Echo Choir

By Clark Frauenglass

Horseshoe Canyon

August 29, 2015

Turns out we have a very musical group. No one brought a guitar, so there hasn’t been much campfire sing-along, but in Horseshoe, we stopped for lunch in a natural amphitheater that projected your voice along the walls of the canyon for at least a mile. I had fallen behind to walk on my own for a bit, but the echoes made it sound like the group was just around the corner. When I finally caught up, the group was already sitting in the sand, staring at the rock art. Paula suggested that someone should sing in the amphitheater and everyone else should go down the canyon out of sight to listen. Then we started tossing around ideas for songs, and realized it would sound cool to sing in a round. Paula taught us the words to a simple round and we split into two groups on either side of the cave, singing to the walls, while Jen ran down and across the river to record the sound. The walls of the cave made our voices distort and reverberate so on the recording it sounds haunting and almost angelic. Soprano voices seemed particularly amplified, and a several soared above the others. The rest of the hike was a constant back and forth of people tossing snippets of song back and forth, trying to remember the strangest songs from childhood.