On previous trips to canyon country, hiking the mesa was something to be avoided. It can be a dry, hot trudge through sandy, slightly hilly terrain. However, if you have spent a bunch of days down in the canyons, enough anyway to forget what it is like when you climb out, it can also be a little magical. Magical in the way that all of a sudden you are looking down into another magnificent, mysterious gap in the ground. Another drainage that turns from a few rain drops running down a slope into a dramatic, narrow, sinuous pathway to salvation.
We hiked across the mesa with the intention of parking ourselves roughly at the top of small canyon called Cowboy Canyon for two nights. We would be able to do a great day hike with some technical drops and squeezing through narrows. We were to anticipate swims. Upon locating our sought after camp site on top of the canyon we set up camp and hunkered down for the wind. It had been windy all day, it was going to be windy all night, and for the next night. The kind of wind where anything with any kind of surface area would soon become a stringless flight lifted into the air. Hopefully it would settle down before it was lost to the depths of the canyon.
That evening we practiced repelling to prepare for the next days hikes.
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