We've made a refreshing change in our mode of hiking and exploring.  After years of using established trails, we are doing more hikes "cross-country" over slickrock or remote desert, where markers are few or none.  We've been fortunate to hike with a fellow southern Utah explorer who has discovered the routes illustrated in the slickrock slideshows below.
​I still appreciate rock cairn markers over miles-long treks in slickrock seas, like Boulder Mail Trail to Death Hollow in Grand Staircase-Escalante.  And, as the southwestern deserts heat up, we will find ourselves in higher elevations on signed forest trails.

Navigation through slickrock country is a fun way to explore, but extra precautions are needed.  You can use dead-reckoning and a compass to travel, but using a topo map helps you discover the canyons and plateaus between you and your destination.  I've started using Topo Maps US, an iphone and ipad compatible navigation application (version 12.0 or later).  With this app, you can download maps for areas in which you will be hiking, record and save your tracks.  I also always use my Garmin GPS to record our tracks, and occasionally Avenza Maps.

​Don't Walk on the Crypto! (more info at end of this post).

For more on petroglyphs:  In Search of the Rattlesnake Petroglyph

References
Loope, D.  et al. 2016.  Sandstones and Utah’s canyon country: Deposition, diagenesis, exhumation, and landscape evolution​.  University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

Open Spaces 
If you relish wide open spaces with minimal human influence, like the freedom to chart your own path to discover features that others haven't, and don't mind the occasional cactus spine jabs and rough rock-hopping, this rugged land is for you.  It's a place for open space "aficionados".  Sunflower Mountain's summit allows you to see what's going on in the Great Basin desert of Nevada:  raw, contorted, ripped and tilted geography as a result of earth's spreading and faulting.  Some say this desert land is too spare, but each plant must fight for survival, changing to adapt. This clever determination earns respect and admiration.  Many times you find unexpected things like fossils, springs and weird rocks.  I've found what looked like a miner's crucible and pottery sherds in remote deserts.  Surprise and unpredictability separate this biome from others.
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A scene from the t.v. series Yellowstone prompted me to pull The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich out of my bookcase.  In this scene, Beth, the daughter of John Dutton, the Montana ranch owner, is reading this book, wondering how to find solace.  "Solace must be discovered," her dad tells her.   Early in the book, Ehrlich states "Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us.  Space represents sanity, not a life purified dull, or "spaced out" but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation."  She writes about the extreme weather and landscapes of Wyoming, and its people.   Ehrlich found solace in Wyoming after a tragic event in her life .

Some people find solace and revitalization in remote, open spaces.  Others find the same in the hubbub of big cities.  Is it an acquired preference that grows out of an appreciation for open spaces after you spend some time in them?  Or are some people more naturally attracted to them?  At any rate, the American West is rich with opportunities for solitude, solace, freedom, discovery.  The list goes on....

I have often wondered why the term "slickrock" is used to describe smooth-surfaced sandstone.  My boots didn't slip on it; in fact I found it rather grippy while hiking across it, up it, or down it.  Unless it is covered by a thin coat of ice or damp moss, it wasn't slippery.  My mountain bike tires held firmly on Moab's Slickrock Trail.  "Slick" was the term that early pioneers of the southwest region gave this multi-colored, cross-bedded rock because metal horseshoes and wheel rims had poor traction on this terrain.

We have been fortunate to meet two friends who are showing us some routes in the magical and ever-changing southern Utah slickrock country.  These routes are not marked;  no cairns, no signs.  They are wild and untrammeled and untrampled, a welcome change from southern Utah's over-traveled national parks.  The landscape is remarkable because there are so many things to see - from small-scale ferns, moqui marbles, and mountain lion tracks, to large-scale towers, blazing orange temples, hoo-doos and spires.  Colors vary from black desert-varnished and stained sandstone to blue pool refections in white slickrock.  This land is unpredictable.  When you reach the top of a smooth sandstone bowl or cross-bedded steps, you may find a cliffed-out canyon, or more slickrock flats, or a rocky pass with gnarled ponderosa pines and junipers to negotiate to reach the sand washes below.

"Nirvana" is the final goal of enlightenment in Buddhism, a state of transcendence where there is no suffering, desire or sense of self.  It's also a term used to describe paradise, a place of perfect peace and happiness - an "idyllic" place.  After a few nights backpacking in the Sawtooth Mountains, I would call that range in central Idaho "paradise".  Low, green valleys and sawtooth peaks all formed by glaciers, and plentiful lakes, so many that you could walk to a few of them in a day or spend each night at a different one.  Southern Utah's Red Rock Country might be described as paradise, or nirvana, at least by me.  It's a place where you can immerse yourself in the extraordinary beauty that's the artwork of millions of years of shaping and carving an ancient sand sea.  I'm grateful to be able to experience these places - to have the companionship of my husband and friends, to have strong legs to get there and be able to share our adventures with others.  We have available limitless adventures, but limited time.

The slickrock slideshow and other images that follow highlight scenes from one day's journey into slickrock paradise.