Canyonlands, Castanets, and the Circle We Draw
Desert myths, ancestral ghosts, and learning not to pace the same emotional loop
Some things are better late than never.
We were supposed to take this trip months ago, before leukemia decided to crash the party and flip the board. But here we are: late summer, 20+ hours chasing red rock horizons and some overdue family magic. Me, the kids, the desert, and the Bronco loaded like a pioneer wagon, minus the disintary.
This wasn’t just any road trip. This was reclaiming. The kids and I loaded up and followed the route we’d mapped out back when life still felt under some control.
First stop: Moab and Canyonlands
Moab never disappoints. It’s still the gritty love child of Mars and REI, where tourists are looking for hiking, biking, or 4-wheel drive trails, and the others are looking for their spiritual awakening and that river!!
Canyonlands Island in the Sky and The Needles districts, narrated by the surprisingly charming GPS guide from GuideAlong. Imagine a sarcastic history teacher who moonlights as your emotionally attuned co-pilot if you've never used it.
The Grand Viewpoint was closed for road construction (because nothing says “you are small and insignificant” like staring into a 2,000-foot canyon and a traffic barricade. But we still caught sunrise at Mesa Arch. The sun lit up the arch like it was dipped in molten gold. For a few minutes, everyone went quiet—even the teenager.
Then we headed to the Upheaval Dome, either a collapsed salt bubble or the smoking crater of an ancient asteroid.
I’m team asteroid.
Probably the same one that gave the dinosaurs a permanent timeout. Makes more sense than salt just deciding to implode one day. You don’t get a name like Upheaval Dome from table seasoning. That’s extinction-level energy.
We stood there, staring into this warped bowl of rock, and you couldn’t help but wonder what else got rearranged when that thing hit; geology, history, maybe even time itself. I love places like this. They remind you how little we know. Most of what we’re standing on is mystery and myth, layered in sandstone.
We made our way down to the Needles District, where the landscape feels like nature got a little tipsy on sacramental wine and started stacking red rock cathedrals for fun.
Southern Utah’s got this wild, mystical energy. For a particular kind of settler, especially those from the "pioneer stock," it was more than just survival. It was sacred scavenger hunting. Treasure maps, buried gold, and “prairie magic” weren’t fringe ideas. They were practically canon. Take a Blanding good o'boy saint, put them near a ruin, and you’ve got a 50/50 chance they’ll start talking about Moroni’s cave, the Lost Rhoades Mine, or that time a vision led someone to Spanish treasure sealed behind a mystical rockfall. This isn’t just folklore; it’s baked into our history. Early Mormon settlers genuinely believed in sacred geography. Some saw these lands as holding remnants of Book of Mormon civilizations. Others believed the Native American ruins were linked to Lamanite ancestors, and that God had tucked away ancient relics and records in the hills for the faithful to find.
Even the Blanding artifact raid wasn’t just about looting; it was part of a long pattern of treating ancient Indigenous sites as both sacred and somehow up for grabs. Whether it was spiritual inheritance or just old-fashioned frontier greed, the lines were blurry. And often ignored.
Some even argue that Taylor Sheridan borrowed (or outright lifted) from the story of Dugout Ranch for his original Yellowstone series. Suppose you spent time in these parts, where fact and folklore swap places like dance partners. And just as we were steeped in all this myth and memory, we stumbled across Woodenshoe Arch, shaped like an actual wooden shoe. Proof that even in a land carved by wind, water, and apocalypse-level patience, there’s still space for the weird and whimsical.
Cortez and Mesa Verde
From Moab, we crossed into Colorado and rolled through Cortez, a town that feels forever caught between the old world and a gas station burrito. But it’s the gateway to one of the most powerful places I’ve ever stood: Mesa Verde.
You don’t just visit Mesa Verde. You witness it.
The cliff dwellings here aren’t quaint. They’re defiant. Tucked into canyon walls with surgical precision, these stone villages are acts of engineering, artistry, and absolute resilience. And when you’re standing there, staring at what the Ancestral Puebloans built over 700 years ago, you don’t just feel small, you feel humbled.
These weren’t just homes.
They were declarations:
We were here. We adapted. We endured.
We took the Balcony House tour, which involves climbing 32 feet by ladder and ducking through ancient doorways. It’s the kind of tour that strips away modern comfort and reminds you how soft we’ve become. Our guide was brilliant, layering the archaeological facts with Indigenous oral histories and respectfully reminding us that these weren’t ruins to be gawked at but living stories we’re lucky to glimpse.
At one viewpoint on the mesa, we could see nearly 100 miles in every direction, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico all stretched out under a sky so wide it felt like you could fall into it. We stopped there for a picnic, in the shade, looking out over the Four Corners and the marvels of the First Nations, eating sandwiches in the same cliffs where families once passed stories through generations, and carved life out of stone and drought. Bob Dillon would croon “Past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people”.
It” struck me how much we flatten Indigenous narratives in school. We talk about “ancient peoples” as if they vanished. This was some abandoned civilization that was swallowed by time, but wasn’t moved. They adapted. Their descendants are still here. Still enduring and still telling stories.
Places like this pull something out of you—something older than grief, but just as heavy.
You start thinking about your cliff dwellings, the pieces of your life you’ve carved into stone, the homes you’ve lost, the quiet resilience it takes to survive what doesn't make it into the history books.
Mesa Verde isn’t a monument to what's. It’s a reminder of what remains.
Durango
We pulled into Durango late in the day, and _I felt an old part of me wake up. It's to explain, but you know the feeling if you've returned to a place that holds your childhood in its dirt. Durango isn’t just a town for me, it’s my story map.
Nick and I used to run wild here. Main Street was our kingdom. The mountains were our escape hatch. We’d peer into the trees like we belonged there, feral, free, and full of whatever magic only kids can see.
We visited the land where my grandmother spent her final years—six acres of quiet. You can still feel her presence as the wind moves through the pines. Her ashes rest there now, alongside the love and labor she poured into that patch of earth with her late husband. It’s sacred. It's und.
Being there brought back more than memories; it brought back a version of me I hadn’t felthadn'twhile—one that wasn’t surviwasn'tne who knew how to belong to a place.
We traveled the Million Dollar Highway, 12,000 feet up and over mountain passes that make your ears pop and your existential crisis flare just enough to feel alive again. (For my Utah readers: imagine driving up and over Mount Timpanogos.
We stopped in Ouray, Colorado. A magical, too-perfect mountain town that feels like a Wes Anderson fever dream. Had a late breakfast. Breathed it in. I half expected someone to slide me a napkin that said Who is John Galt? and offer me a seat at the resistance table.
Ants, Grief, and AI
Somewhere in that long stretch of silence between mountain towns, I remembered a weird little story:
You can trap an ant by drawing a circle around it on paper. That’s it—NTha’s. No threat. Just a line. And yet, the ant will stay inside it, convinced it can’t leave. Can’t, doesn’t, doesn't know. I’ve been wondering if I’ve done the right thing.
Divorce. The loss of Nick. Cancer.
Each one drew a circle around me, limiting how much I let myself hope, trust, or feel joy without immediately bracing for the next hit. I didn’t mean to get stuck there. But I've been pacing those loops like I forgot I had legs.
Lately, though, I’ve been struggling with it. Not to fix it. Not to decode it.
But maybe I should stop drawing the circle again whenever life gives me space to move.
AI keeps teaching me things, too.
Most people think AI spits out answers. But what it’s doing is learning constantly. It takes feedback. It recognizes patterns. It gets better with more context and more straightforward prompts.
Sound familiar? We do that, too. We loop until something forces us to adapt.
We repeat the same emotional code until it stops working or until someone, something, pain, or grace, helps us see a new way through.
We get better when we start asking better questions. AI doesn’t evolve the input changes. Neither do we. If you don’t like what I give you, odds are you didn’t prompt. The same goes for life. The same goes for relationships. The quality of your outputs, peace, progress, and connection depend on the quality of your inputs.
Try this:
Instead of asking, Why won’t they change? Ask, How won't show?
Instead of, Why does this hurt so much? Ask, What is this pain trying to teach me?
Instead of, Why do I always end up here? Ask, What am I still not seeing?
Because maybe the goal isn’t to control the outcome, but rather to write a prompt. One that invites clarity. One that invites growth. One that doesn’t keep you walking doesn't let you.
I’m Tapping In
Quick but important reminder:
I’ve signed up to compete in a jiu-jitsu tournament on February 28th, almost one year to the day I was diagnosed.
I’ll be fighting (literally) to raise money for cancer-related charities through Tap Cancer Out.
If you train, roll.
If you want to support, sponsor me here.
If you’re cheering from the side, you're? Hell yes. That counts too. Every bit helps.
Because this isn’t just a tournament.
It’s a disn'tation: I’m still herIt's’m still fightinI'mI’m not drawiI'many more damn cirI'ms._
No quarter.
—Tyler