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New Painting, waterhole

Blog: #4 of 7 by Bonnie Kelso

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Near Page, Arizona is a short but deep slot canyon called Waterholes Canyon. There are two portions of it, and thus an upper and lower version of it. The upper part is lovely and an easy stroll. The lower part includes a 350 foot rappel near the end. When I was going through this canyon with my husband and two friends, we didn't have much information to go on. This can make a 350 foot rappel on Navajo-owned land a bit daunting to say the least. This is not a National Park like Zion where the search and rescue service is in regular use. If you get stuck out here an argument can go on for weeks as to has to go out and rescue you from your own insane actions. I really don't blame the Navajos a bit for not wanting to spend their money and meager resources on it. It's just something that crosses your mind more than once when faced with a problem.

We did run into some other people in this canyon. They turned back at the big drop, since they didn't have the ropes for it. We had the ropes for it, so we were going down. It was getting late, and we hoped like hell our boat ride back to Lee's Ferry would wait for us. We had decided not to bring camping gear, there were weather issues. We were attempting what was originally supposed to be a two-day trip, in one day. Needless to say, when we rapped down this cathedral like setting, I knew we were in the mother of all waterholes.

The sky was turning dark and threatening. If you can imagine sliding down a 500 foot wall right along the path that a flash flood would take, you can understand the butterflies in my stomach. Not to mention you are dangling hundreds of feet in the air! In my painting, I wanted to express that ominous feeling I had, but at the same time the awesome place I was experiencing, for the first and probably last time. It was dreamlike. Huge cracks and flakes ran up the shear walls. There was a curvature to this giant hole and I imagined myself like a tiny gold fish in a sandstone fishbowl. The crack I had wedged my whole body in during my descent, now looked more like a hairline crack in a giant teacup. The amphitheater that was a giant waterhole curved around me. I was feeling amazingly small. I was imagining what it would be like to see that crack as a flowing waterfall, slowly filling the sandy bottom. The ground beneath me was soft sand, pummeled into fine grains from floods of the past. We were experiencing this waterhole in an unusually dry state. In my painting I wanted to show some sense of scale, so I added the greenish water running down the varnished walls, this was most fortunately only imagined. After getting our rope stuck and sadly deciding to abandon it, we scurried down the last rappels and made it to our ride just in time. We cashed in a lot of lucky coupons that weekend and I swore I'd never do a rappel that high again. We'll see how long it takes me to forget that statement.

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