The trail dropped steeply into the canyon, and I had a thought that it might be a tough climb back out at the end of the day. With each step down I was walking backwards through time; lower and lower, through the ages of the earth. At the bottom, the floor of the canyon rested on the limestone beds of the Jurassic. The Purgatoire River, working over long eons of time, cut these canyons to this great depth, exposing layers of rock laid down as sediment 150 million years ago.

I reached the canyon bottom and followed the rutted trail south and west into the main canyon. Grasses were the predominant vegetation on the canyon floor, with clumps of cholla and wildflowers scattered here and there. It was high summer, and the air was filled with the buzz and hiss of grasshoppers and other insects. With nearly every step a grasshopper would take wing away from me, and I noted there were different kinds in various colors and sizes. At times the insect drone sounded like human voices at a distance, and for a while I would look around for the people I was sure I heard talking somewhere around me. In truth the nearest humans were many miles away, and I was quite alone in this large expanse of land. Being isolated and alone to this degree is difficult to do these days, and I try to look at this rare solitude as a gift to be appreciated.

I passed the remnants of an old dwelling, nothing left but a few crumbling walls and timbers, and the old cook stove out in the yard. A sign marked this place as a protected place of antiquity - I suppose a thousand years from now, humans will gaze at these ruins and wonder what life was like for the people trying to scratch out a living in this landscape. Before the cattle ranchers came here, before the Mexican settlers and the Spanish explorers, the old native peoples occupied the place for a long, long time. It is the river running through the canyon that made human habitation possible. At points in the past, when the ice sheets melted, the Purgatoire was a wild torrent, wide and deep and scouring itself deeper into the earth. Now in this time it was small and tame, with cottonwoods and willows lining the banks.