Mee is an absurdly short name for a canyon a dozen miles long, that drops 4,000 feet, creates a cliff-bound world all to itself. There are no roads inside the canyon, none even peer into it from above. No trail travels its length. Mee Canyon is secluded enough that it exudes primordial indifference. Such places hold mysteries--at least that's what I tell myself. Sometimes the mysteries are in my own head and the silence does no more than provide an opportunity to unravel my own thoughts.

 Mee Canyon has a bona fide secret. There is a unique tower--if tower is even the right name. Several house-size sandstone blocks stand on end, balanced as if assembled by Godzilla practicing advanced stone-stacking skills. There is a massive space between the bottom blocks, so perhaps it's also a kind of arch. Strappo had seen this improbable sculpture while on a boat trip down the Colorado River in 2002 and had not stopped talking about it in months.

So, next spring, May of 2003--twenty years ago this year--Strappo, Chip Wilson, Mark Patterson and me went to Mee to climb this tower. Strappo and Mark and I planned to boat down the river from Loma and bring the climbing gear. At the put-in ramp there were so many people lined up, anxious to get on the water, it looked like a scene from the movie Dunkirk. The long wait gave me plenty of time to worry about the river, which was running very fast, very high. When our time came to launch and we spread our gear out and I saw how tiny an 8-foot Zodiac boat actually was and just how unprepared we were compared to other parties, I began to wonder if this was such a good idea. Meanwhile more people appeared, waiting for us to get moving. I offered to hike in from the top of Mee Canyon--a long hike but at least this would give Strappo and Mark more room. They agreed. I drove off.

A few hours later I parked my truck in a pine forest glade amid amid patches of snow. It was muddy underfoot. Sounds of trickling water were all around, water heading where I was heading: downhill. All I had to do was follow the drainage downstream. As I descended into deep shade beneath growing cliffs, the vegetation became varied and lush. I walked for hours through a lost land of grass and lizards and wildflowers and waterfalls and birds--and even a few freestanding towers. The canyon gradually opened up, scenery slowly became more austere, a landscape where vegetation was green but sparse and soil was sand and the sand came from the stone walls that rose hundreds of feet to left and right. Eventually the base of the canyon was limestone and the stream would run for a few hundred yards, vanish, reappear. Nearing the tower, water trickled ever more weakly between rare, shady, potholes. These ponds were bustling with tiny creatures trying to grow up and reproduce and die of old age before their little world dried up. I walked right past Mark and Strappo, who were resting in the shade of a large boulder after ferrying loads up from the river. An odd sound--human voice? Beer can being crushed? Footstep?--caught my attention. That was how Mee was; senses had to become more attentive to subtleties. At night we were serenaded by the croaking of amorous frogs.

We assembled under the prospective tower to scope out lines. Alas, close inspection with binoculars revealed bolts, fresh enough that they still sported traces of rock-dust. Oh no! We were shocked, horrified really, to see that this supremely remote tower, Strappo's own, had already been climbed.

Though, looking back now this was perhaps not so suprising. The late 1990s saw huge growth in desert recreation. Desert rock climbing was still mostly a sleepy, laid-back scene but there had been a massive surge in numbers of bikes, boats, and off-road vehicles. What we did not quite grasp in 2003 was how this was changing everything. Boaters were now crowding the Colorado River from Loma to Westwater. And, inevitably, out of these boat crews, a few inquisitive souls--some of them climbers--would stop at Mee Canyon and wander a mile or three up-canyon to see what there was to see, just as Strappo had done.

Anyway, there we were, the others and me, late May, mid-Mee, mission thwarted. (We later discovered it had been climbed just a few months earlier by Bill Duncan and John Burnham and is known as Arch Tower). What now? Across the canyon from our intended climb a row of giant teeth grew out of a steep hillside. The tallest of these featured a line of cracks on its east side, suggesting a reasonably, umm, reasonable climb. Which it was. Especially when we were joined by Chip Wilson, who hiked in from the top the next day, bringing extra supplies in the form of a backpack full of deli sandwiches (pro tip: the appropriate meal plan is one deli sandwich for breakfast, two for dinner). The crack did not quite reach the ground so we used a hook and a handful of pitons to get to it but once it started it was mostly plug 'n' chug cams for the next 200 feet.

The summit was sandy-soft and 1/2" bolts slid uselessly in and out of the 1/2" holes we drilled. Lucky for us we had two 1-inch angles and they fit perfectly. That night, as we toasted our success with the last of our warm beer we were visited by a scorpion. Except it was missing its tail. We gave this odd creature plenty of room, just in case, as it wandered around and eventually disappeared into a little hole. It was, we discovered later, a jerusalem cricket.

The weather chose that three day period when we were there to transition from May-warm to summer-broil. Summit day, we all suffered from heat and sun (we had to fetch water from a pothole a half-mile upstream so we never seemed to have enough). The prospect of hiking eight miles and 4,000 feet back up Mee Canyon was daunting. So, for our escape, it was decided that all four of us and our gear (oh, and Mark's dog, too!) could all pile into Strappo's eight-foot Zodiac. That night, the frogs registered their approval.

Next morning we got up at first light and started hiking the three miles to the river. Rounding the final bend in the canyon, we left the deep shade of Mee and emerged into withering sun. We wandered across a cheat-grass bottomland replete with fire pits, hacked up trees (and so few trees to begin with ...), toilet paper, trash, engine noise from passing watercraft, occasional bellows from cattle across the river where the land looked dusty and bare. We had re-entered our world but after three days in Mee Canyon familar sights and sounds felt horribly jarring. We clambered onto Strappo's Zodiac, the rear of which, under all that weight, was submerged to near-Oceangate depths, and enjoyed a rapid ride to the take-out on water Strappo aptly described as "fast-moving glass."