I wanted the next blog post to be Bozeman Part II. I wanted to make an entry that would be a brighter, more optimistic foil to that dissertation on how miserable things were before I got to Bozeman.

But then today happened. I have to talk about today. I can’t not talk about today. Today I went on my first adventure of this trip, and holy hell, what an adventure it was.

Canyons

I have a deep love for canyons.

One of my favorite places in Colorado is Phantom Canyon. As far as I can tell, no one can agree on why it’s called that. The story that my mom told me when I was kid, and the one that makes the most amount of sense to me, is that the rock formations there look eerily like faces. Driving through, you can’t help but feel as though the rocks are watching you, as though they are phantoms trapped in that canyon, ready to strike at any time upon any living, breathing human who passes through.

Related: horror is my favorite movie genre.

In December 2020, I was in between semesters of school, and I realized that I didn’t have any obligations. I could just get up and explore some part of the country and no one would complain. I have a deep love of road trips, so the next day, I loaded up my car and prepared to go. The problem is, I was sitting in my car with all my luggage, and I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I drove around and eventually found myself at the Grand Canyon.

I’m clearly drawn to canyons. I love the rock formations and all the living things, from the tiniest ladybug to the tallest pine tree. When I drive through a canyon, I see each rock formation and wonder what natural processes formed it. I get to see each tree, each insect, each flower, and I know that life is thriving in this canyon despite the fact that it is a region born from a river tearing and destroying everything in its path.

Then, there’s the moment when I reach the top and I can finally turn around and see the whole canyon for what it is. I’m no longer seeing a rock and a tree and a flower; I’m seeing it all. In the most literal sense, I am seeing the forest for the trees. It’s no longer the story of each individual creature in the canyon, it’s the story of the canyon itself, stretched over eons.

At least, that’s what I see.

Bilbo Baggins

“If you’re referring to the incident with the Dragon, I was barely involved. All I did was give your uncle a little nudge out of the door.”

I resonate a lot with Bilbo Baggins. I’m someone who will be perfectly content to sit at home and to stick to my own business. If you want to take me on an adventure, I’ll initially resist, but after enough pestering, I’ll gladly come along. I have a friend from college (an engineering school, I should note), who says that I have an “activation energy,” an energy that’s needed to get a chemical reaction going.

Over the past couple of years though, I’ve started to have less and less of an activation energy. I think the Grand Canyon story above is evidence enough of that. Eventually it just diminished to the point that I was willing to go on my own RV adventure around America.

Naturally, the first place I wanted to visit would be a canyon.

Boiling a Frog

Hells Canyon came highly recommended to me by a friend who used to live in Lewiston, Idaho. As I am making my way west from Montana, it seemed like a natural stop. So today, as I was grabbing a quick lunch in Coeur d’Alene, I punched “Hells Canyon” into Google Maps and got directions.

I traveled north through flat farmland and eventually found myself on roads that wound among trees. I love roads like that. Turning around a corner and seeing a new vista makes something in my soul sing.

I continued on this path, and eventually, the paved road gave way to gravel, a positive sign. Eventually I did just figure I was in a canyon. The problem I was having is that it was covered in trees. All I could see was trees. I love me a good tree, but I also love me a good rock, and the trees were hogging the spotlight.

Eventually, I came to a fork. I tried to turn to Google, but I didn’t have any cell signal, so it was useless. This made me slightly uncomfortable. If I were to get lost, I’d have no guidance out. I shrugged it off and chose the left path because it went up in elevation, so I figured it would give me some good views.

I started to notice something, though. The roads were narrowing. The trees began to close in on the path, coming dangerously close to my truck. I grazed some soft leaves, and I wasn’t worried. Then I grazed some twigs, and realized that they were probably scraping my car, but I figured that it probably wasn’t a big deal. “They’re just twigs,” I thought. “If they leave a mark, it’ll be small. Nothing to get too worked up about.”

Slowly, a realization started to dawn on me. The roads had become so narrow that I couldn’t turn around even if I wanted to. There was a rock wall on one side of me, and a sheer drop on the other. If I wanted to go back, I’d have to put my truck in reverse, and probably stick that way for a few miles.

“I’ll just keep moving forward, this is surely as bad as it gets.”

It got worse. I kept coming across junctions where I needed to make a decision about which way to turn. By this point, I was getting ready to leave this place behind me, so I always chose roads that went west towards the highway. This didn’t help, because those roads bent and twisted and went every which way and inevitably went anywhere but west. I was officially lost.

Will-o’-the-Wisp

I was starting to think that I’d never leave, that I was caught in some kind of endless maze, when suddenly I had a beacon of hope: my phone had a signal! It was weak to be sure, but it was there. I stopped, pulled up Google Maps, and begged it for directions back to my RV. At long last, I knew how I was going to get out of there.

I followed Google’s instructions, and at first, it seemed to work. I was finally making progress west. All was well, until I turned a bend, and I saw a fork in the road. Google did not say that there was a fork here. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and figured that the left side, which looked more overgrown with plant life, must be some kind of service road that Google didn’t even bother to log. So I chose the right path.

I followed that road for about a mile, when I came across something that shook me: a dead end. Google said that this was a through path. I had to go back. Thankfully, unlike most others in this area, this road was just wide enough for me to turn around. I mean, it was a 20 point turn, but I did get it done.

This whole misadventure was a series of bad choices, but all of them were small. This is when I made my first major bad decision. I was back at the fork where I’d chosen to go right. I figured that the road I had been on was actually the maintenance one, and that the left path was the real one. So, I turned and went down that one instead.

This path was the narrowest yet. While the tree branches from before had lightly brushed my car, these ones bit into it. I heard the sound of metal scraping. I muscled through it, thinking, “I need to get out of here right now. The scrapes will be a problem for future Nate.” But then, after about a mile, I came across a dead end.

I like horror, just not when it happens to me.

At this point, I screamed. I actually screamed in anger and frustration. There was only one way out of this, and it was to put my car in reverse. I would have to back my car up through at least a mile of road that was crowded with shrubbery.

I did it. By God, I did it. It was slow. It was agonizing. I screamed in frustration multiple times. I don’t think I’ve ever let anyone in my life see me get even half that mad. Those tree branches that had scraped my car on the way in came at me with a vengeance on my way out. “How bad will this repair bill be? Thousands of dollars?” I thought.

I eventually made it to the fork and was able to turn around with another 20 point turn. Left with no better alternatives, I turned to Google. I knew better than to trust it at this point, but I just needed some glimmer of hope that I could make it out of these woods.

Shockingly, the path it gave me was actually the correct way out. It didn’t even take that long from where I was. By the time I was back on the main road, I couldn’t even be happy. My car was scraped, a piece of my mirror had fallen off, and my throat hurt from dehydration and yelling. What I was hoping would be a two hour adventure had morphed into a four hour slog.

Plot Twist

I entered a gas station to buy some water to rehydrate myself. When I left, I immediately called a friend to tell him what happened. “It might not feel like it now, but in a year you’ll think this will be hilarious.” That helped to hear.

We talked for a bit, and once we wrapped up, I called my grandpa. “I had a bit of a mishap today,” I said. “I was traveling through Hells Canyon and I…”

“Oh, so you’ve been to Hells Canyon! I love that place! Just south of Coeur d’Alene!”

“… I have a slightly more negative opinion on it.”

It took a second for something to click in my head. “Wait, what do you mean by south? This was north.”

Silence. I was driving, and I had just hit a dead zone.

I didn’t get a chance to call him up again until I was back in my RV. “Ok,” I said when we finally reconnected, “Google told me that Hells Canyon was definitely north, but you’re telling me it’s south?”

“Yeah, I’m sure it is.”

I did a search, and I found this lovely little tidbit on the U.S. Forest Service’s site: “Hugging the borders of northeastern Oregon and western Idaho…” The place I had been in could only be described as being near the border between Idaho and Washington.

Google Maps had led me astray from the moment this little misadventure started. It didn’t so much as have the right location for Hells Canyon. I don’t even know what the place that consumed my afternoon and my sanity is called. It sure as hell ain’t Hells Canyon.

I texted that to the friend I had called earlier.

🫠