Want A National Park All To Yourself? Visit Canyonlands National Park In Winter

It was 12 degrees as we stood before the Mesa Arch in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park early on a Monday morning in January waiting for the sun to rise. But we weren’t complaining because we knew that we had this wild and magnificent place almost all to ourselves.

Photographers have gathered at the Mesa Arch to photograph the early morning light that unfolds into the vast, majestic canyonlands below since the previously obscure area became a national park in 1964. But on this day – the first workday after the New Year – there were but two photographers, Bryan from Denver and Ryan from Cortez, Colorado, and their companions trying their luck.
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We compared notes on our morning drives and hikes and realized that the five of us may have represented the entire human population of the 527-square-mile park at that moment. If you want to commune with nature but hate visiting our national parks out west when the roads and hiking paths are clogged with visitors, go now, in the dead of winter, when you’ll feel like you have some of our greatest natural treasures all to yourself. On a recent five-day road trip, I enjoyed blissful quiet at all three national parks I visited: Mesa Verde, Canyonlands and Arches.


Bryan had tried to photograph the Mesa Arch at sunrise last May but arrived too late and couldn’t get near the vista.

“We got there an hour before sunrise, but it was already too late,” he lamented. “There was a row of about 35 photographers here, all with their tripods spread out, and I couldn’t even get near the arch.”

We had no such problem on this morning but we did have to contend with the cold. As we waited for the sun to rise, Julia and Ryan regaled us with stories about her four years working in the ER of a hospital on an Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona.

“They don’t shoot each other,” Ryan said, when I asked if Julia treated a lot of gunshot wounds. “The Apache are still warriors. Shooting people is considered kind of wimpy. They’d be more likely to attack someone with knives, baseball bats, two-by-fours, you name it.”

It was an overcast morning and by 7:40 the sun was two minutes late rising and we started to fret. But a few minutes later, the sun peaked through and gradually blanketed the canyonlands below in a lovely, golden light. We could see for miles and the landscape of colorful canyons, mesas, and buttes was peculiar, wild and unlike anything I’d ever seen before.



The official Canyonlands map boasts that “Canyonlands is wild America” and that is not an exaggeration. Canyonlands is big enough that you can find places to escape the crowds even in the peak season, but in the dead of winter the whole place is blissfully empty. (It gets about half the number of visitors as nearby Arches NP.) The park has five distinct sections and I had time to visit just two, the Island in the Sky and Needles districts, which are both an easy day trip from Moab.




Island in the Sky is often referred to as the park’s observation tower because it provides a view of the canyons with the backdrop of three mountain ranges – the La Sals, the Abajos and the Henrys. I took hikes around Mesa Arch and near the Grand View point overlook and barely scratched the surface of what’s possible in this area.

Needles is a longer drive from Moab, but it’s worth the trek to see the massive sandstone spires that give the place its name. On the way there or back, be sure to visit Newspaper Rock, a remarkable collection of petroglyphs that were carved by Native American peoples between about 700 B.C. and 1300 A.D.




If you want to go way off the beaten track in this area, check out the view at the end of the Needles Overlook road, and on the way back stop off at Rockland Ranch, a unique community of modern day cliff dwellers, some of them polygamists, that is a few miles down a dirt road that forks off the Needles Overlook road.

And while you’re in the Island in the Sky vicinity, definitely check out Dead Horse Point State Park, which has amazing panoramas some 2,000 feet above the Colorado River.

On my last hike in Canyonlands, I sat on a rock and looked out at the Wooden Shoe arch and realized what I loved most about this place: the absolute silence. I live in Chicago, where it’s nearly impossible to find a truly silent place with no chatter, no cars zooming by, nothing. But this place, this place is so blissfully silent that you really do feel at one with nature.




A few caveats about visiting Canyonlands NP in the winter. Daytime high temperatures are typically in the 30s and 40s and you should be prepared for snow. Bring your own water and food – even the vending machines are shut down for the winter at Needles. The roads can be a bit snowy and icy (they were pretty clear when I was there in early January) but there are so few cars that you can drive at your own pace, and stop in the middle of the road to take photos whenever you want. And be extra careful if you’re hiking because no one is going to find you if you get lost in the winter.

I asked Kati Thomas, a park ranger at Canyonlands, if she thought I was on safe ground recommending Canyonlands in the winter and she didn’t hesitate.

“People should be prepared for snow, but it’s pretty unusual for us to have to close the roads for more than a few hours,” she said. “I think winter is a great, great time to be here.”




[Photo/video credits: Dave Seminara]

Monument Valley, Utah: Hollywood’s Wild West

The road unfolds downhill, straight as an arrow, and appears to dead end at an otherworldly collection of sandstone buttes and mesas. We’ve all been here before, even if we’ve never stepped foot in the state of Utah. If you find yourself driving south on Utah Route 163, you will feel a strong sense of déjà vu about 12 miles north of Monument Valley. If the vista seems familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it before in dozens of movies, commercials and music videos. When a producer is looking for a symbol of the American West this is where they come.
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The story of how Hollywood discovered Monument Valley starts with Harry Goulding, an audacious entrepreneur with a fifth-grade education who established a trading post in the area with his wife in 1924. During the Great Depression, Goulding and his wife, “Mike” loaded up their Model A Ford and drove to Hollywood with a suitcase full of photos of Monument Valley. Goulding turned up unannounced at the office of John Ford, a legendary Hollywood producer and was reportedly asked to leave.


Goulding supposedly went out to his car, grabbed his bedroll, and laid it out in the waiting room of Ford’s office, announcing that he wasn’t going home until he was allowed to see Mr. Ford. The secretary called security, but the person who came to escort him out happened to be one of Ford’s site coordinators, and he was enthralled by the photos of Monument Valley that Goulding had spread out on a table.

Within weeks, Ford’s team was in the area filming “Stagecoach,” and he went on to shoot six more films in the area. John Wayne and other Hollywood luminaries were in the area so often that Goulding’s Lodge became their home away from home. Wayne, Ford and Goulding gave English language names to many of the area’s buttes and mesas, and hundreds of westerns have been shot in the area over the decades, not to mention scenes from a host of other movies including “Thelma and Louise,” “Easy Rider,” “Back to the Future III,” “Windtalkers,” and “Mission Impossible II” to name just a few. It was also the place where Forrest Gump got tired of running, and last year Johnny Depp was in town to film scenes from “The Lone Ranger,” which comes out in July.
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Even if you haven’t seen any of these movies, you’ve surely seen Monument Valley in a Road Runner cartoon, in a commercial or a music video. But even though the place seems immediately familiar, I wasn’t prepared for how awe-inspiring the scenery is. Everywhere you look, there are towering buttes and mesas, with every shade of red imaginable, and the panoramas are completely untarnished by tacky development. There is no Starbucks, McDonald’s or any other chain within many miles of this magical place.


The area gets just a fraction of the tourist trade that the Grand Canyon gets and, at least in the winter and summer, most of the travelers are from overseas. I was glad to have the place practically to myself in early January but I couldn’t help but think that Monument Valley deservers a lot more visitors.

If you want to get a taste of Monument Valley’s Hollywood connection, consider staying at Goulding’s Lodge, which has comfortable rooms with great views, not to mention John Wayne movies every night. Either way, definitely check out their free Trading Post museum, which is filled with interesting movie memorabilia and trading post artifacts. I also highly recommend their guided backcountry tour, which gives travelers an opportunity to see areas of the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park that are off limits to non-Navajos and offers insights into Navajo culture and traditions.

According to Rosie Phatt, my Navajo tour guide, locals never get tired of Monument Valley’s breathtaking vistas, but they have gotten used to all the celebrities who descend upon the area.

“Johnny Depp was here in April when they were filming scenes for The Lone Ranger,” she said nonchalantly. “He stayed in his own RV and nobody bothered him.”



[Photo/video credits: Dave Seminara]

Experiencing Polygamy, Utah Style At Rockland Ranch

“Why do some people not like that we have two mommies?”

That was the first thing that 7-year-old Faith Foster asked me when I walked into her family’s home, which is carved into a 400-foot-high, ¼-mile deep rock some 30 miles from the nearest town in rural southeast Utah. Faith’s parents aren’t lesbians; they are polygamists.
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Mention the word Utah in a word association game and the first thing people will say is “polygamy.” Utah natives get a little tired of the jokes and stereotypes, but there is no denying that polygamy, or “plural marriage” as its practitioners prefer to call it, is a part of the state’s history and culture. In 2008, the Denver Post estimated there were about 37,000 polygamists in the state. Although polygamy is illegal and Mormons outlawed the practice more than a century ago, authorities in Utah don’t typically prosecute consenting adults who take multiple spouses.


Shows like “Sister Wives” and “Big Love” and books like Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” have stoked the public’s interest in polygamy, and the ongoing saga of Warren Jeffs, the leader of the break-off Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who is currently serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting children, has brought further scrutiny into the polygamous lifestyle. (The stars of “Sister Wives” have filed a lawsuit, charging that Utah’s law banning polygamy is unconstitutional and on January 17, a federal judge will hear arguments in the case.)

I wanted to meet a polygamous family because it’s a part of the state’s heritage that I wanted to better understand. I also have a personal connection to a bigamist – now deceased – that I never learned about until recently.

My father’s sister, now deceased, married a man whom she thought was single in Delaware in the ’70s only to see him taken away by the police after just a few months of marriage. The knock on the door came after his first wife got wind of the fact that he’d married my aunt and he was imprisoned as a bigamist. My aunt, who was one of the kindest persons I have ever known, had no idea that he had another wife living in another state and severed all ties with him.

Muffins for Polygamists

How many artisanal muffins should one buy for a polygamous family that includes a husband, two wives and 13 children? That was the question I faced on a wintry morning last week at the Love Muffin Cafe in Moab, Utah, as I prepared to visit the Fosters at their lovely, cave-like home in a community called Rockland Ranch, which is about 45 minutes away from Moab, a mountain biking mecca and a base for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.

The enticing muffins were $3 each but I didn’t want to shell out $40 or more for muffins, so I bought just a half dozen and resisted the temptation to eat any myself on the long drive out to Rockland Ranch.

I had arranged to meet Lillian Foster with a little help from Anne Wilde, a plural marriage advocate based in Salt Lake City who once owned a second home at Rockland Ranch, but could tell that she was apprehensive about meeting with me. When I called Lillian to set up the meeting, she explained that Enoch, her husband, and Catrina, Enoch’s first wife, were in Missouri.

“I’ll have to get my husband’s permission for this,” she said.

Somehow I doubted that he’d welcome a journalist into his home, and my fear magnified when I called a day later and Lillian said that she hadn’t heard from him. But shortly after I explained that I planned to visit Rockland Ranch whether she had time to show me around or not, Lillian called back and said that Enoch had agreed to the meeting.

Life on the Rock

Rockland Ranch is not the kind of place one would stumble across by accident. The community of about 20 families, most living in homes carved into a mammoth rock, is located on a dirt road off of a lonely, paved road that dead ends at a panoramic view of the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park.

As I turned off of Route 191 onto the Needles Overlook road, I noticed there was a parked car with a bumper sticker that seemed like a fitting introduction to the neighborhood. “Darwin is Dead. Jesus Lives.”

After a mile or two on the dirt road, a massive curved rock with solar panels on top and colorful houses carved within came into view. Bob Foster, Enoch’s father, a polygamist who had three wives, 38 children and 87 grandchildren, founded the community in 1979. According to Nancy Lofholm’s excellent story on the community in the Denver Post in 2008, Foster, who passed away four years ago, founded Rockland Ranch after being “excommunicated by the Mormon Church, stripped of his seminary teaching job and convicted of bigamy.”

According to Lofholm, Foster leased the Rock and the surrounding 80 acres from the state of Utah and spent the preceding decades “blasting and carving it into his vision of a Christian community ever since.” At one point in the ’90s, Foster even operated a B & B at the Rock that drew a mostly European clientele.

As I drove past a hand-painted 15 mph speed limit sign, I saw a home with 13 bikes parked in front and an American flag befitting a roadside Perkins restaurant and knew I’d arrived at the Foster family home.

A cute, freckle-faced girl answered the door and a mass of children scurried around the kitchen. Seven-year-old Faith proudly showed me her notebook, which had a full page filled with the same line – “I love my family very much.” I asked where their mom was and Faith, in turn, asked me why some people don’t like families with two moms. I was speechless and thankfully Lillian walked into the room moments later.

Dressed in fashionable low-slung jeans and the kind of country-western themed blouse that the star of the TV show “Nashville” might wear, Lillian, 25, immediately disabused me of the notion that only an unattractive woman with few marriage options would resort to being part of a plural marriage arrangement.

My first order of business was to make sense of the sprawling sea of cute, friendly kids whirling around the house. Lillian, who has been married to Enoch, 33, since she was 18, told me that she had five kids, ranging from 7-year-old Faith to 3-month-old Joseph. Catrina, Enoch’s wife of 15 years, has eight children, with a ninth on the way.

The Fosters home school their children – Lillian teaches the younger children and Catrina is responsible for the older ones. I was interrupting their school day but the kids seemed to view my arrival as a pleasant break from their routine.



Lillian gave me a tour of their impressive home, and if I hadn’t looked up at the natural rock ceiling, I might not have realized it was a cave dwelling. The family’s deep religious devotion was obvious – there was a bible on the table with their names embossed on it, and there was a sign taped to the bathroom door that read, “Did you think to pray?”

“Whose room is that?” I asked, pointing to a doorway with a sign that read “Man Cave.”

“That’s Enoch’s office,” Lillian said. “It’s kind of a joke because it’s actually the only part of the house that isn’t in the Rock.”

Lillian told me that she could show me her bedroom but not Catrina’s.

“Since she’s out of town, it just wouldn’t be right,” she explained.

After the tour, Lillian took me out for a tour of the community and told me a little about herself and the Rock. There were 18 homes, most of them built by her husband and some of his partners in the community, with four of them still under construction. It’s a mixed community with some polygamists and others who are in monogamous relationships.

Anyone who wants to live at Rockland Ranch has to pass a six-month “trial period” where they are expected to spend time in the community and ingratiate themselves with their future neighbors before they can buy a home.

Lillian took me into a few of the half-built homes, and showed off the community’s solar panels, their water system, swimming pools, playground and a place they call their “Charity House,” which has a non-profit, volunteer-run community convenience store, a small gym and an unfinished area that will some day house families that can’t afford to buy a house in the Rock.

We climbed up a series of wooden ladders so Lillian could show me the view from the top of the Rock and she made fun of how carefully I ascended the ladders.

“I thought you said you were a hiker,” she joked.

As I surveyed the alpine scenery, Lillian asked me how I felt about plural marriage and seemed to relax after I told her that while I would never want to have multiple wives, I saw no reason why other consenting adults shouldn’t be able to live however they saw fit.

“That’s why our country was founded,” she said, as we walked down towards the end of the Rock towards a cluster of solar panels. “It’s freedom of religion.”

I asked her how her parents (whom she said were now divorced, but had been in a monogamous relationship) felt about her marrying a married man at age 18.

“My father was thrilled,” she said. “Because he knew Enoch and he knows what a good person he is.”

She said that plural marriage helped her “become more like Christ” in that she had to accept and love Catrina, which strengthened her character. Lillian, who grew up in Kamas, Utah, claimed that she detected no jealousy on Catrina’s behalf when she joined their household and didn’t hesitate when I asked her if she’d mind if Enoch took a third or fourth wife.

“You don’t take more wives unless all parties agree to it, but if the Lord directs it then great,” she said.

I also asked Anne Wilde, who was in a polygamous relationship before her husband died, why she or any other woman would be willing to marry someone who already has a husband.

“Because it’s a principle that was in the Old Testament: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, and so forth,” she said. “There were 30 men mentioned in the Old Testament that had more than one wife. The Romans changed it to monogamy and we’ve had that ever since. But we believe it’s a biblical principle and Joseph Smith restored the principle of plural marriage. In order to receive the highest degree of the celestial kingdom you have to have more than one wife, living in harmony and righteousness.”

‘Against the Stereotypes’

Wilde said that polygamists don’t get marriage certificates after their first wedding; but they do have religious ceremonies, where they are given “priesthood sealings.” Some brides take their husband’s name, others do not; some dress in a traditional wedding gown but not always; and many couples host fairly standard wedding receptions, even if it isn’t a first marriage.

The Denver Post story asserted that five of Rockland Ranch’s families were exiles from Warren Jeffs’s compound in Colorado City, Utah, and Laura Lofholm, the author of the piece, told me in an email that Jeffs kicked the men out because he saw them as a threat to his harem. Lillian denied that anyone living at Rockland Ranch had a connection to Jeffs, whose group once numbered about 10,000 strong, and insisted that she found him and his followers as repellant as the rest of the country. Anne Wilde was equally emphatic in denouncing Jeffs.

“We’re against the stereotypes – child abuse, welfare abuse, underage marriages,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Salt Lake City. “Those things have taken place, mostly in the FLDS community thanks to Warren Jeffs. We are very much against those things. We’re law-abiding citizens in every way except when it comes to polygamy – but that’s one thing we won’t compromise on.”

I told Lillian that Faith had asked me why some people didn’t like the fact that they had two moms and she said the question probably came up because Faith told a stranger at the supermarket one day that she had two moms and the woman gave them a dirty look.

“I hated to have to tell her that some people don’t approve of our living situation,” she said.

Lillian asked me about my life and as I briefly outlined all the places I’ve lived in or visited, the gap between our life experiences seemed vast.

“I’ve been to all the neighboring states plus Missouri one time,” she said. “But I don’t get a chance to leave this rock very often.”

I asked Lillian if she could introduce me to other members of the community but she said no one else could see me on “short notice.” I felt like the family was trying to manage my visit but after saying goodbye I decided to wander around a bit on my own. But on a cold weekday morning there was no one out and about.

I drove around to the back of the Rock and was surprised to see four or five freestanding houses, plus two rather dilapidated trailers that Lillian never mentioned. Just as I was beginning to wonder why the backside of the Rock wasn’t on my officially sanctioned tour, my rental car got stuck in the snow.

When I left the house, Lillian was getting ready to nurse Joseph, and the last thing I wanted to do was go back to the house and tell her that I decided to snoop around the back of the Rock and now needed help pushing my car out of the snow. As I made a huge racket spinning my wheels in vain, I had a bad feeling that someone was going to come out of one of the trailers with a shotgun, but I eventually managed to push and maneuver the car out of the snow.

As I drove away from the Rock, I thought about Faith Foster and the question she asked me. As a country, we’ve grown much more tolerant of alternative lifestyles in recent years. But are we ready to tolerate plural marriage? Should we be that tolerant? And will society judge Faith and her siblings harshly because they have two moms and a dad? Someday, I hope to return to the Rock to find out.



[Photo/video credits: Dave Seminara]

A Skeptic Visits A Navajo Medicine Man

I’m sitting on a humble metal chair inside a traditional eight-sided Native American hogan, made with wood planks and packed dirt, trying to work up the courage to ask an intimidating Navajo medicine man if he has the power to heal me. The rich, deep red clay floor looks like the tennis courts at Roland Garros. A wooly sheepskin rug lies before us, a small American flag is hung on the wall, and there’s a loom with a colorful Navajo rug in the corner.

Over by the door, which faces to the east, the direction of the morning light, where Navajos believe that all good things come from, is a wood-burning stove. The smell of burning cedar fills the crisp winter air and the crackling of the fire punctuates the gaps in our conversation. Outside the hogan, the towering buttes and mesas of the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park lend an almost mystical aura to the place.


To my right is Herman Chee, a 60-year-old Navajo medicine man, and his grandson, Larry Holliday, who serves as an interpreter. Chee speaks some English, but is more comfortable speaking Navajo, an oddly melodic tongue with no alphabet that the U.S. military used to confuse Japanese code-breakers in World War II. Holliday is a baby-faced young man who is wearing a straw hat and has a blue handkerchief tied around his neck. He smiles easily when I ask his grandfather questions and radiates warmth.

Chee is a serious-faced man wearing a blue bandana, a long turquoise necklace and elaborate bracelets. His bulky medicine bag is on the floor between us and it looks like the sort of briefcase a pharmaceutical rep would schlep around hospitals and office parks. Each time I ask a question, he closes his eyes, grimaces and turns his head skyward before relaying his answer in Navajo, often using hand gestures to reinforce his points. It isn’t clear if my questions are annoying him or if he’s channeling some sort of spiritual guidance. My instinct as a journalist is to keep the interview impersonal but I have multiple sclerosis (MS) and I can’t leave this hogan without asking him if he’s confident he could heal me.

When I decided to visit Monument Valley, which sits right on the Utah/Arizona border inside the Navajo Reservation, the largest Native American reservation in America, I resolved to find a medicine man. It sounded like a fine idea but finding one proved to be a tribulation. Legitimate Navajo medicine men don’t have websites or Facebook pages and they don’t advertise in the white man’s Yellow Pages.

A contact in Utah’s state tourism office introduced me to Ronnie Biard, the general manager of Monument Valley’s Goulding’s Trading Post and Lodge, who agreed to help me find a medicine man.

“Finding a medicine man isn’t as easy as it used to be,” Biard warned. “It’s kind of a dying art.”

Patients use medicine men to cure them of illnesses but also to restore their spirituality, or purge bad mojo that comes from experiences the Navajo consider taboo, like seeing a dead body. According to a story in USA Today, some insurance carriers in the southwest cover ceremonies performed by medicine men, which can cost thousands of dollars. Medicine men are highly respected in their culture, but a few have abused that power in recent years.

In September, Francis Nez, a medicine man from Gallup, New Mexico, was charged with two counts of sexually assaulting members of his own family, and in 2007, a Navajo medicine man named Alden Chee (no relation to Herman Chee) was convicted of sexually assaulting a female client with a mental disability. Two other medicine men – Herbert Yazzie and David Filfred – were also convicted of rape in the last decade.

Biard asked if I was willing to pay the medicine man for his time and although I’ve never paid anyone for an interview, I was also asking the medicine man for a consultation or a service, so I felt that I could justify it. I told Biard that I wanted to ask the medicine man how they would cure someone with MS and he said that his wife also had MS and had used a Navajo medicine man to try to help improve her condition.

“She went to a sweat lodge and had them perform a ceremony for her several years ago,” he recalled. “I think it made her feel better for a while but I don’t think it really worked.”

“How much do you think they’ll want to meet with me?” I asked.

“I’m just going to throw a number out, and it’s possible they won’t charge at all,” he said. “I’m going to say $200.”

That was more than I could commit to, so I asked Biard to try to find a medicine man who’d be willing to meet me for $50. A few days later, Biard called to tell me that he’d found a medicine man willing to work with my modest budget and the following week, I found myself in the hogan with Holliday and Chee.

Chee tells me through his grandson’s interpretation that he “was picked by the creator, the element, the spiritual people,” to become a medicine man after his wife became very sick about 27 years ago and was treated by another medicine man who healed her.

“After the ceremony was done, she was healthy,” he says. “She recovered and to this day, she’s alive.”

Chee says that medicine men can help relatives but they can’t help themselves or their spouses.

“A lot of the people who come to see me were hit by lightning, which disturbs their spirit,” he says, when asked about his patients. “Or if they see a dead body. We Navajo are very superstitious, so when we go to a funeral, that interferes with our spirit.”

“So how would you treat someone who is struck by lightning?” I ask.

Chee says that he has instruments, tools in his medicine bag to treat them, but when I ask to see them he closes his eyes, grimaces, tightens his jaw, exhales deeply and is silent for several moments. I can hear the crackling of the fire and a bird squawking in the distance as the anticipation builds. I’m like a child hoping to get an ice cream cone.

“In the traditional way I learned from my teachers, these instruments were given to me to use in ceremonies, so this stuff is sacred,” he says. “It wouldn’t be right to bring them out just to show them to people.”

Chee tells me he was in the Air Force many years ago and has worked as a bus driver and a carpenter but is now simply a medicine man. I ask him if he refers very sick patients to medical doctors and he shakes his head dismissively.

“Most of the time, I don’t,” he says. “I can remove and fight witchcraft and illness. I’m a crystal gazer and a hand trembler. I help a lot of patients, even people with cancer. I’m so positive about my ceremonies, that I don’t usually recommend doctors.”

He says that his clients have to make a reservation to see him and that they pay him for his services, or if they don’t have money, they offer him turquoise, buckskins, sheep, jewelry, horses or even cows.

“What do you do if you get really sick?” I ask. “Do you visit another medicine man or go to a hospital?”

“I go to a doctor only if I have a severe illness or broken bones,” he says, as Larry gets up to add some logs to the fire. “But if I just have a fever or small illness, I go to another medicine man.”

Larry tells me that his grandfather wants to know more about me and I see this as the opening I’ve been waiting for. I explain that I have MS and would like to know if he’s treated people with this disease and if so, how and what was the outcome.

“There is a ceremony that can be done for this,” he says. “But you have to make a reservation.”

I suppose it makes sense – you don’t walk into a medical doctor’s office and expect to be treated on the spot – but the response caught me off guard and I wondered if they were expecting me to ask for a price quote. Perhaps they sized me up as a typical ignoramus who rolls into town and expects to have some natives do a tribal dance on the spot and I didn’t want to be that guy.

“How would you treat me?” I ask.

“After you make your reservation, I will go to the Sacred Mountain and ask the elements, all the different gods how to treat you. (The four sacred mountains mark the traditional boundaries of the Navajo Nation.) And I will get all those herbs and plants, bring them home and I will give you the medicine bundle. And I will build a fire and talk to the different gods to invite them to the hogan. I will look in my crystal and X-ray you with my crystal, from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head and that’s where these elements and different gods will talk to me and tell me how to treat you.”

“But does it work?” I ask.

Both men look at me as if to say, “Well of course it works, you damn fool. If it didn’t, why would we do it?”

“After the ceremony, you have four days where you don’t shower,” he says, after a long pause. “You’ll be covered in herbs and medicines and given some prayers and songs. They will put you back together in one piece. All the evil, the taboo will be left behind. It’s helped a lot of people. Five days later, patients come back and say ‘I feel much better.'”

I’m a skeptic by nature and I’m really not the sit in a circle and bang a tribal drum with people wearing tie-dye and taking peyote type of guy. I believe in science and drugs, not spiritualism and native healing. But after seven years of daily injections of a medication that would cost $50,000 per year if, God forbid, I was uninsured, I want to believe that Herman Chee, sitting next to me here in this hogan can cure me. Fuck injectable medications, I’m in the Navajo Nation now.

“To respect our ceremonies and traditions, you have to witness them,” Chee says, when I ask if white men are usually skeptical of his powers.

I have a deep respect for the Navajos and their traditions but I’m from another world, another culture. Still, half the battle in fighting illness is mental. If you believe you’re getting better, you can actually feel better.

But I resist the temptation to make a reservation for a ceremony because I don’t want to leave this hogan as a skeptic buying a ceremony just to test if it works, because under those circumstances, the experiment is doomed to fail. Herman tells me that he makes people feel better and I believe him.

I want to ask him about the three Navajo medicine men who were charged (two have been convicted so far) with sexual abuse crimes, but decide to lighten the mood first by asking if he knows of any cures for hangovers. As Larry translates the question, a huge smile breaks out across Chee’s distinctively featured face for the first time and both men begin to laugh hysterically before Chee responds.

“Give them another beer,” he jokes.




Medicine men don’t cure hangovers but they can help treat alcoholism, he says. I ask about the criminal medicine men and Chee says he doesn’t know them and knows nothing about their cases. He estimates that there are about 200 Navajo medicine men on a reservation the size of West Virginia with a population of nearly 300,000. But he suggests that they probably weren’t real medicine men to begin with and says that those who abuse their craft will have to pay for their crimes.

We step out of the hogan and the luminous glow of the towering, ageless buttes and mesas off on the horizon lend our meeting a fitting denouement. In these parts, where the landscape hasn’t changed much in centuries, it feels normal to be meeting with a medicine man. But Holliday and Biard mentioned that medicine men were becoming harder to find and I want to know if there will still be medicine men in the Navajo Nation 20, 50 or 100 years from now.

“Not too many young people are studying to be medicine men now,” Chee concedes. “But medicine men are always going to be here. Our prayers are always going to be here. Our language will always be here. That’s our survival. One hundred years from now, there will still be medicine men here.”

[Photo and video credits: Dave Seminara]

Photo Of The Day: Stand-Up Paddling On The Colorado River

The confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers in Utah is a maginificent sight for the adventurous traveler. To see it from above is one thing – you can access it by trail in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park – but to see it from the ground is quite another.

Today’s Photo of the Day comes to us from Flickr user Terra_Tripper, who paddleboarded to the confluence of the two great rivers of the West – an up-close way to explore one of America’s greatest natural spaces.

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[Photo credit: Terra_Tripper]