EDITOR'S LETTER

One hundred eighty degrees

And eight decades separate Morgan Sjogren and Irvin S. Cobb. They're as different as Amelia Earhart and Andy Warhol. She's a tanned, intrepid nomad who runs ultramarathons. He was a man with "a round shape, bushy eyebrows, full lips and a triple chin." She lives in tents, concocts "eclectic" burritos and "writes to protect the soul of wild places." He lived in Manhattan, hosted the Academy Awards and worked for Joseph Pulitzer as the highest-paid staff reporter in the United States. Their connection is a dotted line that runs from the slick-rock domes of Northern Arizona to the base of Rainbow Bridge. And their backcountry adventures are bookended in the archive of this magazine. Morgan's story is new. Mr. Cobb's came in 1940. "Our leading article this month," Editor Raymond Carlson wrote in July of that year, "is by that grand American author and personality: Irvin S. Cobb. We wish we could boast about our editorial inspiration in seeking out Mr. Cobb and persuading him to tell us of Rainbow Bridge. It would be a good story, but alas, it would not be true. One afternoon in the mail a bulky package arrived in our office, with a short note appended in which the author hoped we could find room for his article. He said he would like to repay a debt for many pleasant days spent in exploring the remote corners of our state."

I wasn't familiar with Mr. Cobb, but the guy could surely write. Like Mark Twain, he mixed an inimitable brand of humor with a masterful command of the language. And like Craig Childs, his powers of observation could transport a reader from a long line at a red light to the banks of Aztec Creek. Or the base of an unimaginable natural bridge.

"Statistics," he wrote, "however sizable, just seem to curl up to insignificance when they start wriggling against a creation so gorgeously symmetrical, so overwhelmingly majestic in itself, and so starkly splendid in its setting that the English language just lies down and begs for help when you try to describe it. I know this. The very first sight of it repaid for every new-laid blister upon my own setting, and that, I may state for the benefit of any interested blister-fancier, means right smart repayment."

Before I even finished the piece, I shared a copy with Morgan. "I'm trying to imagine him on a mule, going down the Cliff Canyon Trail," she texted me, about halfway through. She knew exactly where he was at that moment. In the 80 years between their expeditions, the Rainbow Trail hasn't changed much. And that's the ultimate hope for the backcountry. That it remain unchanged. That it be preserved and protected for future generations of explorers. "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed," Wallace Stegner wrote. It seems so simple - preservation and protection - yet as I write this, federal rangers in Southern Utah are standing guard over a four-panel collection of petroglyphs known as Birthing Rock. They're there because vandals scrawled racist and vulgar graffiti across rock carvings that had survived unscathed for more than a thousand years. That blasphemy comes just a few weeks after a rock climber drilled bolts into another set of petroglyphs. "It's wrong," the climber told Outside magazine. "It shouldn't have happened. It's just poor education on my part, and I do take full responsibility."

As he should.

I can't think of anything more shameful than the desecration of ancient cultural sites. These places are to Indigenous people what St. Peter's Basilica is to Roman Catholics. What the Western Wall is to Jews. What the Great Mosque of Mecca is to Muslims.

Like Birthing Rock, Rainbow Bridge is sacred, too. It's sacred to the Navajos, Hopis, San Juan Southern Paiutes, Kaibab Paiutes and White Mesa Utes. Morgan understands that. "Standing at the foot of the rainbow," she writes, "I bask in the bridge's sacred geology." If Mr. Cobb understood, he didn't say so. He did, however, write a description of the monument that bears witness to his reverence.

"So in a kind of trance, a thraldom of happy catalepsy," he wrote about his last look at the bridge, "while the inadequate tongue had frozen but the soul was quickened and the brain alert to absorb more and yet more of the beauties of it, I bided there until twilight made everything blurred, then dazedly stumbled away in the dusk, tripping over boulders and splashing through brisk eddies. It was just before the last of the sunset that the glory became almost too glorious to be borne. As the final benedictory rays played over the horizon and struck upon the upper reaches of the great span, what a moment before had been rufous, like a pochard drake's head, now flamed scarlet, like a tanager's breast; and mauve turned to royal purple, and palish green that was emerald and dead gray was all of a sudden opalescent and gleaming like so much live pearl. A steep mica bed on the parent cliff alongside picked up a slanted beam and became a cascade of diamonds; the broken canyon floor lit up like a friendly hearth of ruddy firebricks. And yonder through the crescent of the Bridge the heavens flared with flamings of crimson and with waves of blue and tattered gold."

The guy could surely write. It's up to us to protect and preserve the backcountry that he wrote about. And the sacred cultural sites that have been around for thousands of years. "Take only memories," Chief Seattle said. "Leave nothing but footprints."