There we stood, alone,
just the four of us,
in a vast desert, far larger
than the Sahara.
Climbed gentle backs of
dune after dune,
wind at our backs, stumbling down
the steep lee of each.
Twenty degrees north latitude,
northwesterly wind gusts,
blinded by blowing sand,
seared by desert heat.
Down into a trough between dunes
towering hundreds of feet,
lost in an endless sea
of the brightest white.
But this desert died
millions of years ago,
existing now only
in my imagination.
I stood upon rock of the rim,
Utah’s Snow Canyon State Park,
gazed down at rocks below ––
the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone.
Petrified dunes that last saw light
one hundred seventy million years ago,
rising up over time,
eroded by wind and water.
Then, one point four million years ago,
lavas poured forth
over a plateau of this exhumed
ancient petrified desert.
Streams cut canyons into sandstone and basalt
Three hundred thousand years later,
more lava poured forth, from fissures to the north,
filling valleys with fresh lava.
On the final morning of our St George visit,
I stood upon those hardened basalts,
and gazed one last time
into the canyon below.
White cliffs of Navajo sandstone to the west,
the valley filled by a third flow,
a mere fifteen thousand years past,
enveloping ancient dunes
that once danced across a vast desert.
Took my last few photos,
down into the valley, and
up to the pass to the north,
from which the lava last flowed.
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