Etched In Stone – Hole in the Rock

Last time we talked, I was standing on the edge of the Hole in the Rock looking down towards Lake Powell.
I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I saying to my too kind and loving wife, “Mmm, hmmm, $&%# grhaahhh.”
She said, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
Roughly translated what I said was, “Holy cow! That is insane. Wow!”
As I was looking down this rough crevice remembering all the Hole in the Rock stories, I had been told, I was speechless.
I know most of you can’t believe I was speechless, but this place is a place of miracles.
Long before I became the refined well-read gentleman you see before you, I was educated as a mining engineer and even worked in a few mines in my youth, so I do know a little about dynamite and moving rock around.
My engineer brain was scurrying about trying to imagine drilling with hand tools, being lowered over the edge of the cliff using a rope and getting pulled back before the blast went off.
I crawled down into the crevice and found drill marks, remnants of a blast that created a twelve-inch step down.
I could almost feel the determination of Ol’ Ben Perkins sweating and pounding away with his hand drill making vertical holes every few inches and loading them with powder and yelling, “Fire in the hole.”
He would hold his drill bar with his left hand and his sledgehammer with his right. He carefully placed the bar and raised the sledge over his head, coming down precisely, and consistently.
After each hit, he would turn the bar. The muscles of an experienced miner wielding steel to overcome the hard rock, undaunted by the monumental task in front of him.
He must have repeated that sequence thousands of times to create a road that eventually dropped 1200 feet to the Colorado River.
They blasted the high spots and filled the low spots in the crevice and in some places drilled holes and put oak spikes in them and literally made a road that was floating in the air.
I was really beginning to like Ol’ Ben. I decided that he was the kind of person that could inspire future generations.
The determination of those trekkers reminded me of a quote, “Believers and doers with the courage to do noble deeds, to champion big ideas, and to make the impossible possible are still sorely needed.
“But to really make a difference in the world, we have to live it, be all in, and be fully vested in the cause, come what may.”
These trekkers were all that and more. There are always different degrees of buy-in when a generation is asked to do the impossible.
When the greatest generation went to the moon, when Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile; what seemed impossible…wasn’t.
Some do it for adventure and challenge, some have deeply religious reasons for going. I was here looking down the Hole in the Rock because I made a promise to my too kind and loving wife that someday we would go see the handy work of her forefathers.
They crossed the Escalante Desert heading southeast bound on the south by fifty miles of the Kaiparowits Plateau that rises nearly 4000 feet from Lake Powell.
I imagine they danced a jig at Dance Hall Rock, drank at 50-Mile Spring, risked life and limb going down the Hole in the Rock and landed at the Colorado River to start the hard part of their journey.
What lay in front of them was Cottonwood Wash, Clay Hill (where a desperate traveler scraped in the rock “Make Peace with God”).
They stumbled about, not being able to see the forest for the trees on Cedar Mesa.
The spent Christmas day on Salvation Knoll.
Comb Ridge stood like the Great Wall of China, one of the last barriers. But they didn’t give up in despair, they headed south to meet the San Juan River.
The last perilous part was clawing their way up San Juan Hill using 14 horses to pull a single wagon. Perhaps, thankful for the journey’s end, a traveler scraped in the rock near the top of San Juan Hill, “We Thank Thee O God”.
A real twist of irony is that the initial scouting party had gone from Panguitch and crossed at Lee’s Ferry. But on their return home, they went north through Moab and followed portions of the Old Spanish Trail.
But the next group of 250 pioneers were sent on a shorter “easier way”. Something must have been lost in the translation because it was shorter but easy was never used to describe the Hole in the Rock Trek.
There are going to be challenges in our future. I don’t know what the next generation will be asked to do. But these words ring true now and they rang true in 1879.
“I believe in my capacity and in your capacity to do good, to make some contribution to the society of which we are a part, to grow and develop, and to do things that we many now think are impossible.” Go do the impossible.