The time machine is a muddy Utah Division of Wildlife Resources pickup truck operated by Conservation Officer Mark Connolley. We drive out of Price and up Horse Canyon into the Book Cliffs.
At first, I'm nervous. I've been stuck all day before with some boring administrator. If we're going to part acrimoniously, I want to be close to town. So, I immediately make several highly inappropriate test observations.
They are right on target. Mark is professional enough to do his job well while simultaneously being nuts enough that we get along famously.
Horse Canyon climbs east onto the Tavaputs Plateau. The road is a barely maintained series of drunken switchbacks and imaginarily repaired washouts. Within an hour we are beyond radio and civilization.
At the top of Horse Canyon we stop and get out. Price is a barely discernible glitter of reflections in the arid distance. Ahead the road descends perilously into Range Creek and the dim past. Mark calls it his time portal.
Range Creek is a treasure vault of ancient Fremont Indian granaries, pictographs, petroglyphs and burial sites. Permits to hike it (no vehicles allowed) can only be secured via the Division of Wildlife Resources Web site.
If this area sounds interesting to you, it's also wildly appealing to the sort of people who like to loot artifacts and sell them on the Internet.
Mark's job, then, isn't to protect life, but rather death. He keeps track of every single one of the 28 permit holders allowed to be in Range Creek and the other people who aren't.
We see no one. It is clear and cool and silent. Red-and-gold trees rustle in a wind that moves through the canyon like a river of ghosts.
Periodically, we stop and hike through the junipers to a towering slab of sandstone. Etched in the warm stone are messages that beckon across the centuries.
Some are obvious: sun, water, archers stalking bighorn sheep in eternal hunt.
Less decipherable are horned snakes, winged creatures and figures so bizarre they could only be advertisements for Fremont heavy metal bands.
It is enough to inspire reverence even in the likes of me. Will there ever come a time when I am the subject of geological scrutiny? Will the graffiti I see from TRAX one day be regarded as priceless art?
Most haunting are the low altars of ruined pit houses. Range Creek once bustled with family life. Generations lived, loved and died here, leaving nothing but cryptic stone pictures and a scatter of flint chips.
The silence is spiritual. For the first time in memory, I hear the sound of my own heart. It is like being in a church, or what church would be like if you could get everyone in it to shut the hell up.
We drive back to the busy present in the late afternoon, toward that distant time when the faint marks of my passage will have its own keeper of the dead.
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Salt Lake Tribune columnist Robert Kirby welcomes mail at 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail at rkirby@sltrib.com.
