Find your desert soul on a camel in the canyonlands

Text and photographs by Patrick Cone

In the predawn hours, a camp is covered in heavy frost. Finally, the dawning sun melts the ice crystals into a billion droplets that sparkle in the red light. Wispy cedar smoke rises rope-straight, high into the clear sky as cameleros emerge from warm sleeping bags to hot coffee. High walls and slick rock overhangs throw shadows across the deep water pockets and quicksand pools of McCarty Canyon in Southern Utah. Our caravan wades again and again across the meandering shallow stream, then climbs the sand bank to gather beneath three giant Fremont cottonwood trees, their leaves burning autumn gold.

By noon, the sun is strong.

"Hoosh, Hoosh."

With this command from the riders, the camels fold their legs like jackknives. Riders dismount, and lunches appear from saddlebags.

Another day of trekking is underway.

After Dr. Charmian Wright, a Park City, Utah, veterinarian and her husband, Gordon Croissant, a pilot, took a camel trek through Australia, they decided to launch their own trekking business in the West.

Park City Camel Ventures, the only commercial camel operation in the U.S., offers well-trained camels for special events, movies, parties, and trips through the craggy canyon lands of Utah and Arizona.

Camels' long legs devour distance, about 40 miles per hour at full gallop, and their broad, padded feet leave almost no track. They are very sure-footed, even on rocky surfaces.

Camels are ruminants with three separate stomach compartments. While they need to drink only every five to seven days, their thirst is legendary: they can drink up to 50 gallons of water an hour.

The camel's most prominent feature is its hump that contains all its body fat. With no fat elsewhere, its body feels extremely dense and solid, like a carpet-covered piece of wood. Besides the thick callous pads that it sits on, the camel has other peculiar adaptations to desert life. Long eyelashes, small furry ears, and closeable nostrils keep out sand.

Because a camel chews its cud, a bit won't work. Instead, it is controlled by a wooden nose peg connected to a normal rein that is pulled to indicate direction.

The five basic verbal commands are simple to master. Say "hoosh" and your camel folds up, drops to your feet, and you climb up into a fleece-lined saddle. Say "hut" and he stands. (Make sure your feet are in your stirrups; it's a long way down.) "Walkup" gets the camel moving, and "huthut" really gets him moving. "Heaah" is better left to someone prepared to ride like the wind.

Many centuries ago the camels' distant ancestors roamed the same high desert plateaus. According to paleontologists, the first camel, rabbit-sized, originated in North America nearly 40 million years ago. Over the centuries, larger species developed.

Over the millennia, certain species migrated southward through Mexico into South America and evolved into today's llamas and vicunas. Others crossed to Asia via the land bridge across the Bering Sea, exposed during the glacial ages. The camels that remained in North America were brought to extinction only 8,000 years ago, with human help, according to some sources.

The wandering Asian camels evolved into two distinct species that eventually were domesticated. The tall, single-humped Arabian camel, or dromedary, is still used widely in Arabia and North Africa. The two-humped Bactrian camel of central Asia is shorter and hairier.

In the 1850s, the U.S. Army imported hundreds of Arabian camels for duty in the arid Southwestern frontier. Lt. Edward Beale used these camels in 1857 to carry supplies for the survey of what would become Route 66 from Texas to California. Beale found camels ideal animals.

About 400 of the Army's camels were turned loose during the Civil War. Many were killed for meat by the Apaches, but the remainder roamed the West, with sightings well into the 1950s fueling new legends. Some of these involved the infamous Red Ghost, a giant red camel with a human skeleton strapped to its back.

In the late 1800s, some camels were used to carry cargo to mining districts in Nevada and California. But they frightened horses and mules so badly that the Nevada legislature passed a law in 1875 outlawing their use on public thoroughfares.

"Camels are very responsive to the way they're treated," says Dr. Wright. "They're less tolerant to bad treatment than horses and respond well to good care. They have very long memories. They know what's fair."

On the trail, a burnished sun is setting, casting golden light through the cottonwood trees and on the dark figures of the cameleros and their steeds. An onlooker might imagine that these are a strange apparition, brought on by the sun and heat. But the camels are real, and they appear to feel right at home.

Copyright ©1998 Cowboys & Indians

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