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WE had awakened before dawn to get a jump on the desert heat and rolled out under a headlight moon, pedaling fast in the cool morning of the Dolores River Canyon. There were no cars, not out here. There was only the sound of bike tires on asphalt, the river’s murmur, the cascading song of a canyon wren and that beginning-of-the-world smell of river mud in the blue morning. Horses nuzzled the rough cottonwoods by the riverbank. Pale sandstone walls rose up around us and caught the colors of sunrise.

A day like this couldn’t last. “You know what Dolores means, don’t you?” our guide, John Humphries, had asked us earlier with his I’ve-got-plans-for-you grin. “It means sorrow, or pain.”

Soon enough, I would know exactly what he meant.

... NewYorkTimes Online