Return to Whale Rock
On our first ever visit to Southern Utah four years ago, I took this picture of the boys. It’s atop Whale Rock in Canyonlands, where this Texas girl could hardly catch her breath from the sandstone landscapes. It’s a featured image on our “wall of adventure.”
Fall break in 2025 found us back in Moab. When I asked if they wanted to visit Canyonlands or Arches and my youngest said Canyonlands, because he wanted to take this picture again.
So we did. Whale Rock was the same size, certainly to the eye. The boys were not the same size. Their feet occupied more space, their bodies moved faster up the inclines, their voices issued from larger lungs. They looked through eyes with four years more experience.
Our bodies occupied the same space but we were not the same as on our first visit.
Canyonlands is cake layers of history. The geologic kind, where a river has sliced directly through time. As far as the eye can see, there are vast, colorful, ancient strata. Like sitting amongst the tree rings.
Us being on top of Whale Rock was also a slice through time: to the years when we didn’t already live here, to a time when the hour of the day didn’t matter as much. To a time when we didn’t know what was ahead of us, only a road and a handful of campground reservations.
On both visits, we were time travelers with our eyes, looking out through the layers sliced open by the Colorado and the Green Rivers.
On our second visit, we were time travelers with our bodies, occupying the same space as the us of before. We were moving forward on the trail but also through the curtains of minutes separating the here from there.
But the most beautiful thing, even more spectacular than the view, is how we have moved along but can still return.
Inspired by events in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.
On the ancestral lands of the Ute, Paiute, Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni.