BOULDER OUTDOOR SURVIVAL SCHOOL

Image Gallery PHOTOGRAPHS BRANSON REYNOLDS

Cave life in the 20th century

By David Petersen

WILDERNESS SKILLS SCHOOLS, PART IV:

The day begins gently, cautiously, the way I like it.

I awake on my back on the dusty floor of a shallow sandstone cave. Opening my eyes I see, high on the sloping back wall, the faded, crumbling remains of a pictograph—a small, crude painting made by some primitive artist who took shelter here centuries before Christopher Columbus was even so much as a gleam in his father's eye. The figure is odd, angular, Anasazi.

Anasazi —those mysterious early dwellers of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. The name is Navajo and means "the ancient ones," or "the ancient enemy," and their ghosts pervade these hoodoo canyons yet. It's the summer of 1987, but the atmosphere here is Neolithic.

Photographer Branson Reynolds and I have come to this wilderness of sandstone and sage in south-central Utah to gather photos and experiences for a story on the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, best known by its acronym, BOSS.

From southwestern Colorado we came, crossing into Utah and over the Colorado River where it bleeds into Lake Powell just above the Hite Marina. Then up and over and down and through the rough-hewn splendor of the Burr Trail.

This 71 miles of dirt road between Bullfrog and Boulder, Utah, snakes through such natural wonders as the Waterpocket Fold and Capital Reef National Monument. Its ruts and sand traps force one to drive slowly, and, driving slowly, to see. It's exactly what a road through this rare and beautiful moonscape should be. Unfortunately, the Burr Trail is soon to be straightened and paved—downgraded, as it were; converted to just another Winnebago freeway.

But for now, at least, driving the Burr is still an adventure: At a place called the Gulch, Branson and I were stranded for a cold, wet, challenging night when a flash flood beat us to the low-water bridge by only seconds.

The following morning, the floodwaters had receded sufficiently to allow us to 4X4 across the swollen creek. Then, while lugging up the far slope, the transmission in Branson's Jeep began slipping, threatening to leave us Gulched-up for a second time in less than 24 hours. This struck us as funny; the joke being: Will we survive long enough to reach survival school?

We persevered and, at tiny Boulder, rendezvoused with nine fellow students and four instructors at BOOS’s staging area just below the hilltop ruins of a 700-year-old Anasazi pueblo. (Permanent headquarters are at Rex-burg, Idaho.)