The freedom of the road has always captured the imagination, most people bound to their respective cities, corner coffee shops, and ways of life. With this in mind, Mike and I load our bags into the back of the El Camino and take the back roads to the Colorado River. What are we searching for? Freedom. The open road. We want to find out if you can still ramble the roadways of the American west without seeing too many fences and badges. Yellowstone to Arches was the route. Sister parks with sister cities. Missoula to Jackson to Moab. It seemed a more logical route to the Grand Canyon than following the choked interstate through Salt Lake’s nasty urban spread.

Why not? Hadn’t Earth First! sprouted in the wilderness of northwest Wyoming. The Thoroughfare Basin, southeast of Yellowstone is still the furthest one can travel from a road in the Lower 48. And didn’t Abbey inspire a generation, dispatching from the pre-pavement, slick-rock back of beyond. We were, after all, on our way to the Grandest Canyon left.

We smoked out of Missoula in the rain. Our Lowbagger buddy Hyside Danny was parking cars for the Griz game. Some guy had parked in the whole lot. We couldn’t do much more for Hyside than give him a Pabst tallboy from the cooler. Leaving town was bittersweet, but worth it all the while.

Gunning Bozeman bound, Mike wanted to catch up with Finkle, a high-profile writer friend of his. We both wanted to harass Phil Knight, an old EF!er, and like many old EF!ers, now a mainstay in the non-profit world. But as the Stones say, you can’t always get what you want, and we missed both of them.

We settle down for the night with Howie and Marilyn south of Livingston. I also call Marilyn mom. Mike and Howie have been buddies for decades, and are somehow tied for life due to an organization called Earth First! they founded in the early ‘80s. When Mike and Howie get together they still can’t agree on what caused the Earth First! tailspin, or tipping point for that matter. The two are still friends, though a silent schism remains. Some things are better not to be pressed too hard. 

Yellowstone is snowy, and the Park Ranger at the Gardiner entrance tells me that snow tires and chains will be required on the passes. “Ma’am, these tires are top of the line,” I say, knowing full well Mike probably has a bald pair of street tires on the Camino. He confirms my suspicions inside of the park. We roll past the geysers that mark the world’s first National Park. We pass part of the last remaining wild herd of bison. We continue on through the sweeping openness, and through the thick patches of forest recovering from the ’88 fire. It’s October and tourists are in Oahu. The park is quiet. When the snow lets up enough to let the Tetons peak through, I know I’m almost back to Jackson, my hometown, and the longest place Mike ever called home.

Driving into town on Cache Street we pass the Bridger-Teton National Forest Headquarters, where I met Mike in the mid-eighties. Back then the Freddies wanted to drill for oil in grizzly country around Yellowstone. People were pretty pissed, including Mike. He built a prop oil derrick, as I remember -- it was large; but I was fairly small, six at the time. The image that stands out the most is Mike dropping the thing in the middle of the parking lot from the back of a pickup truck, and expressing his general frustration with the project. As we rolled past the building in the Camino Mike said, “I remember that place being bigger.” I thought the same thing, but we’d both seen a lot since that day.

Jackson, on the other hand, has grown into a circus-freak cluster of facades, stretching south and littering the “Y”. The old Wyoming Woolens on the town square has been replaced by a Gap. The old-time soda fountain, Jackson Drug, has fallen to a dealer of Persian rugs, and is now known as Jackson Rug. Even the oil-soaked floors of my dad’s small-engine repair shop have been converted to support the $500 soles of high-end home décor shoppers and art gallery goers. My dad, Ralph Mahan, owned it when it was Ceece’s Small Engines. Ceece owned the shop in the ‘70s and my dad worked for him. Then Ceece had a heart attack fighting the infamous Wort Hotel fire. My dad took over the shop. And if anyone ever called him Ceece when they came into the shop he never seemed to mind.

I think about all this as we park on Jackson’s town square. I try to find my favorite tree from when  I was a kid. It’s been cut down and replaced with a flagpole. We eat a Billy Burger. It’s good. Some things you just can’t screw up.

It wouldn’t have been right to pass through Jackson without stopping at the Simpson House, a Lowbagger haunt of the ages. I’m skeptical that the Simpson House has remained unchanged, since the rest of town has fallen to yuppie convention. But Mike, a graduate of the Simpson House Scene of the Seventies, insists we must visit the Lowbagger refuge. We cold-call with a knock on the door, and are pleased to find the usual Jackson riff-raff waiting on the couch for snowflakes to start falling from the sky in some location besides Mormon Country. Mike inspects the house like an absentee land lord back from Borneo. I stay in the front room, doing my best not to seem too conspicuous. Occasionally I hear an outburst from some secret corner of the house.  “Ah, I like the addition of the bunkbeds!” In the end, he discovers a piece of fossilized rock that still stands prominently in the front room. Mike had screwed it into the wall some thirty years ago, the fossil itself now a modern archeological find.

At that moment in time, with October clouds hanging low on the Tetons, it seemed that snow was indeed close. And the Colorado still very far away. Southbound and down. Loaded up and trucking. Good-bye to the Snake. Hello Hoback Country. A quick stop at the Camp Creek Inn, Howie’s old haunt. “We’re on our way to the Grand Canyon, but used to live here,” we tell them, and are met with the instant camaraderie of old-time Teton-folk. A round and we drive on. The Grayback Ridge Roadless Area rises up to the southwest.

Around the same time I met Mike, Howie was doing six months in the Sublette County jail for pulling a proposed Chevron oil road’s survey stakes out of National Forest land in the Grayback. A lot of folks thought it was a pretty stiff sentence for opposing an unjust policy of plundering roadless land for marginal economic gain. But the road surveyor who caught him tried to kill him with a hatchet for what amounted to a misdemeanor, so I guess it could have been worse. It was an intense time in the northern Rockies. Another wave of land wars. Back then we pushed for wolves in Yellowstone, and for remaining roadless areas to remain untouched. At the time those positions were considered radical, even crazy. Today they’re mainstay. In that sense, I guess it’s all been worth it. Driving the Hoback Road south toward Pinedale reminds me of runs my mom and I used to make over the sagebrush highlands to see old Howie in the slammer.

It’s up on over the divide, now, into the Green River’s headwaters, and the Oil Patch of southwest Wyoming. The landscape is dark by now, and my wingman snores, eminating stale Pabst and cigarettes. The road runs straight. I do my best to dodge the Jackelope, only females out tonight – no sign of antlers. Occasionally black is broken by the glow of an oil derrick. We lay out somewhere near Green River, Wyoming, dusty cowboys in the sagebrush.

The next morning we shoot past the Flaming Gorge, and rocket up an arid plateau. The El Camino purrs like a tiger on acid staring at Vishnu Schist exposed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. You see, Vishnu Schist is some of the oldest rock exposed on the planet at 1.7 to 2 billion years old. It’s the roots of an ancient mountain range once as tall as today’s Rockies. I couldn’t wait to see it. But for the time Mike and I were on an 8,000-foot, modern-day Rocky Mountain plateau with mile-long groves of aspen trees; white trunks solid, leaves quaking in full golden glory. We were visitors in Indian Country, Uintah and Ouray, and it still didn’t feel like we were in Utah, a good thing.

Dropping into Highway 6 we encounter a town named Friend and suddenly it’s apparent that we are indeed in Utah. On to Price, another Green River, and finally we cut south with Highway 191 and roll into Moab late in the afternoon. We detour for a quick drive up the muddy Colorado, our first view of the river, and then zip into town. While Moab has grown over the past decade, it has yet to mushroom with the same grotesque lavishness that swallows Jackson.

Kicking around, we run into a couple other guys who will be joining us in the Canyon: Dirty Dayton, former wilderness ranger and bona fide Lowbagger, and the kilt-wearing Colonel Abe, a Missoula legend. Dayton is in town on business. A lady friend from Estes Park has agreed to meet up with him. We go for drinks. The kid who waits on us at the Rio spends most of the night watching, and cheering for, pro wrestling on the television. Always prepared, the Colonel pulls out his personal remote and turns off the television. I wander off to see just how cold the beer is at the famed Woody’s Tavern. I sit in a barber’s chair and watch the tail-end of a Monday Night football game. A rowdy crew of young locals is drunk and playing pool. Good to see. I spend the rest of the evening moseying around in a dark, creek-side city park.

I met Abbey once at the ’88 EF! Rendezvous on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Howie was always good about getting me a little face time with the greats. As I remember we didn’t have much to talk about. He wore a big white hat and the signature beard. Years later I would pay my respects at his graveside, alone at sunset, deep in the open desert. Abbey has passed, but his legacy lives on. During a long stretch of road toward Bluff I think of a couple questions I would have asked him back in ‘88. Maybe something like, why did the Mormons get southern Utah?

Roselle and I blaze on toward Bluff and Navajo Country. Two rocks perched on spires pull me into a nearby café for coffee. Hoodoo voodoo. The Camino drops down across the San Juan River, through Monument Valley and into Arizona. Storm clouds lay out a light veil of rain. I push the accelerator and tune the satellite radio to Outlaw Country. On through Page, bang a left, then a right and drop into the pink walls of the Marble Canyon of the Grand. We grab a shuttle rig at the put-in and drive down to the South Rim. We grab drinks at the El Tovar. The service is terrible and it is apparent that the joint is long overdue for a lousy review. Mike spends the night in the front seat of his El Camino, a bold Lowbagger move, proving that, time-and-again, he’s the king. A bit softer, I seek shelter on the bench seat of the van I drove down from Marble Canyon.

If you’ve ever thought of spending much time anywhere near the South Rim, don’t. It’s a hell-hole maze of worthless gift shops, sloppy over-priced eateries, boring bars and over-used trails. That being said, the vista of the canyon from the South Rim is breath-taking. Lowbaggers appear out of the woodwork the next morning. Big Country comes in from Alabama, and Oko from Texas or India or something. Gia, the Montana mama finds us. Dayton and the Colonel straggle in last, taking an extra day to arrive from Moab. Dayton glows like I’ve never seen before, so we take the Bright Angel Trail down into the canyon.  

And the trail goes down, down, down. Past where the tourists stop. Past Indian Gardens. Past the Devil’s Corkscrew. And down to the place that Mike and I have been running to reach for the past five days: the bottom of the Grand Canyon, man. One of the seven natural wonders of the world. Deep and wide. Mike had toted a block of ice, wrapped in his sleeping bag and stuffed in his dry bag down the full 5,000 vertical feet and presented it as a birthday gift to Trip Organizer Wayne Fairchild. Wayne is a modern day Powell, in more ways than just the fact that they both prefer to float the Canyon without ice.

We meet up with the rest of our crew at Phantom Ranch. They’ve been pacing and drinking beer for a couple of hours, so they are happy to see us, and even help us carry our bags to the boats. The line-up includes a hardy bunch of current and former Salmon River guides, a Santa Montanican kayaker, Roselle (whose been down the Canyon before) as a trainee, and Gene and Chuck Fairchild to keep everyone in line. In all, a pleasant crew.

We row upstream that night and camp above one of the more renowned white-water sections in the country. Tomorrow Big Country will be tossed out of his boat in Horn Rapid and Mike Roselle will ace the rapids in a cataraft. But tonight we have no idea what will happen, and I go to bed early.

I can still feel myself splayed out on my Paco Pad, perched upon the metal deck of my boat frame, the constantly fluctuating river rocking the garish yellow, 18-foot craft. The Colorado can be a loud river from shore, its waves constantly lapping on the small shoals of sand that 16 people call home. The spits are communal sanctuary from the deep, green ribbon that rockets side-slope across the Colorado Plateau.

It’s ten days into it now and we’ve braved thick stretches of whitewater, late morning shadows, and the hardships and joys of Old World life. Today I find Vishnu Schist in all of its seasoned wisdom and glory. Who thought that an ancient black chunk of rock could change somebody’s life? Furthermore I was staring at the Great Unconformity. No I’m not talking about Mike Roselle. The Great Unconformity is where Tapeats Sandstone lays directly on Vishnu Schist with over a billion years of geological record missing in between. Some say an inland sea is to blame for the robbery. But who really knows. The Grand Canyon will steal your mind and show you your soul. It’s a bold statement, I know. But the Canyon is a unique stretch of water. Such immensity, day after day. The labyrinth and depth ripple the mind. One searches for true meaning, true importance with each thundering rapid.

Lava Falls makes me re-examine a few things. When our crew ran it, the flow was relatively low, 6,500 c.f.s.  to 9,000 c.f.s., but Lava was still kicking. The Colorado River drops thirteen feet in an abrupt mess of frothing waves and holes. We run right. We zag above the nasty, two-thirds river wide keeper hole. Then, square into the lateral just below a more forgiving, but formidable hole. We stick it -- and slam into the infamous V-Wave. Coming through that drop and froth, it’s on to the final maneuver: a school-bus-sized rock waits below, and next to it, a twenty-foot surging wave. The trouble is that the river wants to throw us on the rock, and we just want to run that wave straight. Team Lowbagger somehow gets it done. Fingers in D-ring, ass on bow, Mike Roselle rode the bull all the way through.

The party below Lava is as crazy and liberating as the rapid itself. We pull over with dangerously high endorphin levels. Joe pulls out a bourbon handle and feeds it to the circling sharks who are whooping, embracing hands knuckle-to-knuckle, and ripping into last night’s smoked brisket, one of Garland’s famous hunks of meat. Nobody had really been able to eat breakfast.

The night flows like honey with beers, baked ziti, and vodka passion-fruit. The crew shares a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of tequila for dessert around the campfire. At some point clothing becomes ridiculous, and naked moonlight volleyball the only option. We all awake the next morning knowing we have taken another step from society’s conventions, and are a little closer to the tribes that once thrived in this canyon. 

Rain is dumping out of the sky and has been all night when we near the take out. For some of the crew it is Day 18 in the wild. For Wave Two, it’s Day 13. The outboard engines of the Hualapai pontoon boats whine as we approach the ramp. We trade the sweet desert air for the aftertaste of engine exhaust. A commercial outfit scrambles to break down its gear and get its clients out of Diamond Creek.

The push to get up Diamond before it flashes, as in floods, is growing death-defyingly dim. Sixteen people scurry in the mud and break down nine rafts with an eighteen-day-tough intensity. Turn it up a notch. The mood is electric as we caravan up the tight wash, not sure if the next blind corner conceals a wall of water, rock, and mud rolling down the hill.

Once again we are visitors in Indian Country. Hualapai Land. People of the tall pine trees. The road out of Diamond Creek leads to Peach Springs, a canyon-top Native town. It’s a stark contrast from the canyon. A post-colonial slap. There are no peaches and no springs, just run-down cinderblock homes and hard stares. The rain has stopped drilling the earth, and the temperature has dropped to forty degrees. People are cold. Fellow guides Jimmy, Meredith, and I huddle in a muddy parking lot keeping watch on 15 river bags, shivering and waiting for the rest of our crew to climb back to the New World. Roselle found his El Camino, fired it up, and turned on Outlaw Country.

The ride to Vegas is blustery. Roselle rips apart the newspaper like it’s a plate of baby-back ribs, gleaning each section like a man would slide the flesh off a bone. I swear he licked his fingers before he said “This storm decimated southern California yesterday.” The Camino shudders in another gust of wind. Up through Kingman, and then we’re stopped at a Homeland Security checkpoint. “Any cartridges in that box?” the Homeland Security officer asks me. It’s Roselle’s ammo can, used as a man purse on the river. “No ma’am.” With that the Camino rolls over the Hoover Dam. The river we’ve ridden for days sits plugged and stagnant in Lake Mead.

The rain won’t relent. Over a pass, and down into the sprawl of Henderson. We pull off the expressway at Las Vegas Boulevard, and descend into the infamous city of sin. A wrong turn on Fremont Street puts us straight into North Las Vegas and skid row. Junkies line the streets, wandering absent-mindedly in front of the Camino. Though only hours from the canyon, we’ve come a long way.

Vegas is a Lowbagger heaven: cheap rooms, never-ending rows of cheap food, and free booze for playing a game. Bet slowly, my Lowbaggers. Roselle and I finally find the Golden Nuggget. The lobby is busy with rich people checking in. I stand in line, still wearing wet river pants and Chacos. I think I may have stood out.

Somewhere near what I call Challis Pass, Mike gets cold. He’s tired, too. And probably needs a beer. But shit, I’ve been driving all night. Mike wants the heater on. I can’t stand the heater at this point. He pushes the heat up. After ten minutes, I bring it back down. It goes on like this for awhile. Finally Mike freaks out. “Don’t touch that fucking thing.” I ask him if he could put on a jacket. “I don’t need to put a fucking jacket on in my own fucking car,” he explodes. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so defensive if his jacket hadn’t been soaked still from the rainstorm at the takeout. I’ll spare you the ensuing conversation, but Mike decides he should drive, and promptly slams into a deer. Near Salmon I convince him to hand over the wheel again, and fly us into Hamilton, Montana for breakfast at the Coffee Cup. Inside the old men are talking about pulling a shotgun on any environmental regulators who want to look at their woodstoves. For some reason the tough redneck words ring comforting. It’s good to be home.