This photo looks north across Negro Bill Canyon from the fins and domes of Sand Flats Recreation Area. Out of view to the right is the side canyon containing Morning Glory Natural Bridge. I was here to see the terrain on the far side of the canyon, particularly the cliff above the center of the image. On that cliff, "northeast of" the center of the image, is a small black dot. To the left of that dot is the bottom of a diagonal shadow. The bottom of that shadow conceals a bowl created by erosion and populated with some bushes. That bowl is the place where two young men from Iowa died in August 1995.

The two men were vacationing in the Southwest and stopped in Moab to do some mountain biking. The last time their families heard from them was when they called from Durango, Colorado on their way to Moab. When they failed to call home from Moab, families alerted the authorities and a search was initiated. About three weeks after being reported overdue, and after much searching by the sheriff's department, BLM personnel, and volunteers, the bodies of the men were spotted from a helicopter.

The formal report produced by the sheriff's department speculates how and why the men got from the Porcupine Rim Trail to the bowl seen here. Their bikes might have become damaged or inoperable. They were likely low on water or out of it completely. Having diminished judgement from dehydration, they sought a shortcut to the trailhead. Their trek led them here and by the time they reached this spot they were likely too tired and delirious to retrace their steps. From the bowl it is about six miles (9km) back to the trailhead via the Porcupine Rim Trail. Via an obscure trail leading into the canyon, it's half that distance to the trailhead.

Their relaxed postures suggested that they had just laid down to rest and never got up. Neither body had any signs of external or internal injuries. There is only one way they could have descended to the bowl without injuring themselves---via the nearby steep rock slope where the gradient allows one to carefully walk or slide down. It is unknown if they tried to shout for help, but they were close enough to the trail in the canyon that a normal shout could have easily been heard by anyone in the canyon nearby. In August, there is not a lot of hiking activity there due to the heat.

A cruel irony concludes the story. The men hiked cross-country---some of it in a confusing terrain of fins and domes---for almost the same distance as they would have needed to retrace their route to the trailhead via the easily-negotiated bike trail.

The bowl is at the center of this WikiMapia aerial view.

I heard about this sad story somewhere on the World-Wide Web and got interested. On a trip to Moab I visited the Grand County Library, where I looked at microfilm records of the local paper. This yielded little detail about the episode but did lead me to the nearby office of the Grand County Sheriff. There I paid nine dollars for a copy of the official report, which has photographs showing the bowl from several angles.

The photographs, together with the textual description ("about two miles up Negro Bill Canyon") gave me a good idea about the bowl's location: above a large rock shelf in the canyon, a shelf known to local hikers but probably not to many people from out of town. To confirm my suspicion, I hiked to the vantage point of this photo on the plateau of the Sand Flats Recreation Area, just west of the canyon containing Morning Glory Natural Bridge. The bowl was almost exactly where I imagined it to be.

Once I saw the bowl from this vantage point, I realized that I had already been very close to the bowl on a hike I did in the fins on the far side of the canyon. The spooky feeling of having been near the bowl without knowing its significance prompted me to return to that area to see how close I could get to the bowl before my fear of heights kicked in. I reached a point directly above the bowl and about 500 horizontal feet from it, but the shape of the terrain prevented me from seeing it. This experience made me more sensitive to the notion that every day, people pass places where others have died---without knowing about those deaths.