WORSHIPPING THE GROUND HE WALKED ON

FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARS, I've been following the footsteps of a ghost around the canyons of Northern Arizona and Southern Utah. Let me explain. In 1919, Charles L. Bernheimer, a cotton-goods manufacturer in Manhattan, began taking annual monthlong pack train expeditions to the desert Southwest. His dreams of Wild West adventures had begun in his native Germany, where he'd grown up reading James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and Zane Grey's novels. After high school, he'd moved to New York to work for his uncle's textile manufacturing company, eventually becoming its president. And his success and relative proximity to the Southwest allowed him to bring his youthful fantasies to life. Bernheimer funded his expeditions on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History, contributing to the museum's archaeological research and archives. His stated ambition: “to turn my vacations into something more substantial, to do in a small way what our big explorers and discoverers were permitted to do on a heroic scale.” He hired a supergroup of guides: John Wetherill and Ezekiel “Zeke” Johnson, archaeologist Earl Morris, and a rotating cast of Navajo and Anglo cowboys. The band of explorers stayed together for more than a decade, from 1919 to 1930.

Bernheimer made transformational pilgrimages to the fabled Rainbow Bridge, Navajo Mountain and the surrounding canyons. In 1922, he popularized a trail from the south side of Navajo Mountain that would spur the development of Rainbow Lodge two years later. In 1923, his explorations expanded to Canyon del Muerto, now part of Canyon de Chelly National Monument, in Northern Arizona.

After his trips, Bernheimer inspired other tourists to head southwest by penning articles about his adventures for National Geographic. In 1924, he published Rainbow Bridge: Circling Navajo Mountain and Explorations in the “Badlands” of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona.

Bernheimer's book kept me company while I lived alone in my Jeep during the winter of 2019, one of the snowiest on the Colorado Plateau. His adventures resonated, and not because I, a nomadic freelance writer, had anything in com-

Man with a wealthy businessman from New York. Exactly 100 years earlier, Bernheimer's first expedition had passed right by my campsite in Utah's Bears Ears National Monument. His whimsical tone directed me not only to turn the page but also to follow in his path.

Another of Bernheimer's stated goals, at least early on, was “to instill a love for nature even in its bleakest and sternest mood where the conventional exhibits of beauty are not found, but where beauty, if the traveler wishes to see, exists in fullest measure, and to urge upon others to do as I have done.” By 1924, though, his objectives had changed, and he cautioned his readers, “I do not recommend that others follow in our footsteps, excepting for scientific purposes.” I haven't listened. Instead, I've spent the past four years attempting to retrace many of his routes.

BERNHEIMER HAS LED ME around Navajo Mountain, to Rainbow Bridge, on climbs up seldom-scaled mesas, through Canyon del Muerto, and on a 300-plus-mile backpacking trip through Bears Ears and into the Glen Canyon backcountry. Despite my quixotic obsession with following his long-erased footprints, swaths of his travels remain unvisited by my own feet. In 10 years, Bernheimer covered a lot of ground.

At first, I was grateful to have even one friend join me on these unusual hikes. My family and friends accepted the way I talked about Bernheimer as if he were a dear old friend. What those off-piste, map-free outings lacked in certainty, they guaranteed in exquisite solitude, sensual Navajo Sandstone walls and glimpses into the past.

In time, these quirky outings guided me toward an expedition team of my own. It turns out there are other folks as obsessed about Bernheimer as I am. Harvey Leake (Wetherill's great-grandson), historians Fred Blackburn and Jim Knipmeyer, and archaeologist Bill Lipe all passed along their research and hard-earned clues to help me along.

Historian, guidebook author and prolific desert hiker Steve Allen has covered nearly all of the terrain that overlaps with Bernheimer's travels. A few years ago, he began sharing his maps with me in the hope they might help fill in pieces of the puzzle. Then, in the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022, he organized two backpacking trips in the canyons of Northern Arizona, within the Navajo Nation backcountry, to further help me travel back in time.

Bernheimer endearingly referred to his squad as “the rough and ready soul corral,” and our present-day team — environmental lawyer Joro Walker, pioneering technical canyoneer Jenny West, conservationist and artist Giles Wallace, corporate event planner and philanthropist Julie Marple, and metalsmith and history buff Joel Arnold - lived up to that level of passion. Where Bernheimer's team used upward of 40 horses and mules to haul gear, we relied on backpacks. Thankfully, outdoor equipment has evolved in the past century. No tents were used on Bernheimer's trips, just tarpaulins. We wore bright technical shirts, down jackets and Gore-Tex hiking boots — another contrast with Bernheimer, who dressed like a dandy in the desert, wearing a starched white shirt and tie. The rest of his team dressed like cowboys, in work pants and flannels. My felt-brimmed hat was our only nod to the 1920s expeditions' style.

Like Bernheimer's primary cast of explorers, almost everyone on our team was between the ages of 55 and 70. Like Morris, I was the outlier, still in my 30s. Not that age matters much: Carrying 11 days' worth of food, and occasionally several gallons of water, is not for fair-weather backpackers, and these were some of the strongest athletes I've ever met. It's impossible to explore every nook of canyon country in one lifetime, but the collective wisdom of this team, and of Bernheimer's, reminds me that it might be possible to scratch the surface if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, year after year, for decades.

Our objective on these backpacking trips was to piece together the most puzzling portions of Bernheimer's 1921, 1924 and 1927 expeditions. Navigating complex canyon networks and traversing dry, exposed uplands blanketed with black brush is challenging, even with modern maps. In the 1920s, U.S. Geological Survey maps were not complete, So Wetherill, Johnson and Diné guides such as Natsisan ushered Bernheimer based on their encyclopedic memory of terrain. Bernheimer's expeditions carried the existing maps and plotted new details. After the trips, Morris used Bernheimer's field notes to sketch maps in pencil. Often, the destinations were mislabeled, outdated or marked by Navajo place names. Bernheimer also made up names, such as Octagon Butte, that still are used on modern USGS maps. Allen's extensive knowledge provided immeasurable assistance. He has expertly collected and documented desert stories and history in Utah's Canyon Country Place Names (which spills over into Northern Arizona). Still, Bernheimer scrambled the information to a degree that every turn we took was a chess move. Each time we confidently decided, “This is it!” about a canyon or spring, we'd walk a few miles farther the next day, look around collectively befuddled and ask each other, “Wait... maybe this is it?” Just getting to the start of our spring trip, an old and now seldom-used stock trail, would have been impossible without the help of Navajo Mountain local Frederick Burns. We piled into his pickup truck with our backpacks at the start of the trip, and he warned us that the road might be rough. Driving through a maze of unmarked dirt roads through the piñon-juniper forest, he announced, “I kind of know a lot of roads.” But there was no clear road to be