottish soldiers, writing later that “as few Highlanders were made prisoners as possible.”
On September 13, 1759, he was commander of British troops in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City–a place with spooky similarities to the Culloden battleground. Facing him were French forces under the command of Marquis Louis Joseph de Montcalm (whose aide was a man named Joseph Johnstone, a Jacobite veteran of Culloden who’d fled to France).
Both commanders were killed in the battle, which was the beginning of the end of French rule in North America. Wolfe’s death-by-sniper was memorialized by the painter Benjamin West, who rendered it as a Pietà.
“The Death of General Wolfe” by Benjamin West (1770)
Thomas Gage was a lieutenant colonel in the fighting in Western Pennsylvania in 1755 that marked the start of the French and Indian war. George Washington was a colonel there, and knew him.
By the eve of the American Revolution, he was the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and commander-in-chief of British forces in North America.
Gage sent troops to confiscate colonists’ weapons west of Boston, a foray that became the disastrous Battle of Lexington and Concord, with 273 British casulaties to the Americans’ 93. He was in office (although not in command) at the Pyrrhic victory of Bunker Hill, where the British suffered a thousand casualties. He wasn’t optimistic about England’s chances in an American war. By October 1775 he’d been relieved of his duties and was on the way back to England.
In 1884, a man named Benson J. Lossing published a history of the United States that told a story about Gage in siege-bound Boston that the painter Henry Bacon depicted a century later.
Even the children seemed to lose their timidity, and became bolder. They nobly exhibited it on one occasion. They were in the habit of building mounds of snow in the winter on Boston Common. These the soldiers battered down, so as to annoy the boys. This being repeated, a meeting of larger boys was held; and a deputation was sent to General Gage to remonstrate.
“We come, sir,” said the tallest boy, “to demand satisfaction.”
“What” exclaimed Gage, “have your fathers been teaching you rebellion, and sent you here to exhibit it?”
“Nobody has sent us here, sir,” said the boy, while his eyes flashed with indignation. “We have never insulted nor injured your troops; but they have trodden down our snow-hills, and broken the ice on our skating-grounds. We complained; and calling us young rebels, they told us to help ourselves if we could. We told the captain this, and he laughed at us. Yesterday our works were destroyed for the third time; and we will bear it no longer.”
Gage admired the spirit of the boys, promised them redress; and, turning to an officer, he said, “The very children here draw in a love of liberty with the air they breathe.”
“The Boston Boys and General Gage” by Henry Bacon (1875)
Bacon, a Massachusetts native, had served in the Union Army. At the Second Battle of Bull Run he sustained a crippling wound to his left arm, which was not his painting arm. He presumably knew something about things worth fighting for.
The painting, owned by The George Washington University, is famous for the variety of people depicted–and, by implication, the universality of support for the appeal for the redress of grievances. In addition to the “tallest boy,” there was a respectful girl pulling a child on a sled, an old man using an umbrella as a cane, a woman walking a dog, a maid flirting with a British soldier, a scamp climbing a lamp post, and two Black men.
Trevor Royle, in his book, says of Gage: “In the aftermath of the loss of North America, Gage was criticised for his docile behaviour and his refusal to crush the rebellion if necessary by employing overwhelming force from the very beginning. It was not as if he did not have the necessary experience . . .”
Suppression of an uprising in support of an exiled royal pretender was possible in Scotland. Suppression of an uprising in support of democracy–or the incomplete 18th Century version of it–wasn’t possible in America
Everyone on the Challenge devises a route that must be reviewed and approved by a team of omniscient hill walkers known as the “vetters.” Only then can they do the walk.
My approved route had me leaving Drumnadrochit on the Great Glen Way, a popular and well-maintained path like the Affric Kintail Way I’d come into town on.
The Great Glen Way made a westward-facing semi-circle along the shore of Loch Ness before heading northeast toward Inverness. I saw a way to avoid that semicircle by walking on what was essentially a chord across it. It would require climbing a steep single-lane road through three hamlets before heading into the hills on a farm track, and then on footpaths over a couple of hills and back to the Great Glen Way.
This was a small modification. It would cut some distance–and perhaps some time–but would alter only one-third of the day’s route. The weather was good and the elevation low; it seemed a safe (and spoiler alert: was!) change.
However, it was freelancing in the sense that if I collapsed and died my body woudn’t be where the coordinators would first come looking for it.
I got to the end of the paved road, unlatched the gate, and headed down the farm track.
The footpath I was looking for was supposed to intersect the track, but I couldn’t find it. However, I knew where I needed to go–thatta way.
I headed across the heather and grass and eventually came across a path going my way. But it didn’t last long.
Soon I was back on open ground, which it should be noted is harder to get across because it’s soft underfoot and wet in places.
I came across a single egg lying on a bed of moss, a long way from where it should be and destined never to hatch.
A bad sign?
I knew from the map that I had to go on the left (west) side of a little loch, and was happy to see it to my right as I came over a hill and got a view.
A fence went along hill. My GPS signal put my location on the wrong side of the fence from where the path was on the map, although I was starting to conclude the path, rarely used by man or animal, had been reclaimed by nature.
However, I knew where I was heading and that I’d eventually need to be on the other side of the fence. So over I went, pack first. Luckily it had only a single strand of barbed wire (on top, of course).
When I got to the top of the final hill and saw the farm buildings next to the Great Glen Way, I turned around and took a panoramic shot of the direction I’d come from.
It looks bigger and wilder than it was. Nevertheless, pathless walking is always a bracing exercise. Like al fresco dining, which turned out not be the theme of the afternoon.
The Great Glen Way went through a pretty forest of mixed hardwoods and conifers. Out of nowhere appeared this vertical, hand-painted sign advertising a restaurant. “Open all year . . . Cash or card . . . Vegan options too.”
I must have passed 10 more over the next two miles. They all said the same thing, but none said where the restaurant was.
Eventually I came to a turnoff from the Way. There were different signs. The pathway was soon paved in freshly ground wood chips.
I passed a derelict building, a few picnic tables, and stacks of newly cut rounds of tree trunk. I eventually got to a fence with a brass bell hanging from a post, and a sign instructing potential customers to ring an electric doorbell above it,
I pushed the button, heard a dog bark, smelled woodsmoke, and waited. A woman in an apron appeared.
What I really needed was to fill two water bottles because my camping destination for the night was not near a water course, which is pretty unusual in Highland Scotland. I was happy to buy a cup of coffee and a scone, however, so as not to just be asking for favors.
The woman said the restaurant wasn’t a coffee shop, but that it did sell “a light meal” that might appeal to me. This was comprised of a bowl of soup, a small salad of cucumbers and olives, a packet of oatcakes, a piece of lemon cake, and a hot drink of one’s choice.
It was more than I wanted, but I said yes. In the meantime, where could I fill my water bottles? I asked.
“We’re off the grid here,” she said. “I’ll bring you some water with the food.”
She asked me where I was from, we bantered a little, she saying “you must be sweet enough” when I told her I needed only cream, no sugar, with my coffee.
In a few minutes a man with a white beard appeared from out of the house and walked to the fence.
“This gentleman will show you where to sit.”
The man walked through a gate in the fence that wasn’t obvious and walked ahead of me down the path I’d come in.
“This weather is going to turn, so I’ll get you under cover,” he said. A minute later he asked, “Were you ever in the navy?”
“No,” I said. I may have missed something with the accent and lack of hearing aids. Or perhaps not.
He led me back to the derelict building, which looked a little better up close, and to a back porch under a plastic roof. Tibetan prayer flags, worse for wear, adorned it. He put down several folded tabloid newspapers.
“Here’s something to read if you’d like. I’ll bring you your food when the ladies are finished preparing it.”
I introduced myself and asked his name.
“It’s Howie,” he said. “That’s short for Howard.”
We talked briefly and I managed to learn the woman was his wife, her name was Sandra, and that they were in their seventies. I figured I’d get a second chance when he came back.
To my surprise I didn’t even look at the newspapers. There was no WiFi, but I had a cell phone signal and read e-mail instead. It was getting cold and I was looking forward to the coffee and soup, if nothing else.
In about 15 minutes later I saw Howie coming down the woodchip path carrying a tray.
It was an amazing spread. No plastic, everything homemade, not too much of anything (except perhaps the piece of lemon cake, which was huge), nothing missing. It reminded me of my own entertainment Standards & Practices.
There was also a half-liter bottle of water. Whatever the couple’s water source was they weren’t sharing it with customers for some reason. There’d be no filling my Nalgenes, but it was better than nothing.
As Howie plunged the French press I started to ask him questions. He graciously answered. I told him enough about myself to keep him from feeling interrogated.
He used to be a coxswain in the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a sort of coast guard.
“I spent a lot of time going out to sea at times when everyone else was coming in.” After a pause he said, “It was founded in 1824, about the time of the Texas Republic.”
“I’m curious, how do you know what year Texas was founded?” (It was 1836.)
“We send a lot of engineers to Texas to work in the oil fields, and we stay in touch.”
This was not a preposterous assertion. In the 19th and early 20th centuries Scotland produced more engineers, mathematicians, and inventors than it could employ at home. They were lured to Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to work. It’s not by chance the engineer on the Starship Enterprise was named “Scotty.”
Their al fresco restaurant “is not a hobby,” Howie said. “We have to make a living.” It’s part of a 279-acre farm, where they raise cows, pigs, and chickens. (“No sheep,” he added emphatically.)
“We’re lucky. We own our farm. Most of our neighbors are renters and subsidized by the government,” he said. “Some of the richest people around are Bolsheviks supported by the government We’re capitalists here!”
He asked if he could take a picture of me for the restaurant’s Facebook page, and of course I said yes. I asked how I could pay for the beautiful lunch.
“If you pay in gold, leave it on the table. If you pay by card, come up to the house and the lady will take care of it.” He pointed to the bill face-down on a saucer, and then withdrew.
The tariff was 20 pounds; I left 30.
As I left I took a better look at the building where I’d been sitting. It had slogans painted on it, and an orange life ring, perhaps a relic from Howie’s maritime service.
I hoisted the pack and walked away from this benign Grimms fairy tale, as interpreted by the Whole Earth Catalog.
I wandered on a few more hours to my destination, finding no place to pitch a tent until one miraculously appeared.
I put up the tent and crawled inside. It started to lightly rain. I wasn’t very hungry so I had only tomato soup, which I ate inside looking out, demi-al fresco.
I frankly don’t remember much about the second day other than it was 17 miles with 1,900 feet of ascent, had a few long climbs, and went through a fair amount of cut-over forest land.
I came into Cannich with two people I’d met earlier in the day, George and Ian, both first-timers who’d walked farther than I. We were all pretty tired by the time we got to the “caravan park” campground, where I’d reserved a pod to sleep in–marginally more comfortable than in a tent.
The next day was spent entirely on the Affric Kintail Way, a dedicated hiking trail (with a few road portions), some of it recently built. A man on an e-bike and a woman on an e-tricycle passed me at one point. The AK Way seems to have been built with such uses in mind, unlike the old footpaths in the hills.
In some places it was a gravel road, probably an old logging road.
After a lot of climbing I turned downhill. Ahead of me were two people sitting on a tree trunk lying across the path. I asked if I could sit with them.
“Sure,” said one of them, in a trimmed beard and an American accent. “We just took it down for you.”
The other was a man I’d talked to from a distance the day before as he sat beside the road eating peanut butter and crackers for lunch (as he was doing again). He was Dennis; the other was Roger.
Roger retired last year as the “senior master” at The Salisbury School, a boys prep-school in Connecticut. He’d taught there for years, starting as a math teacher and finishing as an instructor in boat-building and industrial arts. He’d done a lot of canoe camping but not much backpacking. Like a lot of people, he’d heard about the Challenge and saved it for retirement when he had the time.
As we sat and talked it began to rain, and then to hail.
That didn’t last long, and as it was letting up Dennis said, “Let’s get a group picture. We’re the Septasomethings.” We were. Roger is turning 72 on the trail, I’m 74, and Dennis turns 78 in September. (“Born the same year as Prince Charlie, I mean King Charles.”)
As the hail let up, Dennis said: “Better day for walking today than yesterday. Too hot then.” (And he was serious.)
Amazingly, Dennis is still working. He’s retired from a university job where he taught some sort of educational management, and now works 17.5 hours a week taking packages off a conveyor belt at a UPS depot. Each shift is 3.5 hours without a break, and at the end you’re told how many packages you missed.
“Just like Amazon,” he said. And then he added: “It’s like being in the gym.” I felt like asking him why he had to do it, but I didn’t. He plans to retire in September.
There commenced a long, fascinating conversation.
The discussion of his UPS job began a discussion of attention to workers’ needs and viewpoint. His job has little of that, but he knows enough history of 20th Century business to know that’s not a formula for success.
He gave a short lecture on the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, the American academic who founded “total quality management,” advised the Japanese car industry in the 1950s about the importance of sweating the details (and making the way for its ascendancy over American manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s), the ignorance of its principles, which led to the nationalization, downfall, and breakup of British Leyland in the 1980s.
If people don’t pay attention to their workers, and enlist them in finding a better way to make a better product, they will fail, he said.
In the case of British Leyland–once the maker of Triumph, Jaguar, and Rover–“workers eventually were nicking parts just because they were tired of being ignored.”
“But why did British Leyland executives not realize this?” I asked, perhaps naively.
“They were public school toffs who spent the day in their clubs and playing golf, coming down to the plant once in a while to see how things were going.” He paused: “Brilliant designs, though.” (I’m sure he is serious about that, too.)
Before you think Dennis is some sort of die-hard socialist I should note that hanging off his pack was a plastic reproduction of the Union Jack in black and white–a bit like the black-and-white starts and stripes (with the single blue stripe) one sees in MAGA World. I have no idea if this is Brit-MAGA adjacent, but it’s worth noting.
But we really didn’t talk about a lot about politics.
We talked about, camping gear, and cold weather clothing, which somehow got us to Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic adventures and heroism, which Dennis recounted in detail. I knew much of it, but he had anecdotes and observations I hadn’t heard (or at least didn’t remember).
We talked about his home, Manchester, England, and demise of mining in the region. I asked him if any of his people had been in mining. He said no. One of his grandfathers had been in Word War I “and had never really got over it. He was never able to hold a job very long.” Then he added: “My dad never really got over World War II either.”
If we’d been alone, and we’d had more time together, I would have asked him to elaborate (and I’m sure he would have). But I didn’t.
He did almost all the talking. All of it was interesting. I missed some of it because of his accent.
We eventually got to a steep pitch. Roger was ahead of us. I didn’t feel I was holding Dennis back.
“That’s the difference a few years makes,” I said, looking at Roger.
“I find it’s better to keep your head down, not look at the hill,” he said. “I also find it’s easier when you’re walking with someone.”
The current route of the Affric Kintail Way is not on the Ordnance Survey maps–Britain’s equivalent of our USGS maps–we had on our digital apps or on paper. There were a couple of confusing spots where we had to consult our references.
“I’m all analogue,” Dennis said. He pointed to his watch, which had a face and hands. Around his neck was a plastic sleeve that held his paper maps, But he wasn’t all analogue.
He had a Garmin InReach mini, which is device that allows you to determine your location anywhere through satellite GPS, and also to communicate by text to emergency rescue services. Dennis got his out to determine the grid reference where we were.
“I’m glad to use this thing,” he said. “It cost enough.”`
We came down into Drumnadrochit, looking at the lovely valley on our left.
At the base of the hill we came to–unaccountably–a redwood tree. In fact, there were two, one clearly an offspring. There was a trail marker that talked about the family whose estate now comprises this piece of public land, and a mention of the tree, but no explanation of how or why it’s there.
No matter. We all took pictures of each other, to show scale. Dennis said: “This is for my daughter. She thinks I’m too old to be doing this.”
We walked into the village. I was staying in the Loch Ness Drumnadrochit Hotel–top of the line. Roger was staying at the youth hostel, which has individual rooms (something I wasn’t aware of.) Dennis was pitching a tent at a campground. “I don’t have a lot of money, so I’m doing this on the cheap,” he said in passing.
Roger went his way, and I walked with Dennis to a roundabout, where there was a Coop where I wanted to buy a few things. We shook hands, and Dennis went on his way.
“It was a pleasure walking with you,” I said. “I hope we meet again.”
“Me too,” he said.
I never even learned his last name, but I won’t forget him.
For many of my Challenges, the event–if not the walk itself–began at Glasgow Queen Street Railway Station, which was always within a 15-minute walk of wherever I was staying to do the staging.
This year, I stayed at a place I’d always fancied, an eight-room hotel attached to the National Piping Center, Scotland’s museum of its national musical instrument, the bagpipes.
This was my first time in the hotel, although I’d visited the museum. The hotel dining room serves Scottish-themed dinners, always an adventure. I had venison stew.
After my second night there I got up early, rechecked my packing and decided what triaged-out items I was going to send on from Shiel Bridge, my starting place, and walked to Queen Street Station.
Queen Street is a clean, efficient station (I’d seen it improved over the years), and is the first chance to see one’s potential walking companions. And, inevitably, an opportunity to feel deficient.
Here is me in a window on the way there.
Here are the first two people I saw at the station.
What’s in their packs? Where do they sleep? What do they eat? Do they stay in the same clothes for two weeks? (It’s not as bad as you think, especially if you’re doing something productive. It’s the way life was until about 1500.)
The train ride to Inverness (changing in Stirling) was uneventful. In Inverness I queued for the bus to Shiel Bridge. The traveling population had shrunken to where backpacks were more signal than noise.
The two TGOC “coordinators”–organizers, advisors, hand-holders–for most of my Challenges, the selfless Sue Oxley and Ali Ogden, were both on the bus. I greeted them. Sue has retired from the job; Ali is still doing it.
Sue told me she’s taking an easy route this year, although in truth there are no true easy routes.
“It’s been a long year for me,” she said.
“And for me,” I said.
An hour and a half later we got off at Shiel Bridge and I walked a half-mile to the hotel. Some people camp the night before they go camping for two weeks. Not me. I’ll pay almost anything for a last night in bed. Plus, I had to mail two packages–2 kgs each, about 5 pounds in all–of culled items.
One of the packages was going to my hotel in Montrose, where I’d end up (God willing). The other was going to the Argyll home of my friends Deborah and Paul Richard, where I’ll go when it’s all over.
At the hotel, the clerk Glenn kindly helped me register and pay for the two packages I was mailing. Shiel Bridge has no post office, but the Royal Mail picks things up.
I also told him that I’d left my UK converter plug at the hotel in Glasgow (a bad sign), and asked if by chance they sold such items. He reached to an upper shelf and pulled down a cardboard box. “People leave a lot of stuff here,” he said, offering me a choice.
I found a duplicate of the white plug I’d bought at Apple three years ago on top of the pile (a good sign).
I walked around the end of the sea loch the hotel sits beside. It was beautiful, but like so many of Scotland’s maritime sites, a little sad. There were hardly any boats other than derelicts.
I finished packing and slept fitfully. I was the last one to sign out to begin the Challege on this place and this day the next morning. (Walkers can start over three days, and there are nearly a dozen starting points.)
I kind of wished this fuzz was walking with me. But dogs are prohibited on the Challenge–it’s lambing season, and too many routes go across pastures.
So I left alone.
On the way to the trail into the hills I passed this house. Scottish houses love chimney pots, no matter how humble they are. This one has three.
This will be the view of much of the next few days: a path treaded into a trench, surrounded by wild land.
There are views down into azure pools of icy water from peaks still melting their snow.
You meet wonderful people on the trail. This is a group from the Netherlands coming the other way. They were what you expect from Dutch folks–friendly, tall, and speaking almost unaccented English. One asked where I came from.
“Baltimore, in Maryland,” I said.
“I was just in Pennsylvania last week,” he said. “But I didn’t see any Pennsylvania Dutch.”
“They’re German,” I said. “The person who named that ethnic group missed it by a couple of countries.”
We laughed and moved on. In 10 minutes I could still see them below–a 20-footed caterpillar crawling along the treeless slope.
My route took me over this col, marked with an enormous cairn. The wind was fierce and cold, but a hundred yards down the other side it was almost calm.
When I got down into the glen and looked up the loch I saw what appeared to be a house. This is the view at maximum magnification on the iPhone.
This is something one sees in the Highlands–unbelievably remote settlements, made of stone and meant to last. I got on a long imaginary riff of what a life there might have been like.
Did the man love his wife, or was she just there to cook, and keep him clean, and have babies? Did his wife somehow find happiness in this empty place, or did she flee one summer, children in tow and midges clouding her teary face?
I hope they were happy.
There is still snow on the tops.
This is something nice to see in the late afternoon. But like the sunshine it didn’t last.
My route was 14.43 miles, but it felt like 20. On and on, I passed Challengers–singly, in a pair, four in one place–who were setting up camp. I was tempted to join them, but I had 17 miles–17, with 2,000-feet of climbing–the next day, so I had to make my destination.
Which I did, nine hours after I started. (Of course there were breaks.) It was worth the work. I was alone, with a loch to myself–not a person in sight. The places to pitch a tent were poor, but who wants perfection?
It started to rain as I set up the tent and moved inside. I had a wee dram (spilling half of it) as I boiled the water for the pasta bolognaise that would soon cook (more or less) in its plastic pouch.
As I waited I pulled out an iPod I’d loaded with music about six years ago before one of the walks. When I packed for this one I’d confirmed it still took a charge and worked, but nothing more. I put in the earplugs and turned it on.
Dave Brubeck appeared out of nowhere. Almost any music would defile this place, but not Dave Brubeck.
After dinner the drizzle turned into a real rainstorm and it suddenly got cold. The roof of the tent was pulled tight enough to give a moment-to-moment report of the storm’s intensity. There would be no going outside for teeth-brushing tonight.
Thank God I have a bomb-proof tent! Thank God I brought my winter sleeping bag! Thank God I have a urine bottle!
I sleep poorly. But that night I slept pretty well.
It has a great industrial past, much of it involving shipbuilding, now gone. (In the19th and 20th centuries, one -fifth of the world’s ships were built on the River Clyde, which runs through the city.) It has a huge and distinguished medical school (University of Glasgow, established in 1751 and with 2,800 students now). They both also have well known art schools, although the Glasgow School of Art is far better known the Maryland Institute College of Art.
The GSA (as it’s called here) is also different in that it has a singular personality who helped bring it lasting fame—Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). He was a polymath of the Art Nouveau era—a painter, a designer of furniture and interiors, and an architect.
The Willow Tea Rooms, opened in 1903, are a must-see destination in Glasgow. There’s a house that reconstructed the interior of the house where he and his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (also an artist), lived. The Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow and the V&A Museum in Dundee have reconstructed rooms and large collections of his work. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, he’s venerated for the completeness and intensity of vision of what a built space should be.
The public apotheosis of this is the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, designed and built from 1897-1909. It’s a little like the original dome building of John Hopkins Hospital—a visual symbol that was also where everything happened. (Two of the pictures below are of models.)
In 2014, the building suffered a fire accidentally caused as an art show of graduating students was being set up. As it happens, the fire happened while I was on my first walk in the Challenge.
I stayed in a hotel one block away for two days making the final preparations. I didn’t have time to tour the inside of the building, and in truth had only just learned about Mackintosh before I left. When I came back two weeks later streets were blocked off and the city was still in shock.
May 2014
When I came back the next year, this is what the building looked like.
May 2015
In 2018, as the building was near the end of a $33.5 million restoration a second fire happened that was far worse than the first. Whereas 60 percent of the contents were saved after the first, everything on the inside was destroyed in the second. (More than 6,000 tons of debris was removed over the next few years.) Worse, the building–which is on a hill–had structural damage. The downslope facade had to be stabilized and a tower taken down.
This is what it looked like a year later.
May 2019
As one would expect, there’s been a lot of haggling with insurance companies and with the company doing the original restoration. (The cause of the second fire hasn’t been determined.) The insurance settlement is now in arbitration. About $22 million has been spent since the second fire. No work to speak of has been done in eight years.
This is the way it looked in 2024 when I was last here.
May 2024
I hadn’t thought much about the Mackintosh Building in the last two years and was interested to see the progress when I got here. I was surprised to see there was none. The only thing different is that the plastic covering blew off in a storm and was replaced only on the roof.
May 2026
The Mackintosh is a “Category A Listed Building,” which means it can’t be torn down without government permission. In any case, the GSA says it still wants to restore the structure. Estimates for that are at least $140 million, and maybe twice that amount.
I walked up to the building just after nightfall my first night here. A janitor named David, who’s worked there for 24 years, was smoking a cigarette outside the Reid Building—a modern building opposite the Mackintosh in every way.
”I’ll be in the ground before that ever gets done,” he said. “It‘ll never get done. There’s nobody that’s got that kind of money.” He said he has a friend on the work crew who told him the rental of the scaffolding alone costs a million pounds a year.
Then he added: “It’s only a building.”
Notre-Dame in Paris is only a building, too. But it had God and government on its side; the Mackintosh has only art and a university.
Meanwhile, art marches on.
I went into the Reid Building the next day. The school’s museum was closed, but a show of student works from a silversmithing course was up. It was full of delicate, hand-wrought things that I suspect Charles Rennie Mackintosh would have liked.
This question is most relevant to me, of course, but I’ve gotten it from enough friends and family that it’s probably worth addressing at the outset.
The last time I walked across Scotland as part of The Great Outdoors Challenge was in 2024. I found it much harder than the previous five times and I suggestedin the last post (again, speaking mostly to myself) that I was done for good.
But here I am, back in Glasgow typing on an iPad mini, mailing padded envelopes full of camping meals to myself, and trying to figure out why my backpack weighs 10 pounds more than everyone else’s.
The principal reason I’m here is that what I’ll be doing for the next two weeks is a challenge (as the name suggests), and finishing it will be an accomplishment. At 74, my accomplishments are in the past, and I spend enough time going over them. It’s nice to have a new one, even if not in a new place or activity.
Scotland is a beautiful place with which I have some ancestral connection. (I don’t want to make too much of the latter; this isn’t a homecoming). The people here also speak a language I sort of understand, which reduces the psychic stress of traveling alone. While there will be no cell-phone service for some days, I’ll be out of touch with the rest of the world only for short periods. This is a snow-globe adventure, which is enough for me at this point.
Two years ago, one-third of the people in The Great Outdoors Challenge aged 70-74 dropped out, although the ever thoughtful and encouraging organizers of the event use the term “retired.” I’ve already retired and would prefer not to do it again, so I’ve set an easier route than my previous ones.
The digital mapping app says I’ll go189 miles; most of previous ones were more than 200. Many Challengers devise routes that let them “bag Munros”—summit hills of at least 3,000 feet, of which there are 282 in Scotland. I’m not going over a single one. My maximum elevation will be 1,738 feet, and the cumulative ascent is 18,236 feet.
When the Challenge started nearly 50 years ago, the rules allowed one night indoors each week—no more than two in the event. The days of giants! I’m sleeping inside four nights and outside in a tent nine nights, although some of the latter are in campgrounds, not “wild camping” as they say over here.
In my last Challenge the longest day was 24 miles—too long. This year the longest is 18, and there are a couple under 10. I’m also taking all of the allotted 14 days the event allows; some people will do it in 10.
If there’s any theme of this walk it’s sightseeing. I may never come back to Scotland again, so I want to see a few more tourist attractions this time than in the past. I’m going through Inverness and want to see the Inverness Castle at least. My shortest day (eight miles) is built around a visit to the Culloden Battlefield, of which you’ll hear more than enough. There are some “chambered cairns” along the route that I’d like to see. (I’ve never lived in a place that featured chambered cairns—or “standing stones” either, which I also hope to see).
I looked In particular, I want to see the ruins of Findlater Castle, near the village of Sandend on the Moray Coast. I looked down on it from a bluff on one of my early crossings, too tired, and with too little light left in the day, to explore. It looked like a monument unimaginable human effort—and the passage of time. If there’s one reason I’m back now, it’s to see it up close.
That last comment suggests, some of this year’s route isn’t new.
In fact, a lot of it goes along the Moray Coast, an east-west stretch of beach and cliff running from Inverness at the apex of the Moray Firth to Fraserburgh on the North Sea. When I first walked there in 2016 it was to see where the first rehearsals for the D-day invasion were held, and also see remnant World War II defenses. (You’ll hear more about both, I suspect.) Plus, who wouldn’t want to walk on 30 miles of beach again?
The event requires walking from the west coast to the east coast of the country. But as the maps below show, the definition of “west coast” is flexible. I’m starting in Shiel Bridge, one of the more popular of the dozen designated starting places. It’s on the water, but there is a lot of land to the west of it.
Shiel Bridge is on a “sea loch,” which is essentially a fiord (or if you’re in medicine, an invagination) of the Atlantic Ocean. There are many of these and they extend far inland. I was surprised on one of my early crossings to walk eastward for a day and camp next to what looked like a lake, only to find it had salt water and seaweed.
The first map shows my whole route. I charted it with different colors for different days, some of which are translucent and nearly impossible to see unless you blow and have spent more than two hours today trying to change the color of the route to a bold blue. I haven’t been able to. I’m having my usual battle with technology; stay tuned.
The we second map shows the Highland portion of this walk. (There isn’t a lot.) The third map shows the route from Inverness to Fraserburgh.
Screenshot
I’m carrying a lot of stuff. This has been a chronic problem. On my second crossing I walked for a day with a paving contractor named Stevie. He was taciturn and tough, but over the course of a day we became trail friends.
He was usually ahead of me, but I caught up with him at a mid-afternoon rest stop, which I left before him because I told him I was so slow and I needed to “crack on,” as they say.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, lying on the ground with his boots off. “You go’ qui’e a bi’ ki’ ”—You got quite a big kit. Which means: “You’re carrying too much stuff.”
This is most of my kit for this crossing. It doesn’t seem excessive. Two tee shirts, two pairs of underpants, two pairs of socks, two pairs of trousers (one a waterproof, as they say), one pair of long underwear, etc. I have mittens, because if you think you’ll need gloves you should bring mittens. I’m bringing a small pair of binoculars—Challengers have laughed at this indulgence—but decided at the last minute to leave the small thermos behind. That was maybe not a good idea, as a thermos was the gateway to the most memorable 30 minutes of my Challenges.
That was an interview with 91-year-old Challenger Jim Taylor about his time in the RAF in World War II, and how he had to go to the doctor to get a bigger shirt after gaining weight during training. (He’d gotten enough to eat for the first time in years.) Jim was famously taciturn, but I offered him a cup of tea from my thermos as he took a break, and he talked. This is a picture of him; you can read his story in the section of this website “Scotland 1 “Jim Taylor’s Story.’
I weighed two scarves on my kitchen scale and picked the lightest. I weighed two spoons and picked the lightest. Nevertheless, the pack weighed 35 pounds at Icelandair check-in—and that was minus the freeze-dried food I had sent to the hotel in Glasgow and the electronics I carried onto the plane because I was still using them.
The big tasks today were getting stove fuel (you can’t fly with butane canisters), a cigarette lighter, and mailing three packages of food to places I hope to reach.
Also a bottle of single malt, decanted into a Nalgene.
Tomorrow I get up early to take a 3 1/2 hour train to Inverness, and then a 1 1/2 hour bus to Shiel Bridge.
One of the many advantages of this trip is that it contains no rapids of any size–a thoughtful accommodation by the Gods of Outdoor Recreation that comes to an abrupt end 2.5 miles below the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers.
What a traveler then encounters was described by Major Powell when he and one of his men, George Bradley, climbed partway up the canyon wall on July 19, 1869. (Back then the Colorado above the Confluence was called the Grand River.)
“What a world of grandeur is spread before us!” Powell wrote. “Below is the canyon through which the Colorado runs. We can trace its course for miles, and at points catch glimpses of the river. From the northwest comes the Green in a narrow winding gorge. From the northeast comes the Grand, through a canyon that seems bottomless from where we stand.”
The party explored and took geographical measurements for a few days before moving on. They soon learned what they were in for. Powell’s entry for July 23 begins: “On starting, we come at once to difficult rapids and falls, that in many places are more abrupt than in any of the canyons through which we have passed, and we decide to name this Cataract Canyon.”
Today, it’s well marked, and you have to sign in before you enter.
Our last campsite was at Spanish Bottom, on the right bank about three miles below the Confluence. We arrived at mid-morning, and after setting up had the rest of the day to do our own exploring.
We were at one end of The Maze, the remotest part of Canyonlands National Park. It is a place of confusing beauty and danger, a dozen sites of rock art, and almost no water. A permit is required to camp there, and fewer than 2,000 people do each year. Most go for a week
Our destinations were a geological formation called the Doll House and an Indian granary near it, far above the river. The “Doll House” is a curious name, as there’s no house and the stone spires are only vaguely doll-like (kachinas being the closest in appearance). Some indigenous groups called them “the Guards” and some settlers called them “the Soldiers”–both of which are more like it.
To get there we crossed a flat, scrubby area incised with dry creek beds–an ancient sandbar that was now a permanent plateau. The canyon wall and its flying buttresses of broken rock would not be an easy climb.
The ascent took 1 hour and 45 minutes. The day was hot and we stopped a few times; we also found a shady stretch in which to have lunch. In a few places someone had set or carved the stones into steps. I’m always touched by such hard and silent service for people the laborer will never meet.
This is the view down from about half way to the top. Our camp is around the corner where the river disappears in the upper left. The ascent was 1,100 feet in all.
The views from the top were worth every bit of effort. The revelation (although any glance at a map makes it obvious) is that the cliffs we’d been paddling along weren’t hiding plains or other unspectacular features behind their tops. Instead, there were numberless other canyons and cliffs, some more spectacular than the ones we’d seen.
As the Haitian proverb says, “Beyond mountains there are mountains.”
We didn’t have time or energy to explore the dolls of the Doll House, a half-day project at least.
Instead, we walked on to the granary.
On our way we encountered patches of ground that seemed to be covered with dead and mangy plant life. It was “biological soil crust”–a community of lichens, mosses, microfungi, and blue-green algae. Also known as cyanobacteria, the algae is among Earth’s oldest organisms, and was responsible for converting the original carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere into an oxygen-rich one.
This is what a National Park Service publication says about this groundcover.
In biological soil crust, cyanobacteria are dormant when dry. When wet, they move through the soil, leaving behind sticky fibers that form an intricate web. These fibers join soil particles together, creating a thick layer of soil [that acts] like a sponge, absorbing and storing water. Over time, lichen, moss, and other organisms grow onto the soil as well . . . Some crusts can be thousands of years old!
Cyanobacteria move through soil particles, leaving behind sticky fibers (white strings shown above) that clump soil particles together. These fibers stay sticky long after the cyanobacteria have died, creating a thick, continuous crust of soil. USGS Photo
We eventually got to the granary. It’s four mud-walled compartments under a deep overhang. Three are on the left, one on the right.
These structures were well-built and undefiled, and with their mouth-like openings seemed to be speaking to us through time. It’s worth taking a minute to learn about the people who made them.
They were the the Mesa Verde Anasazi, of the Pueblo III period (AD 1150-1300), who arrived here after AD 1170. They were dry-land farmers who raised corn and squash, and occasionally cotton.
(What follows is from a 2021 publication entitled “Archaic Foragers and Ancestral Puebloans of Canyonlands National Park” by Alan R. Shroedl and Nancy J. Coulam.) https://npshistory.com/publications/cany/cap-5.pdf
Because of the marginal farm land in the park, it is hypothesized that at least some of the isolated granaries in the Maze and Island in the Sky districts are associated with fields planted in localities distant from habitation sites.
The additional storage features at these site may not reflect excess surpluses but rather a need to mitigate against potential crop shortages in the future . . . In the mid-AD 1200s, paleoenvironmental conditions for corn agriculture worsened and households increased the number of storage facilities while reducing the amount of living room space . . . Such a storage strategy would ensure having enough seed corn to replant fields after a year of losses and also to maintain an adequate food supply until the next productive farming season.
Canyonlands National Park was depopulated by AD 1300 . . . Archeologists once thought the “Great Drought” of AD 1275–1300 caused the Mesa Verde people to abandon the region, but this drought was not as severe as that of the mid-1100s . . . It now appears that these paleoclimatic factors combined with widespread violence may have been what led people to emigrate from the park and the region.
The place was without a visible gouge of graffiti, not even from centuries ago. I chose to view this as not just good behavior, but also homage to all that it took for people to live in this environment 900 years ago.
We descended as the air was finally starting to cool. It took 1 hour and 22 minutes, faster than the walk up, but still hard on tired legs. It was a good way to end the trip.
In the morning the outfitter picked us up, and lots of other people, in a jetboat and took us up the Colorado River–Powell’s “Grand”–to a paved put-in where a van waited.
One of the reasons I wanted to go on this trip was to have the chance to sleep outside under the stars.
The most memorable night skies of my life were those I saw on trips through canyons in Utah in the summers of 1981,1982, and 1983. A friend from college, Eric Johnston, was a post-doc in chemistry at the University of Utah those years. I had the good fortune to accompany him, his wife Ann Lindberg, and various friends down various rivers in rafts and kayaks.
On July 20, 1981, we were in Desolation Canyon, on the Green River many miles above where Larry and I started. I finished the journal entry for that day this way: “The night is beautiful: warm winds, no bugs, the sound of the river, thousands of stars. We are camping in a place you could not add to if you thought a long time.”
Perhaps that was the reverie of youth talking, or maybe it was the wildfire smoke blown in on two of the days of this trip that made its night skies less memorable. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t awestruck by the number of stars this time. Instead, I had a rendezvous with the few constellations most of us know–the Big Dipper, Orion, the Pleiades.
On the next-to-last night out we camped on a new-formed sandbar whose surface was three feet above the river. All through the night we could hear pieces of it collapsing into the water, like icebergs calving off a glacier.
As I lay on my back, warm in a sleeping bag, I could crane my neck and see just behind me a trapezoidal notch in the sky formed by two cliffs. As my eyes adjusted I saw Orion couchant in the notch, not yet roused from his day-long sleep.
As the night progressed and I fell in and out of sleep, I saw Orion rise from the horizontal, disappear behind one of the rock formations, reappear in the diagonal, and finally present himself upright above my feet. I looked at him as I contemplated my place in the universe, grateful he’d made himself available.
In one interlude of wakefulness I also saw three shooting stars, which have always been for me symbols of human evanescence. Whenever I see one I think of a moment in a book I read long ago called “The Gypsies.” It was written by Jan Yoors, a Belgian (and later an American) who at age 12 in 1934 ran away from home and joined a kumpania of Roma (Gypsies). He lived with them for five years.
We lay on our backs and looked up into the starry sky. I noticed a shooting star and, eager to share this with Nanosh, pointed out to him where it had passed, far away. In a hushed, husky voice he told me to never do this again; for each star in the sky is a man on earth. When a star runs away it means that a thief takes flight, and if you point a finger at a shooting star the man it represents is likely to be captured.
The night sky is not motionless, but it does seem changeless. That’s what Robert Frost is saying at the end of his poem, “On Looking Up By Chance at the Constellations.”
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last tonight.
It did last, every night. I hope to be back to watch it last some more sometime.
An unusual feature of Labyrinth Canyon is a stretch of the Green River called “Bowknot Bend.” It’s a six-mile loop that long ago would have become a dry oxbow if the river didn’t have to cut through thousand-foot cliffs in order to take a more direct route.
Larry and I got there on our third day out. We left hiking shoes out and ready, as well as trekking poles, and other things we might want on a walk. We planned to hike up the right-hand wall of the canyon to the saddle, where you can see the two sides of the loop.
In his account, John Wesley Powell describes the feature this way:
About six miles below noon camp we go around a great bend to the right, five miles in length, and come back to a point within a quarter of a mile of where we started. Then we sweep around another great bend to the left, making a circuit of nine miles, and come back to a point within 600 yards of the beginning of the bend. In the two circuits we describe almost the figure 8. The men call it a “bowknot” of river; so we name it Bowknot Bend. The line of the figure is 14 miles in length.
The description and distances (plus or minus a mile) fit the feature we paddled around as well as the now-dry oxbow just downriver where we camped later that day. Powell’s statement that his party went around two large loops of river leads me to the conclusion that the second loop was cut off sometime after his 1869 trip, as the river no longer goes there.
In the map below, the squiggly line I’ve drawn shows where the second loop of river might have run. In any case, “Bowknot Bend” on contemporary maps denotes the bigger oxbow we paddled around, although technically it forms only half a bow.
Four other boats had pulled ashore on the right bank at the place where a trail led up a boulder-filled slope to the saddle. At least two of the boats carried people who’d been on our shuttle trip to the put-in–fit retirees, more than half of them women.
We walked up the trail, which was marked by occasional cairns. In a few places rocks had been arranged to create steps. In a few places we had to climb on all fours. There were two or three dangerous spots, but the people ahead seemed to have had no trouble, so we soldiered on.
When we got to the top the view was spectacular (and it had been pretty good on the way there).
“It’s the only place in America where you can stand and see a river flowing in two directions,” Larry said.
“Is that true?” The assertion seemed unlikely, although it occurred to me he might have read it in a book.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said sheepishly. “There are probably other places you can do it.”
We looked down on the outbound arm of the bow, where we’d be in a few hours. Three canoes passed by. They were tiny. No one looked up. On the far side of the river from them was a river bottom impenetrable with tamarisk.
On a red sandstone wall exactly where someone would stand to take pictures was a name and “9/24” scratched into the rock. We wondered what century it was from until we saw next to it an inscrutable drawing and the number “2024.” So it was from September 2024–the month before we were there. Amazing and appalling.
As we started to descend we ran into three people. One was a big man with wild Einsteinian white hair. He asked Larry as we passed, “Are you a computer programmer?”
“No,” Larry said.
“I thought you might be. We have the same shoes. I’m a programmer. Everyone in my office wears them.”
“No, not a programmer,” Larry said. “Keep guessing.” I was tempted to give him Larry’s impressive 25-word biography, but held my tongue.
Back in the canoe, we paddled around the Bend, looking for the remains of uranium mines and even an old airstrip that the guidebook said were on the right bank. We could see none of them. What we did see is what Powell saw and described.
There is an exquisite charm in our ride to-day down this beautiful canyon. It gradually grows deeper with every mile of travel; the walls are symmetrically curved and grandly arched, of a beautiful color, and reflected in the quiet waters . . .
Powell’s account says the party camped “on the south side of the great Bowknot” that night–somewhere below where we would soon pitch our tents. “As we eat supper, which is spread on the beach, we name this Labyrinth Canyon.”
Like Greek gods, Powell and his men that day gave two places the names they still bear on maps.
* * *
If you travel in silence down a Utah canyon, whether on water or foot, an ironic fact eventually reaches consciousness. While everything in sight is the product of breaking and falling, you never hear anything break or see anything fall. Silence and stillness are the canyons’ natural state.
How can that be?
The answer, of course, is geologic time. Change in this part of the world happens so slowly it’s imperceptible to the human observer. Major Powell, the geologist, never loses the sense of wonder that it’s so. Of the buttes and spires he passed he wrote: “The rain drops of unreckoned ages have cut them all from solid rock.”
But as soon as you’re convinced that nothing happens quickly you run into evidence that sometimes it does. That was the case at the place where we camped after paddling around Bowknot Bend.
We came ashore at the downriver end of a dry oxbow that, as I argued above, I think was cut off from the river sometime after the Powell expedition of 1869. We unloaded on an immense sandbar, the biggest we’d seen.
The upstream entrance to the ancient oxbow was so obscure that we hadn’t seen it, but there was no missing the downstream end. It drained a place called Horseshoe Canyon, which has a watercourse called Barrier Creek running down it. None of this registered with us; we were just glad to find dry sand.
After we’d set up the tents, chairs, and the table Larry carried a chair across the alluvial plain into the shade to read. I headed up the dry oxbow to explore. The stream bed was damp, but there was no standing water.
The sun was dropping behind a rock formation between the oxbow’s two limbs. The formation was flat-topped and had a pointed-oval shape. It was called “The Frog” according to the guidebook, which said the reference was not to an amphibian but to the soft underpart of a horse’s hoof, which is called the “frog.” The name made sense, given that we were in Horseshoe Canyon.
As I walked away from the river the creek narrowed. Newly cut walls of sandy bank were 12 feet high in places, with roots sticking out of them all the way down.
In several places, trees had eroded from the bank and fallen into the channel of the creek.
Clearly, there’d recently been a monstrous flow through these parts. I imagined what it must have looked and sounded like as rushing water and tumbling rock redesigned the stream’s course. Our campsite–if it even existed before that storm–would have been washed away, along with anybody on it.
Canyons are quiet and peaceful except when they’re tumultuous and violent. I was disturbed by my lack of situational awareness when we chose this wonderfully bare sandbar as our stopping place. Spooked, I walked back to the river on the bank, not in the stream bed, climbing through tangles of matted vegetation.
The darkening sky was still cloudless and there was no rain in the forecast. I didn’t suggest to Larry that we move the tents to the inland edge of the sandbar, from which we could scramble to higher ground if we heard a riverine freight train in the middle of the night.
Sitting around the fire, I hoped for fair weather for us tomorrow, and fair weather for everyplace up Horseshoe Canyon that night.
* * *
The canyons may appear empty, but traces of man are all around if you know how to look, and where. By and large we lacked that talent and knowledge.
We stopped at a couple of spots to look for an abandoned ranch building, a cliff dwelling, an Anasazi granary mentioned on the map. We encountered a lone woman on an oar raft and asked the way to Indian ruins in Jasper Canyon. “You’re past it. It’s back there,” she said, pointing upriver.
If we’d looked harder and gone farther from the river we might have found some of these sites. The most unusual one, however, I didn’t learn about until after the trip.
The Great Gallery of rock art was about 13.5 miles up from the mouth of Horseshoe Canyon, where we camped. That’s a long hike, and not doable roundtrip in one day. Going there would have required a radical restructuring of the trip.
The Great Gallery is 200 feet long and 15 feet high, and has more than 20 anthropomorphic figures painted on a rock face. (That makes it a “pictograph”; a “petroglyph” is incised into rock). It’s been dated to A.D. 400-1100. An antelope-skin bag containing tools for making arrowheads (chert blanks, antler flaking tool, sanding stone), as well as an emergency ration of marsh-elder seeds, eroded out of the sand in 2005. It was dated to A.D. 770-970.
By Surfsupusa at English Wikipedia
It would have been nice to see some Indian rock art. However, we did see one of Labyrinty Canyon’s better-known pieces of graffiti–the pictographic work of Denis Julien, a French Canadian fur trader from 1836.
Eight tags by Julien are known, although the authenticity of two is suspect. Many aren’t easy to find and one wasn’t noticed until 1931, almost a century after it was made. We’d missed one of Julien’s offerings the previous day, and were determined to find the next one. It turned out that wasn’t hard.
We knew we were close when we saw a canoe pulled up on a mudflat near piles of flow-deposited debris. As we landed two people appeared who’d just come down from the inscription. They gave us directions, which were not terribly clear but that we figured would get us close. The most useful tip was to look for a “plaque,” which turned out to be a sign on a post telling visitors the graffiti was on the National Registry of Historic Places and that adding to it was a federal crime.
We found it above a dry creek and climbed up to get a good look.
The main features are “D. Julien 1836 3 mai”–the capital “J” in an old orthography that makes it look like an “I.” Next to it are drawings of a boat with a mast (and possibly a diaphanous sail), and a sun-like image that might also be the body of a winged creature. There’s evidence of a few other bits of graffiti that someone had taken off with fair success.
This inscription was apparently first seen by a steamboat operator in 1893, with a photograph of it published in Outing Magazine in 1905. There’s another that reads “1836 D. Julien” in lower Cataract Canyon, which is now covered by the waters of Lake Powell.
What’s most surprising about the inscription we saw was that it was made before the one we’d missed the day before, which is dated “16 mai 1836.” That means Julien was traveling upstream on the Green River. The canyon both creates and channels wind; the idea there was enough to sail by is remarkable.
A surprising amount is known about Julien. He was born about 1772. His wife was an Indian who went by the name Catherine. The records of a cathedral in Missouri note the baptism of children in 1793, 1798, and 1801. In 1808, Meriwether Lewis, governor of the Louisiana Territory, described him as “an old and much respicted trader among the Iaways.”
In the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1996, historian James H. Knipmeyer wrote: “His name appears in the ledgers of St. Louis fur baron Pierre Chouteau in 1803 and 1805, the latter instance to trade with the Indians in present-day Iowa. From 1805 until 1819 he owned property south of Fort Madison. Mention of his trade with the ‘Ioways’ was also made in records for 1807, 1808, and 1810. His name is listed as a witness to the Iowa Treaty of 1815.”
He owned property in Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi River (in present-day Wisconsin) in 1821. In 1827 he was in a party that recovered cached furs on the land of the Ute Indians in western Colorado or eastern Utah. Where and when he died is lost to history.
What’s certain is that Denis Julien got around and left his marks. Today, they unwittingly raise the question: “When does an act of desecration become an artifact?” One answer is: “When it’s 188 years old.”
Elsewhere on the trip we passed tags from the 1940s that the map and guidebook found worthy of interpretation, but that I’d file under vandalism.
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