I’m offered an opportunity to escape into an ancient landscape devoid of phones and internet for a four-day adventure. Yes! A few days of silence make me think about the world we live in compared to the world of our ancestors. I have been doing a podcast series on consciousness and religion and the “Great Awakenings” that have shaped western civilization. What better way to immerse myself in quiet and nature to consider a few ideas?
What is this thing we call “consciousness”? Is it to be used to watch endless videos on devices designed to keep our eyes glued feeding algorithms that learn to predict our thoughts? Or should it be used to grapple with mankind’s purpose, or to simply enter into the sublime present — the only moment we really have?
I tend to think that if we wish to maintain our sanity, we need to unplug, detach, and untether from the hum of modern life. To step into the world of being. We are all a part of this shared consciousness — a brief spark in the long arc of time. This connection with the land that so many authors attempt to capture might be better expressed in what is missing.
There is a pervasive anxiety that hums in our material world. It’s felt on our freeways each morning, in glass towers and sprawling subdivisions. A gnawing sense that there is not enough. Envy, greed, pride rule the world. It’s the antithesis of the meek — those who, as we are told, shall inherit the earth. Is our anxiety a result of our lost connection with the earth? With the infinite? Or with our lost track of our place in this scheme?
Down here, in the canyons carved by the Colorado River, time reveals a different order.
The Story Written in Stone
The Great Basin is best witnessed not from highways or Instagram videos but from deep river caverns, where walls of stone reveal eons of time.
In Cataract Canyon, one layer unveils the beginnings of life itself — fossils scattered in slate along the river bottom. Beside a warning sign — “DANGER” — one guide points out fossils nearly 600 million years old. The river is both cathedral and scalpel. It cuts open the belly of the earth, exposing bones of ancient seabeds, the rise and fall of inland oceans, the upheaval of tectonic forces.
Each layer tells a story: silt deposited from glaciers, compacted under pressure. After several million years of compaction, these layers fractured; some were even tilted at forty-five degree angles by the restless plates below. The Colorado River, a mere infant in a geological sense, is estimated to be 5-12 million years old. The plateau rose up due to tectonic and geological forces, slicing through the massive plateau to reveal “sleeping dragons” of stone.
Here, just 3,000 years ago, Ancestral Puebloans once planted corn, built granaries in cliff alcoves, and lived with the rhythms of the floodplain. Their traces remain: stone tools, fire pits, corn husks preserved in dry caves.
And here we drift, a group of modern pilgrims, beer in coolers, tents on rafts, our devices silenced from the outside world. The moment becomes sacred. We savored an excellent meal of chicken fajitas with an ancho sauce on poblano peppers prepared by Mike, our trip lead. On our first night, the Milky Way clearly wrapped around the cliff walls like a blanket. The nighttime sky is a spectacle we all miss out on in our well-lit cities.
But even as the land and the sky humbles us, it’s the people on the trip — the guides and their stories — that leave just as deep an impression.
Mike’s Leap of Faith
Mike is our trip leader down Cataract Canyon, He is an energetic, long-haired thirty-something with a quick smile. He’s the kind of guide who can both row a boat through Class IV rapids and cook a Dutch oven feast on the sand. He is, like so many in Moab, a transplant. And like so many, he has a story of escape.
“Tale as old as time,” he says with a laugh. “I followed a beautiful woman out west.”
Mike had been living in Richmond, Virginia, for a decade — first college, then a stable job in accounting with Ernst & Young. His girlfriend wanted to move west for school in Salt Lake. Mike, who had been dabbling in raft guiding on the East Coast, decided to take the leap. He sold his car, pared down his possessions to what barely fit in a U-Haul trailer, and headed west.
“She dropped me off in Moab in the spring,” he remembers. “It was this cold, rainy day. She set up my tent at the company property — everybody called it ‘The Swamp’ — and then she drove back to Provo. So my first night in Moab, I was in a wet tent, no car, no clue. But I was starting my wilderness first responder class the next morning. And that was it. I was in.”
From Cubicle to Canyon
Mike’s journey wasn’t just geographic — it was existential. He had worked at Ernst & Young for five-and-a-half years. He’d studied accounting, followed the track, and seemed destined for the same life as his father, who had practiced accounting for 30 years.
“I didn’t actually become a CPA,” Mike says. “But I was on the path. I took a sabbatical during COVID to study for the exam. That was supposed to be my reset.”
But the pandemic stripped away the parts of his job that gave him energy — meeting clients, collaborating with coworkers. “Suddenly it was just me, staring at spreadsheets, alone at home. I realized I was suffocating. The sabbatical was supposed to get me back on track. Instead, it showed me the track wasn’t mine at all.”
He began climbing, guiding, and doing what he loved.
“When I finally stepped away, it was like — oh, my life is right here in front of me. All I had to do was walk out the door.”
Life in the Driver’s Seat
One of the hardest conversations was with his dad.
“To his credit, he never said, ‘You’re an idiot.’ He was supportive. But I could hear the sadness in his voice. Like, okay, you’re leaving the profession that I know, that I can help you with, for something I can’t guide you in. But he said, ‘It’s your life. You gotta live it.’ And that meant a lot.”
Mike pauses, his oar dipping into the current. “Without COVID and the sabbatical, I don’t know if I ever would’ve had the guts to leave. I might still be behind that desk, wondering what life could have been.”
Moab is full of stories like Mike’s — people who traded stability for something wilder, leaner, but richer.
“For the first time,” Mike says, “I felt like I was in the driver’s seat of my own life. Before, I was just riding along. Out here, everybody’s steering their own ship. Sure, sometimes you drive off trail. But it’s your trail.”
That mindset, he believes, is contagious. “You realize that financial security isn’t everything. You don’t need the IRA, the giant nest egg. What you need is to fill your eighty laps around the sun with things that make you glow. And that’s what guiding gave me.”
River Culture
Guides form a tribe. Mike and Paul are teaching Jacob the ropes as a second-year Navtec employee, who is on his first guide trip. We all laugh around campfires joking about the day’s intensity paddling through the rapids. The guides are all different, but the common denominator is passion.
“The best part,” Mike says, “is that we’re all here because we want to be. Not because we have to, or because it’s the next position after college. But because this is what makes us come alive.”
On our trip, the eclectic mix of guides and guests proved that point. Some came for a party, but left feeling something closer to a pilgrimage. “Sometimes you think it’s just a booze cruise,” Mike chuckles, “but then it turns into this life-changing thing. Like, you don’t need drugs to blow your mind. You just need four days in Cataract Canyon.”
A Reflection in the River
At night, the stars stretch across the canyon sky. Fossils glint from the stone by day. Guides like Mike steer us not just through rapids but toward deeper questions: What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to take the wheel?
The river has a way of drawing out metaphors. Speaking about keeping treasures in experience and in heaven, Jesus told his followers to “consider the lilies of the field” — they neither toil nor spin, yet they are clothed in splendor. Out here, the lesson is clear: life doesn’t need to be endlessly scheduled, secured and adorned in material comfort to be meaningful.
Mike says it plainly: “It’s so much more valuable to fill your life with richness — experiences, relationships, places that make you glow — than to live afraid, saving for a future you’re too anxious to enjoy.”
When the rafts finally drift into calmer waters and the shuttle buses appear, the spell breaks. Phones flicker awake. The hum of anxiety, silenced only briefly, returns. But something lingers.
For me, it was the reminder that consciousness — the one gift we all share — isn’t meant to be squandered in endless distraction. It’s meant to be lived, here and now, in the great canyon of time.
For Mike, it was the reminder that you can always choose a different path. That security is not the same as serenity. And that sometimes, the best way to find your life is to leave it behind.
Feature Image and additional photos by Richard Markosian.
