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.
