“It’s hard to believe that photography ever caught on.” I tell my sister, Sara as I set up an old Rolleiflex camera on the tripod’ I bought it at a yard sale at a senior citizens center earlier in the summer. It was about the only item I could afford. Between covering college and living expenses on my six-dollar an hour salary, I don’t have a lot to spare. I’m shading the image, upside down and  reversed on the frosted glass, and trying to tell Sara which direction she needs to move to get into the frame, but the process is disorienting. Behind her, Johnson’s Arch, a landmark hidden behind a large sandstone fin on the southern end of Snow Canyon, glows in luminescent red and orange as the midday sun bounces around the rubble below and back up again to accent the bottom of the arch with light where the shadows should be.

It’s late summer and we have decided to kill some time in the canyons, hoping that the high, narrow walls will be enough to provide a little shade. No such luck. The trail was hot and dry the whole way until we got to the narrows where the canyon eventually ends in a vertical climb just after the arch. The hike is fairly short and we figured we could get up here and back in an hour or so. We are traveling light except for my camera gear. I’ve rigged a strap around one leg of my tripod so I can sling it over my shoulder and still have my hands free for climbing on the rocks. What we didn’t bring was water and I’m regretting that now. There is hardly anywhere in Southern Utah you can go in September without taking water with you, even for a few minutes. While the hike is beautiful, it’s longer than I remembered, or maybe it just seems longer because I am unprepared.

We have crawled up over the rocks and through a passage on the far side of the box canyon across from the arch. From the wide ledge we are standing on, the arch is practically at eye level and doesn’t look like an arch at all. The span stands in front of another wall and without any view of the sky behind it, the arch looks more like an alcove backed by solid rock. Now that we are halfway up the canyon wall, the way down doesn’t look as easy as climbing up. As we scope out the route above us, we decide that by the time we maneuver down the crack to the bottom of the box canyon, it would actually be easier to go up. If we could make a straight shot over the sandstone fin that stands between our car and us, it would only be a mile or so back to the trailhead. We have hiked sandstone canyons like this one through Snow Canyon and all over Southern Utah and we are both pretty confident in our abilities to scale the fin. From the top it should be an easy task to survey a route back down the other side and across the short stretch of desert to the car.  In the wider part of the canyon, the terrain is fairly flat once we get off the rocks, so the chances of getting disoriented are slim.

Up is farther than we expected. Once we pass a ledge we could see from our platform across from the arch, that we assumed was the highpoint on the massive stone obstacle that dissects us from the rest of the canyon, it becomes obvious that the fin is taller than we had estimated. There is still another seventy five to one hundred feet of sandstone to scale before we reach the top, assuming that what we now think is the summit isn’t just another illusion caused by our lack of perspective. For a minute we discuss whether we should turn back and work our way down the cliff instead of trying to go over the top, but I convince Sara that we are past the point where it makes sense to backtrack.

By some small measure of luck, I was right this time - or at least partially so. After about twenty minutes we have worked our way up the rest of the wall and out of the box. The top has leveled off enough to support a few rugged plants growing through cracks in the rocks, mostly cactus and small junipers. From the top of the fin we can see the car and it looks so close now that we are encouraged. My head is pounding now – one of the first signs of dehydration - and my legs are a little less steady after expending more energy than I had expected getting up the last stretch of the wall from what we thought was the top originally. The sun has moved from directly above us a little to the west now and it will be hitting our faces the rest of the way. A thought that drains any encouragement we may have gained from our new perspective. As much as we would like to sit and rest, every minute we are out here now with no water to hydrate or cool us puts us in more danger so we quickly try to plot a route off the fin and back to the car.

Our options aren’t so great. Standing on the western wall of the fin we can see one obstacle we didn’t count on. Between the us and the car there is a seventy five-foot cliff that stretches nearly the whole distance of the fin! Any optimism is drained from us at this point. Every other thought in my head is gone too except for the obvious; we have got to get down from here. We find a series of ledges and naturally softer inclines that looks like it may have some promise, but as we work our way down them, it becomes clear that the route will get us further down the cliff, but we will still be thirty to forty feet from the bottom. We will have to go back up to the top of the fin and try again.

There are more than five vertical feet between the ledge I am on and the one above us, but there is a large rock wedged into a crack on the left hand side of the route that I could use to get some leverage and pull myself up to the upper ledge.  I’ll go first and then give Sara, who is much smaller than I am, a lift up. Pulling myself up half the distance, with all my weight on the rock, I swing my right leg up the rest of the distance and get most of my foot on the ledge. Just then, the position of the rock wedged in the crack that I am relying on shifts and I slide back down onto the small ledge below on my knees and wrists. The effect is like kneeling on a belt sander. The skin on my knees is mingled with the sand and rock, leaving long abrasions on both legs. My ankle that was on the upper ledge is bleeding and the scrapes on my wrist that went through the first layer of skin are slowly turning from white to red as the blood soaks through tiny holes where skin used to be like liquid seeping through a paper towel.

I look behind me and see just how close to the edge I have fallen. Another few inches and I would have kept falling, down past our narrow perch on the wall and into the canyon below. I try to stand up in a vain attempt to convince Sara that it wasn’t that bad, but my legs are shaking so badly that I can’t encourage them to hold the weight of my body. Sara’s eyes have been pulled open in a look of horror that tells me she knows exactly what state we are in. I’m waiting for her to lose it, but she doesn’t. We decide to sit for a few minutes here on the ledge and get our wits about us before attempting the climb again.

The second time up is no easier, pressed against the cliff with all the contact points on my body worn raw from the fall, but I have pulled the loose rock out of the fissure it was wedged in and found a sturdier hand hold in the crack. I pull Sara up after getting myself steadied on the upper ledge and we decide that from here on out we are not taking any chances, no matter how long it takes us to get down. We make it to the top of the fin again and I am exhausted. The strap from my tripod is digging into my sunburned shoulders and my mind alternates between this discomfort, the pain in my hands and knees and the fear that we may be too dehydrated now to make it anyway. I’m amazed at how quickly one bad decision has turned into two and then three until what started out as a quick little hike turned into the mess we are in now. If we don’t get down, nobody will come looking for us until after dark. When we left, we had no specific plan, so our family doesn’t know how long we will be gone and they would have no idea where to start looking anyway. Until a ranger notices (if one notices at all) that the car has been sitting at the trailhead long after anyone would be hiking, we are truly alone.

About half a mile northward, up the fin there is a popular rock-climbing area. Rappellers use it because they can climb up along one side of the rock fairly quickly and then rappel down the cliff, getting in a lot of descents in a short amount of time. We decide to work our way up the fin and, unless we find a clear route before then, we’ll drop down from there.

We meet our first lucky break a quarter of a mile from where we were stranded before on the cliff. From the top of the fin, we can see a gradual drop to the bottom through a large fissure filled with scrub oak and boulders. This time we scout the route from the top, along one side of the large crack. We know this is our last shot. We are both too worn out and parched to make it back up to the top to find another route if this one fails. Sara and I are both satisfied that we can make it, so we start the long, slow process of working our way through the brush at the bottom of the crack and over boulders toward the bottom.

That’s where we saw the snake.

About halfway down our new route, we see a rattlesnake slip itself under a holly bush about ten feet in front of us. The bush fills the bottom of the crack from one wall to the other. We had planned on sliding around the bush on the right-hand side, but now that I know there is a snake somewhere under the bush, there is no way I am going near it. Sara notices a thin ledge about five feet up on the wall – barely a bump, really – that we could follow past the bush. This is the last straw for me though. I am mortally afraid of snakes; even the ones that I know are not poisonous. The fact that I know this one is does nothing to calm my nerves.  The floor of the whole route is covered with old leaves and grass and by now, the snake could be anywhere. I toss a few rocks into the bush, hoping to at least get a rattle that would betray the snake’s position. Nothing. Not so much as a rustling of leaves.

I go into a rant on how dumb we are; about coming out here with no water and no first aid kit, and how I have no mechanism in me for dealing with snakes at all. At this point, Sara has had it with me. “Oh, I’ll go first!” she says in exasperation. And I let her.

Sara pushes herself up onto the tiny ledge, keeping her self flat against the contour of the wall and in a matter of seconds, my fourteen year old sister has passed the obstacle that seemed so daunting to me a minute before. I toe into the bump on the wall and slip past the bush, poking it a few times with my tripod when I get directly over it for good measure, but we find no trace of the snake again. Embarrassed by my complete lack of chivalry, I catch up with Sara on the other side of the bush and we work our way down the rest of the crack without incident.

Where we finally met with main part of the canyon is about three quarters of a mile from the trailhead, through sagebrush, sand, prickly pear and cholla cactus to where our car is waiting. By now the sun is low enough to cast a shadow nearly the full distance across the canyon, but not quite enough to cover our route. The temptation is to walk across the canyon and hike down the other side just to get out of the relenting sun, but expending any more energy seems like an impossible task now.  We look back up at the wall that we have been trapped on for the past four hours and it seems so innocuous from the bottom. If it weren’t for the cliff that seems much smaller from our perspective now, we would have been home hours ago. Along the way we see two or three viable routes we passed simply because we couldn’t see them from the top of the fin and console ourselves by knowing that we are finally out from under the cruel whims of the mountain.

When we open the doors of the car, the heat from inside is enough to make us sick. We roll down the windows and while we wait for the car to air out I tell Sara a story I didn’t want to mention while our own lives seemed in imminent danger. There was a news report earlier in the summer about a pilot who ended up landing a small plane on Red Mountain, only a few miles west of where we are. Rescuers found the plane the next day in fairly good shape, but they didn’t find the pilot. It wasn’t until about a week later that his body was spotted in a small wash less than a hundred yards from the road where rescuers had been traveling up and down the whole week. Apparently he had survived the crash in good condition, but wandered away from the plane to find a route off the mountain. He died from exposure and dehydration, surely listening to the shouts and the hum of vehicles on the mountain, but was too delirious or otherwise unable to get their attention.

We stop in the little town of Ivins, just outside of Snow Canyon and get the largest drinks they have from the soda fountain. The sound of the ice cracking as Coca Cola flows into my big plastic cup is nearly enough to make me cry.  Five miles down the road we stop at a gas station in Santa Clara and get another drink, just because we can.