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Labyrinth Canyon
| The lowest of the super saw-cut canyons, and the most memorable. A very special place. A short walk from river to opening in cliff. About as much farther to the first branch: you take the left. In perhaps a quarter or half mile you encounter a wall on the right with a wide, black stripe running from top to bottom: one of Labyrinth’s trademarks. A fine camping alcove is high on the right just downstream of the stripe. Soon you encounter a mini-Labyrinth in the floor of the big Labyrinth, a winding fluted inner canyon cut in the floor, perhaps six to twenty feet deep. Then, perhaps a mile from the Colorado, Labyrinth earns its name. Generally no more than two or three feet wide at the bottom and many hundreds of feet deep. Usually fluted, often dark, occasionally lit by shafts of sunlight, twisting and turning, often easily chimneyable (but not often leading anywhere)… About three miles of unsurpassed saw-cut canyon |
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GLEN
CANYONEERS: PLEASE CONSIDER
HOW TO LINK TO YOUR SITE HERE.
The rescuer who left us in Zion Canyon to take his bar exams, passed his exams, was elected to the Colorado State Legislature the following year, and became Governor soon after that. That is Dick Lamm, whose logical analysis of how we spend our limited funds for health care gave him a reputation—from those of more limited logical insight, I feel—of callousness. To those who feel limited resources can be self-deceptively declared unlimited if its for a good cause, I say study carefully our page on how not to look silly.
The geology enthusiast I met in 1949 went on to get his PhD, and ended up teaching geology at Princeton University. He also steered author John McPhee into far more interesting geology than McPhee had expected, and that has resulted in a whole new series of McPhee books. This is Ken Deffeyes, the geologist featured in McPhee's book, "Basin and Range." Ken was always fascinated by surprising puzzles and phenomena and contributed much to my awareness of strange mistakes that so many people make with no inkling that anything is wrong.
The errors made by our lost hiker when he identified "Clear Creek" by its high, vertical red walls are actually very common errors, errors only rarely recognized and often very difficult to expunge from one's thinking. For example, he had inverted the implication, "If Clear Creek, then red walls," to mean "If red walls, then Clear Creek." His error is easy for many to see, but not everyone—and the abstraction itself, Boolean implication, is much more difficult. We should like everyone to be able to recognize the commonality in his dangerous error of route finding and Wason's card selection puzzle, a puzzle we refer to often on our Web site. He also interpreted all his observations to fit his first hypothesis—that they had accomplished what they had learned to be impossible, crossing a saw-cut canyon—without attempting to construct alternative hypotheses. His learning was without real understanding, and his first hypothesis got sealed in a logic-tight compartment.
Furthermore, both
of our lost pair apparently had difficulty reading a map: another point
we make on our Web site: under "Accurate Maps." We always stress
that very often someone else is "seeing" some things very differently from
the way you see them. And with differences that seem to construct
mutual walls of misunderstanding between people.