The Invitation
The call came in March 2022. My youngest brother was organizing a group trip to Canyonlands National Park in Moab, Utah: fourteen mountain bikers, four days, eighty-plus miles along the White Rim Trail. He needed someone to drive the SAG vehicle. Support and gear. Not a biker. Not the one doing the hard thing. The one following behind, carrying the supplies, making sure everyone had what they needed at camp each night.
I said yes before I fully understood what I was agreeing to.
That is, I have come to believe, usually the right order of operations.
The trip organizer's stated goal was simple: to explore a remote and iconic location with adventuresome people. A coming together of remarkable humans in a rugged, wow-inspiring landscape. Mountain biking with good friends in good places. But really, he said, to be inspired by places and people.
I was not going to bike. I was going to drive. And somewhere in that distinction was a lesson I did not expect to need.
Terra Incognita
Canyonlands is the kind of place that recalibrates your sense of scale. The canyon walls rise hundreds of feet on either side. The Colorado and Green Rivers carved the landscape over millions of years into something that looks less like terrain and more like evidence. Standing at the rim, you understand immediately why the old maps used to write terra incognita across places like this. Unknown territory. Not because no one had been there, but because some places resist being summarized.
The White Rim Trail runs about a hundred miles through the Island in the Sky district, a narrow two-track road that threads along a sandstone bench above the canyon floor. The bikers rode it. I drove it in a loaded 4Runner, leapfrogging ahead to each campsite, setting up, waiting, then doing it again. My pace was their pace. My job was to make sure that when they arrived, exhausted and covered in red dust, the camp was ready.
I had expected to feel peripheral. I did not.
What I found instead was that driving slowly through that landscape, alone with the silence, the canyon walls, and the occasional raven riding thermals overhead, was its own form of immersion. The silence at times was deafening. Not the absence of sound exactly, but the presence of something older and larger than sound. A stillness that the ordinary world does not offer.
The People You End Up With
One of the things that happens when fourteen people spend four days in a remote place together is that the usual social scaffolding falls away. There is no performance here, no professional context, no reason to manage impressions. You are just people, eating camp food, watching the canyon go dark at night, talking about things you might not talk about anywhere else.
The group was a particular kind of remarkable. Outdoor educators. Doctors working in remote medicine, in places from Yemen to Alaska. A social worker. A tech entrepreneur and his teenage son learning the trail. An architect who had traded Chicago for a town on the edge of the canyon. A high schooler on an e-bike, discovering that she loved this. People who had met through gap year programs, college soccer teams, and outdoor organizations were brought together years later by a single person's instinct to gather people in good places.
What struck me, watching them come into camp each evening, was the quality of their presence. No one was half there. No one was managing a mental list of things waiting back at the office. The trail had taken care of that. When you are pedaling stroke to stroke through that landscape, with nothing between you and the canyon but your own effort and the red dirt road ahead, the ordinary noise goes quiet.
That kind of presence is hard to manufacture. But the right environment creates the conditions for it.
Do Less. Be More.
I came home with a lot of red dust on the 4Runner and two phrases I have not been able to put down since.
The first: Say yes to all invitations from great people. Not because every invitation will be what you expect, but because the ones that stretch you rarely announce themselves as stretches. They arrive looking like logistics problems, like scheduling conflicts, like trips that don't quite fit. And then you go, and something happens that you could not have planned for, and you come back changed in some small but real way.
The second: do less, be more. I have thought about that phrase more than I expected to. Most of what the working world rewards is doing: more output, more activity, more visible effort. The calendar fills. The inbox accumulates. The measure of a productive day is how much got done. And there is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. But it does not go all the way.
Being more is harder to quantify and harder to schedule. It is the quality of attention you bring to a conversation. The ability to sit in silence without filling it. The willingness to show up in a place that is not about your expertise or your output, to be useful in an unglamorous way, and to find that the unglamorous thing turned out to be the whole point.
Driving the SAG vehicle was not the starring role. It was the supporting one. And from that position, carrying the gear, setting the camp, keeping the operation running so that fourteen people could do the hard and beautiful thing they came to do, I saw the trip more completely than I would have from inside it.
What the Desert Returns to You
Four days in a place like Canyonlands does something difficult to name and easy to feel. It reboots something. Not in the tech-product sense of a reset, but in the older sense: returning to a starting point, clearing the accumulated weight of ordinary time, ordinary urgency, and ordinary noise, and finding out what is still there underneath it.
What was still there, for me, was fairly simple. Curiosity. Gratitude. An appetite for the kind of connection that only happens when people are a long way from their regular lives. The recognition that some of the most important things I have ever done involved showing up somewhere I was not sure I belonged, in a role that was not the obvious one, and discovering that was exactly where I needed to be.
The canyon does not care what your title is. It does not care what your numbers are or whether you hit your targets last quarter. It is just there, patient and enormous, having been there for longer than the concept of productivity existed. Something about that is clarifying in a way that no off-site or team retreat has ever quite managed to replicate.
All I had to do was say yes.
It turns out that it is almost always the whole instruction.