Since that walkabout, I began studying the Anasazi, ancestors to the Hopi and Tewa.  Prehistoric rock art fascinates me, and canyoneering is a world all its own (first time go with a guide or a friend with practice!).  Reading a Tony Hillerman novel about life on the Navajo Reservation is well worth a rainy day, "(Lieutenant Leephorn) noticed a symbol for Maii' — the coyote spirit — at his work of turning order into chaos and others representing the weapons that Monster Slayer and Born for Water had stolen from the Sun to wage their campaign to make the Deneh (The People — Navajo) safe from evil that had followed them up from the underworld (through the reed straw and out the Sepipu, which the entire human race cam up through!)"  (Hillerman, The Shape Shifter).  Many traditional Deneh still believe.
 
     Chuck believes, "rock climbers have their religion, too."  Chuck was a man of few words.

     Ed, always on the edge, "I am . . . (in the desert) to confront, immediately and directly, if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.  I want to . . . look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities . . . To meet God face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself.  I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the non human world."  (DS)
 
     I never got a chance to meet either of these earthy prophets — saints — mystics.  Pratt wrote very little but his essays are deep wells of sweet water.  Abbey wrote a lot.  Both had desert varnish on their skin.  Ed's op/eds, short stories, essays, and novels are enough to fill Lakes Mead or Powell, both of which he  would of loved to have seen a hole blown in their dams to create the world's most spectacular horizontal  geyser and wind blast.

     There is an archaic Hebrew / Aramaic word for desert — to speak.  When we go out there we must listen carefully, eyes very wide open.  We may hear — see — Kokopeli play his flute.  Never mind scoping out Super Crack or the Totem Pole.  Get the knack.
 
     Go in beauty (Hozro, Navajo for harmony, peace, beauty).  No desert varnish on me yet.