I stripped down to my underwear as we drove east across the Navajo Reservation. The windows down let the 90 degree breeze in, and the sun beat down on my bare legs for hours. Shifting uncomfortably in my seat, I muttered something about swamp ass as I sipped my fourth La Croix of the drive. Air conditioning would be nice. Fall weather would be asking too much of this treeless expanse.

Headed for Georgia O’Keefe country, a place we’d never been. The eastern outskirts of the Colorado Plateau welcomed us as if we had never left home. Red rocks shot up from the cracked earth, titled yellow siltstone tower and brown capped hoodoos made a six hour drive feel like nothing at all.

We were the only ones in the wedding party not staying in a room at Ghost Ranch, the famous homesite of O’Keefe and the object of her many paintings. We found a free campsite fifteen minutes up a dirt road next to the Rio Chama- more our style anyway.

“Oh my god, this is a friendly desert!” I said to Jaden when I stepped out of the car barefoot onto smooth sand. No immediate puncture wounds from tiny cacti or goatheads.

“There’s trees!” he said, nodding at the various cypress, pinion, and juniper growing tall with straight trunks.

It was dark when we arrived. The river tumbling next to us was audible but would soon be visible as the nearly full moon rose. Not a cloud in the sky. We pulled our sleeping pad and sleeping bags out to lay under the Milky Way. Jaden saw a shooting star every time I blinked.

“What is that!” I shouted, bolting upright from sleep in what felt like the middle of the night. A siren was blaring down the canyon, not too far from us. Not any siren I had ever heard, not a police car or emergency vehicle.

“I don’t know, but it’s freaky,” Jaden said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

I took a deep breath in, testing the air for smoke. No big plume in the cloudless sky either. Suddenly the blaring noise stopped, and I timidly fell back asleep wondering if I would wake up in flames.

It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before a helicopter’s blades roared over us, with a spotlight shining in the trees all around us. Are they looking for someone? Search and rescue? Murder? Wildfire?

Sitting up again, I shielded my eyes when the spotlight moved over our camp. I watched the helicopter fly lower and lower and hover a few hundred yards from us. Blinking sleep out of my eyes trying to catch up, I squinted through the trees to try and make out what was happening.

“I think they’re rescuing someone, it looks like they’re carrying a body out,” I translated to Jaden, who put a pillow over his face. The helicopter turned around to make it’s way back out of the canyon, with a long rope dangling from the bottom. I didn’t see a body but assumed something was attached.

“Maybe it’s Flight for Life,” Jaden’s muffled words emerged from under the pillow. Uneasy, I waited for more action, but the only sound was the river gurgling by. Sleep fell upon me again, until the helicopter came back, this time circling near the spot it picked something up but quickly retreating without anything else. Finally, it seemed like that would be it for the night.

“Oh, shit!” I heard Jaden say in the wee hours of the morning light. Before opening my eyes, I felt it. Rain was falling on my cheeks and forehead. Not a light rain, not a drizzle. Heavy drops were soaking through my blanket already. Dazed and confused, Jaden was up on his feet, opening the trunk and shoving our sleeping bags into any crevice that would fit. I joined him, laughing a little at the horrible night’s sleep and groaning a bit at the waterlogged fuzzy blanket.

The rain stopped as soon as we were safely inside the truck back in our sleeping bags, of course. Sleeping any more was out of the question, so we surrendered to the coffee that was calling our names. Crawling out of the truck, I couldn’t wait to see the river. A surprising yellow color, murky and shallow with rounded rocks exposed. Delighted that I could walk around barefoot, I passed the cup of coffee to Jaden.

“Woah, Beth- look!” he was crouched down under a juniper tree pointing to a fresh poop deposited fifty feet from where we slept. The scat was unmistakeable, and next to it were kitty claw marks in the sand leading to the water. My eyes widened at the sight of a mountain lion pooping so close to our heads, then I began to giggle uncontrollably.

“This place sure is enchanting,” I said, shaking my head at the eventful few hours since we arrived into New Mexico. We sprung into action, with only a few hours until we were due at the wedding reception at Ghost Ranch. Checking the map, I found a narrow canyon we could walk after breakfast.

A bowl of yogurt with Muesli by the water and copious cold coffee fueled our adventure. The hike required driving to the end of the forest service dirt road, so we loaded up in the truck and carried on down the canyon. The one way dirt road was a feat of human engineering, the fact that it existed at all impressed me. Narrow with steep sandy cliffs toppling down to the river and blind hills that winded up the squishy rock layers.

At the top of a hill stood three people scratching their heads and a tow truck blocked the road. They were looking down the slope at an overturned car, which we assumed must have been the emergency from the night before.

“There must’ve been a survivor to call for a helicopter,” Jaden said as we waited for the tow truck to move over so we could pass.

“Yeah and they must’ve had a GPS or had an SOS button to hit, because there’s no service out here,” I nodded, watching the overturned car pass by my window, hoping everything turned out okay. Saying a silent thank you to the first responders, the pilot, the tow truck driver, all the people in our society who come to pick up the pieces.

Parking at the mouth of a canyon, we wandered up the stream bed into a silent wilderness without any sign of other humans. Old, rugged cottonwoods lined the bottom of the canyon with leaves that were turning yellow. Puddles hid among the slickrock with soupy mud that we could either squish through or stem over, with our hands and feet pressed up against the rock.

Secrets of the desert are always revealed in the sand, especially the wet sloppy saturated sand. As the red crossbedded walls rose up around us, we were funneled deeper into the narrow passageway.

“Look!” I said, stopping dead in my tracks, waiting for Jaden to catch up. A grin spread across his face when he looked down at my feet, lined up next to a series of bear paw prints walking up the canyon.

“Those look fresh,” he said, giddy with excitement. Walking slower now, we followed the bear’s steps deeper into the canyon. Little fox or coyote prints dotted the sand, all the creatures including us drawn to the puddles of water strewn along the bedrock. The canyon split into two, so we followed the bear and took the left turn.

Several skid marks where the bear slipped in the mud and splashed in a bigger pool of muddy water were visible. The canyon cliffed out soon, so we turned around to follow the right section. The bear did the same thing, splashed in another puddle and turned around to some unknown destination.

I have never seen a desert bear before. I’m used to seeing the little black bears in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the big shaggy brown bears in the San Juan Mountains. But never have I ever seen a canyon bear. It’s hard to picture them walking through this landscape, but they are quite adaptable it seems.

Grizzly bears wandered the southwest, including New Mexico, for 30,000 years. According to the Rewilding Institute, Anglo-Americans killed roughly 90% of the grizzly bears in 90% of the places they once lived in a remarkably short 50-year period between 1860 and 1910. The last grizzly in New Mexico was killed in the 1930’s.

Black bears now inhabit the Rio Chama region. Elusive little desert blazers led us up a canyon and disappeared into the mixed forest of ponderosa, oak, pinion and cypress likely before we finished eating breakfast.

The time had come leave the canyon and return to our campsite. To wash our pits and bits in the river while our outfits hung from the branch of a juniper. To get all gussied up for the wedding took about as long as water to boil in the JetBoil for mid afternoon coffee.

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