Our other guide was Bron, a soft-spoken Mormon with a wide, frontier preacher's smile. Bron was the son of David Wescott, a former owner of BOSS, and he'd grown up tracking around these southern-Utah canyonlands. Yucca made good cordage, for instance, and if you sniffed a ponderosa pine tree up close, it smelled like butterscotch. The country we hiked through was filed with these little wonders. The high Sonoran desert runs south from Utah into Arizona, a succession of rosy, sandstone canyons tapering off into a flat, sandy sea.
Mountain lions live here, alongside bears, coyotes, and files of deer.
Impact is supposed to shock your system into rough, desert awareness, at which point you set about learning rudimentary skills of the wild. We filled our shriveled bellies that second evening with a concoction of lentils and maize, cooked hobostyle, in blackened billycans. The next morning, Jill gave a lengthy disquisition on the bowdrill fire set. Fire is at the center of the survival experience. All campers are expected to master this primitive technique, which involves threading a wooden spindle through a taut bowstring, propping it up-right on a narrow board, then rubbing the bow back and forth, while squatting precariously on your haunches.