Unabashed

I believe I have found an evil place. Yes, I have accounted for the fact that I very nearly died in the canyon of Falling Rock, and that I did so in a way that was teasing (even to myself), but in all seriousness, this place is full of bad mojo. But if you look at the picture below you might think, “How can a place so beautiful be bad?” I can’t tell you that, but it is. Maybe my perceptions will change; I hope they do, but for now, I’m treating this place like it’s got it in for me.

Falling Rock is a beautiful overhang over which water cascades down nearly a hundred feet. Behind the waterfall there is a deep gorge beneath the overhang into which you can explore.

On the day I went Geocaching there (Friday), I found that there was no waterfall due to dry conditions in the area. And furthermore, I can only account for my own scrambled sense of being while I was there. I felt wrong. I felt in a daze, though it was early morning and I’d had breakfast, plenty of fluids and a healthy 1.5 mile hike out to the spot, for whatever reason, my mind was muddled. Once I found the first cache, which is up at the top of the canyon, I punched in the GPS coordinates for the second one, determined that it was down in the bottom of the canyon, and maneuvered down the trail to a place where I could climb down. It was about a sixty foot climb, and my footing was good, although I did begin to feel a twitch in my left knee on the way down, I didn’t think that much about it.

In the bottom of the canyon, looking up at that overhanging cliff (see picture below, courtesy of remy fauxtog), the realization came to me that the rounded cliff looked like an upper lip of an open mouth, and the recession beneath the cliff head looked like a throat. I hiked away from the cliff, down the now-stagnant creek, searching for the Geocache, when I took my double fall that ended my day (as I described in my previous post). I climbed back up out of the canyon following the same path I’d come down, but my left knee was throbbing now instead of just twitching, and my right elbow looked like someone had taped a golf ball to it and sprayed it with ketchup and dirt.

I’ve made many and many hikes in my day. I’ve gone into wilderness without trails, just to see what was there. I’ve waded through stagnant, cottonmouth-infested pools of swampy marsh and worse. I’ve encountered wildlife. I’ve fallen, gotten back up and kept going. I’ve been a lot of places and seen a lot of things. I’ve ridden horseback through the Carmel Mountains in Israel, along ridges a foot wide edging over a precipice five hundred foot sheer. But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the gloom of a place like Falling Rock. I know that people have died there. My wife grew up in a city nearby and remembers friends from school who got too close to the edge and plummeted to their doom. But the uncanny silence of the place, the appearance of the open mouth of Earth, waiting to inhale and suck you down into its depths, makes me believe that this might always have been a Bad Place. And I believe there are places in the world that are good, and there are some that are bad. Indians had their holy places, where they would go to commune with the gods, where they would bury their honored dead. I do not believe any Indians were ever buried at Falling Rock, though I believe some might have died there. It is a place of ethereal beauty, but filled with haunting gloom. If I ever go back again, I do not think I will go alone.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: evil, haunted places, mojo, scary, wicked, wild, wilderness