Читать книгу Shaped by Snow. Defending the Future of Winter онлайн

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Home, they said to me. This is your home.

Mobbing

“Oh no.” I take a shaky breath, gripping the wheel. “Oh no oh no oh no.”

“Easy now,” Colin says from the passenger seat. “Just go slow.”

The steep decline had turned to mud. The typical pink sand of southern Utah is a sultry shade of burnt sienna. Heavy rain and hail in the past hour eroded the right side of the road and created gaping cracks, some of them quite large, in what should be a dry dirt road down to the campsite. If the car starts sliding there is a good chance we’ll drift off the side and get stuck. There is little room for error.

We were finishing a hike in Zion National Park when the sunny afternoon turned into a raging hail and lightning storm, leading to flash flood warnings and a mass exodus from the park. As we boarded the bus to leave Zion, three ambulances with their lights on passed us going up the canyon. I fidgeted in my seat nervously, thinking of the riverside campsite we had planned on staying at that night.

I tap on the brakes lightly, and we creep slowly down the hill until it flattens out. We step out of the car, our hiking boots sinking two inches into the mud. I feel as though I’m walking through a marsh, not a desert. Colin starts looking for the highest place in the campsite, where we might be able to set up a tent. I watch the river. We had been looking forward to our first night camping together, but rain in the desert makes me nervous. The slickrock of southern Utah doesn’t absorb water like soil does. Flash floods are frequent here. I pick out a few exposed rocks in the flow of the water and watch them. Within minutes the river rises and the rocks disappear.