"Upon all sides the deep and loathsome valley, Trembled so..." — Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy Canto XII
No bubbling river of blood courses through Hell Canyon, as in Dante's seventh circle of hell. Instead, the bedraggled corpses of 2000's arboreal apocalypse, the Jasper Fire, molder in their open graves. For now their graying hulks seem seem as permanent as the violent souls boiling in the Phlegethon.
Maybe Jasper's flames never flickered out. They just seeped into into the scene, where they're await reignition like a Bonnie Tyler lyric lying dormant in a scrapbook or a drawer. A flick of the wrist and out slips a gravelly, game-on "Forever's gonna start tonight." Tonight, really? Hell Canyon elk (hellk?) munch green wisps of fire-grass while you think what you should pack.
Every fold of Hell Canyon flexes with alt-eternities, like one of those "choose your adventure" kids books minus an exit. Even the rocks are up to no good.
I don't know much about death metal, a genre so legion with sub and sub-sub genres, that how could you? There are lures though: the cover art, the fonts like Gordian thickets of mutant Baphomet antlers, and the drum technique called a blast beat, a kind of amphetamine-martial rhythmic propulsion in which the drummer's arm becomes a machine gun bolt. The blast beat's staccato sonic attack feels like the soul-petrol that might motor you through this parched valley.
As in death metal cover art, or the earlier apocalyptic art that inspired it — take John Martin's "The Fall of Nineveh" — there is a cinematic quality to the carnage.
Armaggeddon isn't generally imagined on a plain. In Martin's "The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah," sky-borne fire careens down hillsides and city walls, earth and sky coalesce as the city becomes a vortex of woe. A canyon like Hell can receive, or roil its atmosphere, like a skater bowl for the thunders, an off-ramp for the Four Hogmen of Sturgiscalypse streaming fire on their way to the Gathering of the Juggaloes Below.
You can explore Hell Canyon via two hiking trails — the 5.6 mile Hell Canyon Trail located just off Highway 16, across from Jewel Cave National Monument, or the 3.5 mile Canyons Trail on the Monument side. Both can be combined for a longer canyon tour.
The JCNM Canyons Trail walks the bottoms of Hell and Lithograph Canyons. Since lithographs were a method for mass-marketing fine art, I was kind of expecting spell-binding vistas. Walking the canyon bottom, it's more the kind of place to focus on the details — colors embedded in the rocks like melted crayons, how charming poison ivy starts to look this time of year.
There are several Forest Service roads that trace along upper and lower levels of Lithograph Canyon, accessible from FS 278, off Highway 16 east of Jewel Cave. FS 278 runs out at a fence separating the Monument from the Forest. Your correspondent walked the unused ghost road past the fence, to where it linked up with the Canyons Trail, but the best views of Lithograph Canyon are probably from FS 1G, which offers an overlook.
Just west of JCNM, FS 277 (or Hell Canyon Road) meanders deep into Beelzebub's gutter. The first four miles or so are improved gravel, after that you can keep going till it hits the 272, but you'll need a high-clearance 4WD. Most of this is Forest Service land, though there are occasional private tracts, so be aware of where you are. Though it's hard to improve on the Hell Canyon trail for your HC experience, a drive down Hell Canyon gets you more — more desolation, more arbor-clysm. And canyon wall caves to be discovered and explored. Limestone is versatile stuff, a shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic fondant in Lucifer's nimble fingers.
A few miles west of Hell Canyon Road, FS 668 can get you to a fraternal pair of limestone buttes, Red and Yellow.
Again the road gets rougher as you go. (When I was in high school in Knoxville, certain kids could afford to and did buy small pickup trucks and lower them to a centimeter off the ground. The kids who did this equipped their trucks, which were not Ford F-150s, with loud woofer systems so that they could listen to a particular type of bass music. This wasn't Miami bass or West Coast lowrider music or bass-heavy hip hop. There were no lyrics. Both graphically (on the cover art) and sonically, it was sort of like Hardees had ventured into bass music. At that time though, the pursuit of niche pleasures — like feeling every dip and 808 kick in your Adam's apple — looked poised to go universal. Between then and now that Nissan hardbody beached itself on the high center of the rutted road of economic time. And that's probably what would happen to a low-clearance vehicle on FS 281.1V.)
Approaching Red Butte from the East, you can just peep its namesake capstone through the trees, but without a cyclone haircut old Red is at a competitive disadvantage with her cousin Yellow.
The best time to visit Yellow Butte is in the late afternoon, when the sun streams down through the trees on this apricot chiffon battleship. You can climb to the top for views of Red Butte, Surveyor's Hill, Elk Mountain and Antelope Ridge.