Loop-the-loop

My unspoken rule (until now): a good hike begins and ends as a circle. While a loop may not technically qualify as a circle, at least I understand the geometry, that it will take me back to where I started. For me, woe is the way that promises to be a line, especially a wobbly one. A line demands I tread the same ground I previously trod; greet the same old rocks and trees on the way back, even stifle a yawn as the same magnificent vista reasserts itself. 

If this rule sounds eccentric, at least consider this simple advice: always hike with a companion. Pam said she’d go with me, and I was relieved that she did. 

Prater Ridge Trail is the longest trek in Mesa Verde National Park – 7.8 miles – and described on nps.gov as “strenuous.” The site goes on to report, “After climbing 1.1 miles to the top of Prater Ridge, hikers may choose ... either or both loops.” The north loop is longer than the south loop, but I recommend – as your unofficial guide – hiking the perimeter, which gathers the two smaller loops as if caught by a lasso. Mileage varies, but stay to the right, or you’ll end up like a cowboy tangled in your own rope tricks.   

Spruce Canyon Loop – not Prater – is the one that seduced us with its map of gentle topographical curves. It starts just below the Mesa Verde Museum where a convenient bathroom stop is located, and upon reaching a sign that points toward Petroglyph and Spruce Canyon trailheads, go right. On a summer day we’d have gone left, along the steeper, more shaded Petroglyph path, even having hiked it many times before. The view of prehistoric rock carvings on a 20-foot sandstone panel never gets old. 

On this December day, only a whisper of snow lingered beneath the trees where the sun couldn’t reach it. The temperature hovered in the 40s and the trail stayed mostly in the sun. Switchbacks snaked past enormous boulders stacked like cairns from a land of prehistoric giants. 

As we moved down the path, we encountered a family of hikers coming up. They stopped for a collective breath and chilled us with this caution: “We decided to play it safe and turn around; the trail below looks like it might still be frozen.” Frozen? We both glanced toward the sun, smiled and wished them a safe return to the pavement. 

When we reached the canyon floor, the sun insisted we remove our jackets. The path turned into a single-track hiking (not biking) surface. 

I’d forgotten how dirt has its own rule, and when mixed with water, becomes mud. It also adheres to a hiker’s boots. Our pleasant stroll with the sun on our backs shifted to an occasional hop, from one side of the path to the other. Then the low spots got so muddy we had to straddle, one foot on each side of the trail, walking like bowlegged cowboys. 

We picked up our pace, galloping along on the canyon’s spine until the path’s inclination was to climb. Elevation and drainage took over, so we gratefully walked on dry ground again, but more like lumbering dinosaurs heading up the trail with our shoes thickly shod in mud. As for the hikers’ warning that we might face glacial extinction, the irony was not lost on us, that is, until we faced a stone staircase. 

Not actually constructed of stone, the way out of the canyon made use of stones protruding from the soil like a crooked set of teeth, many glistening as if they’d been waxed. Where the path ran straight, a frost-covered rail lay between them. The ridge’s shadow cooled to a better-put-your-coat-back-on temperature and climbed. We stopped smiling. 

Each time I paused to look back, the trail felt steeper but the more breathtaking the view from behind. When I glanced ahead, where the loop’s end must eventually be harnessed to the top of the ridge, I decided on a new strategy: don’t look back. 

Rock by rock we climbed, attached to each other as if participating in a tug-of-war with gravity, hand over hand, each step seeking a grip, one hand ahead, one hand behind. If we found a rock where we could stand together for a moment, our arms instinctively reached out like safety belts to encircle each other’s waist, as if to suggest what we didn’t have the breath to say, let us rest. 

I held to a reckoning that I’d be rewarded with some gloriously straight, dry, and flat terrain, and we finally surfaced like a submarine, gasping relief, but in my mind all the way to the top I kept repeating a line I’d revised from Sir Walter Scott’s poem, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when a loop gets twisted and I’m nearly deceived.”