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A/N. This is accurate southwestern US vistas, although I've taken some liberties with specific hikes ,changing locations a bit and adding some landscape from others in order to make the story a tad more dramatic in the next chapters.
Happy holidays to all!
Thanks for the reviews and reading.
Sam938
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Jack stirred, the truck's lack of motion waking him instantly. He pulled his sunglasses away from his eyes and stared out at the scenery. A white arch, nearly 200 feet across that spanned a canyon nearly a hundred foot below dominated the view, huge red buttes serving as a backdrop behind.
He rubbed his eyes. "Where are we?"
"Natural Bridges National Monument, sir. Sorry to wake you. I needed a break, and this looked like as good a place as any. Better. I've always wanted to see this, although I'd really love to see it at night."
"Why?"
"The sky here is a Class 2 on the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale."
"Uhuh."
She grinned. "Sorry, sir. It's the darkest sky ever assessed in the U.S. Understandable, considering the country we traveled through to get here. There's nothing for hundreds of miles around us. There were literally no structures to be seen the whole time you were asleep."
She glanced around her. "It's amazing here."
"Yeah, it is." He got out of the truck and stretched, staring at the view.
She got out as well. "ETA's about an hour to the where we leave the truck, sir."
"And that means?"
"We left the Henries about an hour ago." She pointed to the mountains barely visible to the west.
"Grand Gulch is to the south. Abajo Mountains to the north. We need to finish crossing Cedar Mesa and then climb Comb Ridge. The head of Butler Wash is in the Cheese and Raisins area on the other side of the Ridge. We can head in there, and drop off the truck. It's ten clicks in the canyon as the crow flies after that. Probably longer as we'll have to follow a smaller wash whose name I don't know and then drop into Butler somehow where they connect."
"Terrific."
"It's the easiest way in from the topos."
She poured some coffee from a thermos and handed it to him. He nodded his thanks and then headed to the back of the truck, sorting through the equipment.
"What are you looking for?"
"Rechecking the climbing gear." He pointed to the canyon view in front of them. "The Monument's relatively civilized, Carter. The rest of this country is completely wild. I'd rather not free climb with packs unless absolutely necessary."
She took a sip of coffee, and nodded her head, acknowledging the point. "So, you want to drive, sir?"
"You tired?"
She smiled. "Not at all."
"Then let's head out."
She grinned and started up the truck.
Jack scanned the countryside carefully as Carter drove them over Cedar Mesa. It was appropriately named. The land was deceptively flat with a huge cedar forest covering the mesa for miles, as far as the eye could see. But land was cut with cracks, canyons hundreds feet below, extending for miles, their sides sheer and unrelenting, denying access.
"Wow."
Jack watched, amused, as they approached Comb Ridge and Carter took in the engineering that had been necessary to conquer it. It was a monocline, a sheer sandstone block that extended for 40 miles in Utah alone and rose 800 feet above the mesa. There was nothing like it. It was a complete anomaly. He knew it from his time at White Sands, when he'd done a lot of traveling in the Four Corners, and so knew what the geology in this country was like, but Carter had never seen it before.
"Yeah. It's ok."
She glanced at him like he was out of his mind, and then caught herself and said nothing.
He grinned.
Once over the pass, Carter commented, "It's about another five miles or so to the turn off, sir, to the northwest. The turnoff might not be much of a road, in fact, probably nothing. We have to head into Cottonwood Canyon and then into the Cheese are Raisins area."
"What's the deal with the name?"
She glanced at him and smiled. "I have no idea. Maybe someone's really, really awful idea of a sandwich?"
"Like Elvis' peanut butter and bananas?"
She looked surprised.
"Before your time, Carter."
She grinned. "Actually not, sir. And I like peanut butter and bananas."
Huh. Well, that was a thought that he could do without. He stared out at the vista. "Turn on the left approaching."
They headed into Cottonwood Canyon, on a very old but still paved road for about a mile, and then Carter turned to the west on a questionable dirt road, even for his truck. As she continued to navigate what was clearly a track, and a bad track at best with canyon cracks on all sides. Mud from the latest rainstorms throughout the area added to the challenge, making traction difficult. He thanked the stars that he'd insisted on his truck and four-wheel drive.
He considered insisting that he drive and then rethought the idea. It was Carter at the wheel. She'd handle it. He glanced at her, and saw her smile as she finished a particularly tricky maneuver.
He put his shades on his eyes, and leaned back. It was Earth, after all. She'd pulled his ass out of far more tough situations than a dicey canyon road on Earth. Many times; in fact too many. Besides, she was enjoying it.
He grinned to himself, and let her deal.
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Sam parked the truck off the track in a sandbar underneath some cedars, still grinning at the drive. It had been fun. "We're here, sir."
"Great." The Colonel's tone was unmistakably his usual cynicism. He opened his eyes, got out of the truck, stretched, and looked around him. "We're in the middle of nowhere, Carter. Literally." He glanced at the cliff next to the truck. "Still don't see it."
"What?"
"Cheese and raisins."
"The yellowish sandstone layers *are* moddled with round dark red rocks, sir. Sort of.. raisin-y. And cheesy."
"Definitely cheesy."
"Actually, the strata are called-"
"Ack. Carter. Enough. Cheese and raisons is fine. Has a ring to it."
She smirked, and grabbed her pack out of back of the truck, rechecking the contents and then started to attach the tent to the back of her pack.
"Leave it." She looked back over to him, questioning.
"We don't need the extra weight. There are plenty of alcoves in the canyons."
"Gets cold at night."
"We'll deal."
She checked her watch. "It's 1600 now. The earliest ETA at the site by my calculations would be 1830, and that's if it's only 10 clicks in, which is more than unlikely in this terrain, and assuming we can cover four clicks an hour, also unlikely. Sun goes down at 1800 this time of year. The last part of the hike will be in the shadows. It could be as late as 1930 before we reach the site."
The Colonel shrugged. "Sleeping bags will be enough. Better to have the water, ropes, all your tech and… MRE's." He grimaced at the last and then threw her two two-gallon jugs of water. "Take those." He added two to his own pack as well.
"What's the plan, sir?"
He finished putting on his gear. "Hike in, find the site. I'll recon and if all checks out you can investigate stuff. The rest is up to the wackos running this show."
She swallowed back her annoyance. He had a point in leaving her outside the cave. The entities had reacted badly to her presence last time, and due to Daniel and Teal'c's desertion, they had no backup. She needed to stay back to keep him safe, and to be able to act if anything did happen. "Understood."
He looked at her, surprised. "No argument?"
"None, sir."
He glanced at her suspiciously and then shook his head as if to clear it. He shrugged his pack to a more comfortable position. "O - kay. Lead the way, Major."
She grinned and slid down a 50 foot-high bench of sand; the easy entrance into the side canyon that would lead them to Butler. The Colonel raised his eyebrows ironically.
"Fun."
He followed her in.
Two and a half hours later, she recognized that her backup estimate of the amount of time it would take to get to the site was more accurate than her first. The country was wild and unrelenting. Sure, she'd been in a lot of *really* wild, crazed country off world, but this was Earth; it was home. She'd somehow managed to let her guard down by that deceptively simple thought when making her initial calculations.
The Colonel didn't seem bothered by it. If anything, he appeared to be enjoying the trek. He smiled at her, and then gestured to take break. She sat down next to him, her back against a boulder, and grinned back at him as he handed her an energy bar and some water.
"Thanks."
"No problem." He leaned back against a second boulder hidden in the shadows and took a bite of his own food. "Any idea where we are?"
She swallowed and took a drink. "Actually, we're pretty close, sir. But the canyon -"
"Yeah, meanders, doesn't it."
Meander was one word for it, she supposed. Tortuous and winding were others.
The trek had started gently, the mesa top covered with juniper, pinyon pine and gamble oak. The cliffs rose gradually on either side of the arroyo as the Colonel and she headed down canyon, the hard sandstone wash scarred with pot holes now filled with water from storm that had swept through while they were at Powell.
Rocks, fallen cedar trees and branches, swept along with the sharp currents from hundreds of years of deluges, clogged choke points in the arroyo. They'd hiked around some and climbed others. Then the side canyon they'd started in had dead-ended with a huge run off, merging with Butler, 200 feet below.
She'd been sure they were going to need ropes to rappel, but then had noticed the ridge. Barely five foot across, two hundred foot above Butler Wash, it paralleled the canyon floor below it. They backtracked on it until they were able to scramble down the slickrock to Butler.
The canyon was a maze of red rock enclaves, sometimes miles in length, twisting in all directions. After a while, the wash opened up, a quarter mile across, with cottonwoods, golden in their fall glory; the grasses on the lower levels ignoring the orange- brown sand beneath them that should make survival impossible.
Water still gurgled through the wash, leaving small pools in shady spots and quickly dissipating in the high desert dryness in others.
As they moved towards the head of Butler, the canyon closed in again, only twenty or thirty feet across at the bottom, but the sides nearly two, then three, then four hundred feet above them.
She could see ledges higher up, and occasionally sited a ruin like the one they'd seen at Powell, most nearly invisible due to the Anasazi's long ago careful replication of the rock outcroppings on which they stood. The engineering was impeccable. The ruins were carefully protected and impossible to reach without ladders or rope.
They were fortresses in the wilderness.
She stared carefully at one. There. She could see that there were steps picked out of the vertical rock; difficult, if not impossible, free climbing. And there were petrogylphs on the sheer cliff walls nearby. Clearly, someone was telling a tale of the ruin.
She looked away and focused on the route in front of her, carefully making her way though the wash. The rabbit brush was in bloom, something she recognized from Colorado, its top a bright golden hue, spectacular when combined with purple asters, and red pestemon; red gamble oaks and then the green of cedar and pinyon pines making up the mix.
She looked above again, the wind picking up, and watched as clouds flew across the sky.
"God, it's beautiful."
"Yes, it is."
There was something in the Colonel's tone that she couldn't quite place. She stared at him curiously. He was just too assured, calm.
"You've been in this country before, haven't you, sir."
He shrugged. "I told you I was stationed in White Sands."
"That's 500 miles away."
"So, I took an occasional detour."
It suddenly clicked; the desert climate, the wilderness, his special ops background, his time in the Middle East. "You did survival training out here."
He shrugged again, not saying anything.
She watched the sun as it set quickly over the canyon walls, a fire red orange ball, followed by bright gold, oranges and purples reflected in the clouds that she would not have believed were natural colors if she hadn't seen it herself.
The Colonel broke the silence. "We need to head out, Carter. Sun goes down fast here, and as far as I can figure we're about a half hour from the site of your emissions."
He looked at the sky. "Moonlight should be adequate, though. We'll be able to see some. We'll reconnoiter a possible camp in an alcove nearby and then head to your emission site, which has got to be in yet another cave."
He glanced around at the sheer canyon walls, bare of life except at the mesa tops or on ledges carved out of the rock or gullies formed by avalanches, towering above them. "My guess is probably two- three hundred feet up. That's the usual place for ruins in this country."
"You *did* train here. Why didn't you tell me, sir?" She wished he'd talk to her.
He shrugged, apologetically. "It was a long time ago, Sam. I didn't think I'd remember. But being here, yeah, it comes back. It always does."
She didn't know what to say to that. The use of her name, his comment, and the resignation in his tone were all completely out of the norm for a mission.
He stood up and put out his hand to help her up. She grabbed his, confused. He never did that.
He grimaced, noting her confusion. "Just worried about the ankle."
"It's alright, sir. I'm fine."
"Let's finish this."