Floating the Mighty Free and Easy (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Floating the Mighty Free and Easy (Cont.)

"DID THE COPS question you about it?" I asked Bobbie late the next day.

We were standing just across the river from our campsite, on top of the cliffs, staring numbly at the remains of a formation once a familiar landmark to Indians and fur trappers and steamboat captains. What we saw was a pair of inward curving arms, each about ten feet high, stretched upward to the sky, as in supplication. The arms had once held and balanced capstones so that the formation was a graceful natural arch 11 feet high, a landmark called the Eye of the Needle.

"We talked to the BLM and the local cops. We were the last people to see it before..."

Sometime between May 25 and May 26, 1997, a vandal or vandals pried the capstones off the top of the arch and pushed them over the cliff.

"I was guiding a group," Bobbie said. "We were the last people to see it intact. Climbed up here on Memorial Day weekend. It was rainy and slick and it poured rain all the next few days." The steep climb winds its way up through a narrow chute, and it is necessary to move carefully, three points on rock at all times. Bobbie carries a climbing rope because a sudden rain can turn the chute into a water slide. "The next group to come through reported it down. Some folks think it may have collapsed on its own, but the cops told me they found the marks of a metal bar on the rocks that had been kicked over the cliff."

The FBI was called in, Bobbie and her group submitted their snapshots—the last photographs ever taken of the intact formation—and then the years began to gently drift along, no arrests were ever made, and the remains of the Eye stand sentinel over the river, testament to a certain virulent variety of human disfigurement.

Late that afternoon, we climbed back into the cliffs behind our campsite. The rock walls closed in around us, forming a water-carved, keyhole-shaped passage of the sort found in caves. Several fallen boulders the size of trucks or houses blocked the way, but Bobbie led us scrambling over them, insisting that she had something to show us. And indeed, when we topped out, we immediately saw another Eye of the Needle—an arch of about the same size, wind-scoured and smooth as gritty marble. I climbed up to get slightly above this peculiar eye, and when I looked through it, there, below, stretching out for over a mile, was a maze of canyon and tortured rock, perfectly framed: an invitation to commit poetry or philosophy or any number of the higher aesthetic or contemplative crimes. I imagined there were other Eyes, in other drainages, none of them actually on the river, but all probably worth a climb—isolated instances of beauty in no urgent need of beholders.

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