Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park by Tim Cahill

balanced, precariously. It looked like nothing so much as a small car resting on its front bumper with its back wheels in the air. The formation was very much like one P. W. Norris had sketched in 1880. Could that top rock have held its position for more than 120 years? It occurred to me that I had arrived at an unfamiliar intersection between geology and acrobatics.
    I moved below the permanently precarious hard-rock circus and walked around a high flat blade of standing stone. It was growing late, and the sky above was still blue, but in the basin, where we were, shadows fell all about. I looked up at the flat rock rising 60 or 70 feet above me, and it resolved itself into a face, with a central protrusion of nose, and a large pyramidal hat above, of the sort that might be worn by a shaman or priest of some alien religion. But what made me stumble backward, startled in the silence, was the perfectly animate pair of eyes staring down at me. They were a cool, luminescent living blue. I believe I said something clever, like, “Whoa,” as I wheeled backward, then stood still, pinned motionless under the intense blue gaze of the rock. I lived through five very odd seconds until the eyes resolved themselves into two round holes in the flattish rock. The basin was all in shadow, but I was looking up through the holes directly into the blue of the western sky.
    Tom and I spent two days alone in the Goblin Labyrinth. The nights were deliciously creepy. The moon, half full behind us, illuminated the various figures in a pale light broken by irregular shadows. The stars, cold and bright, glittered through holes in the rock. They wheeled overhead as we sat for hours watching the shadows shift so that the rock figures assumed alternate shapes: a horse’s head, a fierce crouching lion, a failed saguaro cactus, a sorcerer’s apprentice.
    The next day we climbed Hoodoo Peak, which at 10,546 feet was 1,000 feet above the basin. There were more goblins set higher on the mountain, and they were less eroded than the ones in the basin, so that from a distance they looked rather like the heads on Easter Island, only bunched closely together, as if conspiring in the wind. There were some fanciful columns and balancing acts. I rather liked the one that looked like a pig on a stilt.
    Still, it was the basin that drew me back at dusk the next night. I went around the front side of the flat rock and stood in its shadow in order to stare it directly in the eyes. And the damn thing
winked
at me. “Whoa,” I said.
    “What?” Tom asked.
    “The rock is winking at me.”
    I climbed up on a scree slope to get a better view. Aha! Some small bird, probably an owl, was moving in and out of the eye, perching there for some moments as it scanned the ground for rodents. The owl had blocked the sky and caused the rock face to wink.
    I dragged Tom to that vantage point and told him that an owl was making the rock wink. By that time—naturally—the bird had flown the coop, so to speak. Tom glanced up into the empty eye socket, then stared at me for an uncomfortable moment.
    “Have you been smoking something?” he asked.

The River of Reliable Rainbows
    A T THE FAR SOUTHWEST CORNER OF THE PARK is an area called the Bechler, named for the main river course. If the Bechler ever ran a personal ad seeking companionship, it would be a pretty sappy one: “If you like hot tubs and rainbows and waterfalls, you’ll like me. I’m the Bechler.”
    This time our group consisted of Tom and me, Dave Long, and our emergency room crew from the first trip—Eileen Ralicke and Kara Kreitlow—and Liz Schultz, a friend and a local interior decorator who was in charge of camp decor. We drove to Ashton, Idaho, then down the gravel road that led to the Bechler entrance. “We’re doing this,” I reminded everyone, “in the name of city dwellers’ sanity.” Just in case anyone thought we were simply out having fun.
    And maybe it wouldn’t be all that enjoyable. We were