Just when I thought the monsoon thunderstorm was finally ending, a surge of foamy water rushed down the road in front of me, skating across the surface of the already-flooded streets of Loa, Utah. From the safety of the town park pavilion, I watched as this fresh intruder filled the avenue to capacity and began pouring over the curbs. The water pressed greedily up against the back doors of several buildings, searching for a way inside. Even the closest trashcans were caught up in the excitement and began to drift with the current, amiably enjoying their brief transformation into seaworthy vessels.
Soon enough, highway workers arrived on the scene wielding shovels and sandbags to try and divert their watery foe. But the surge was already starting to subside. The waves created by a speed bump in the middle of the road diminished in height until I deemed it was safe enough to venture out onto the highway once more.
A ridiculous amount of rainfall had poured out from the sky in the last few hours, and every ditch and gully had struggled to meet the demand. In nearby Capitol Reef National Park, flash floods were still scouring the slot canyons clean of organic life. I had planned on doing some canyoneering in Capitol Reef that afternoon, but a visit to Las Vegas had put me a day behind schedule, and inadvertently may have saved my life. If I’d been dumb enough to enter the canyons while those thunderstorms were building overhead, I would have been caught in the rising waters and bashed to pieces against the sandstone walls before I had time to even think about escaping.
After a sleepless night spent being battered by gale-force winds – a parting gift from the belligerent thunderclouds – I shook the dust from my sleeping bag, straightened my bent tent poles, and drove down from my campsite to the outlet of Cottonwood Wash. This wash was one of several that flushed water down from the colorful domes and spires of Capitol Reef after rainstorms. The national park’s twisted sandstorm formations were mostly devoid of soil, and thus were unable to absorb and release their rainfall slowly; water simply poured down their sides and rushed feverishly through gaps in the rock. A raging stream could appear and disappear within hours, leaving behind nothing but wet mud and sand.
Still, the precipitation had been so intense yesterday that a trickle of water remained, winding its way from pool to pool amid fragments of sandstone and broad stretches of freshly-deposited mud. I had hiked similar canyons before, but never the day after a flash flood swept through. In some places, the sand was saturated with water and hadn’t had time to settle, creating patches of muddy quicksand that sucked at my sandals and prompted several panicked leaps to safety.
As the walls that constrained the wash closed in, it was harder and harder to avoid stepping in the pools of reddish-brown water. Inevitably, the canyon narrowed to a tight corridor that was completely flooded, and I had no choice but to wade through if I wanted to continue upstream. A long pole would have been nice for probing the murky depths, for there was no way of knowing whether I was facing a mere puddle or a small reservoir. Silt had made the water thick as paint.
