“From the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the top of the Rockies and back again” is how author and adventurer Brett LeCompte describes a walkabout he took in the early 1990s.
On March 10 at the Dolores Public Library, LeCompte will share images and stories from that four-month, 1,400-mile solo journey that circled the desert canyons and mountain peaks of the Four Corners region.
“It went amazingly smooth,” LeCompte said of the trip. “I lost 20 pounds, and it took a year before I did not want to eat everything in sight.”
He describes his epic pilgrimage as a “vision quest” combined with a “walkabout” of the Australian tradition.
“The concept is to send a person out to learn the land that supports you,” he said. “A walkabout is really an in-depth personal exploration of your homeland.”
His longest day was 26 miles; his shortest, a bushwhack that gained him just 6 miles.
“For me, ‘lost’ is a relative term: I was making my own route,” he said. “The trip gave me a profound sense of my home in the Four Corners.”
The biggest challenge was finding water during the desert portions of the trip. Discovering a watering hole that you were depending on to be dry is demoralizing, not to mention life threatening.
“I dug in wet sand until it pooled and drank from that at one point,” he said. “I had some close calls finding water.”
LeCompte wrote a book of the experience titled “Southwest Circle Quest, A Walkabout in the American Outback” Copies will be available at his slide presentation at the Dolores Public Library on March 10 at 6:30 p.m.