Chapter 37: Probing the Slots
We woke to a slightly cool morning, never having awakened in the night to flip the blanket over ourselves. Rather than flip it over now, I began rubbing some warmth into Kaitlyn’s front. Her back I’d warmed through the night, as she’d warmed my front.
“Morning, Davie,” she greeted me.
“Morning, my love,” I returned. “Ready to get up?”
“Yeah. Too bad we’ve got to get dressed to do it, though.”
“Indeed. It’s almost perfect skin-only weather now, and I’ll just get hotter the rest of the day.” I rolled away from her and slipped into the clothes she’d selected for me last night: cargo shorts, a tee shirt, and my Tevas. I’d be going commando today, of course.
Kaitlyn slipped into much the same outfit, except that she’d selected a tight set of jean shorts for herself.
We filled our pockets with our personal items, unzipped the tent, and rolled out to visit the campground’s facilities.
This campground was unusual among those in my experience: it had hot showers! Most places I tended to go I was lucky to find flush toilets. Sand showers are nice and fun, but hot showers are one of mankind’s greatest inventions, so I stripped down, hung my clothes up nearby, and jumped into the shower, taking along a cake of soap I kept in my shave kit for cases like this.
I finished cleaning up and got back first, so I started getting breakfast together, leaving Kaitlyn to take down the tent. We finished about the same time, ate, and packed our things up. I considered leaving the dishes dirty, being unable to clean them in our accustomed style with a magical blast of sand, overdressed for it as we were, but then I decided to just take them down to the bath house and clean them in the sinks there.
As we were loading our things into the truck, I happened to walk around the rear end, my eye caught by something new, something quite different from the few Oreos still stuck to the truck after our drive down the highway last night.
“Kaitlyn? C’mere please.”
She came over to my side and followed my eye line down to the license plate holder mounted beneath the tail gate. “Oh my god…” she breathed.
There, zip-tied to the thick metal frame that protected the license plate were two nude plastic dolls, a redheaded Barbie variant with the hair cut short and a darker “ethnic” Ken doll. Neither looked a thing like us, but the message was clear. “Sherry again?” I guessed.
She guffawed, “Probably!”
“I wonder how many people saw our little nudist friends on the road from Moab?”
Kaitlyn just laughed again.
“Do we keep them?”
Hands on hips, she cocked her head and studied the scene for a while. “Yeah, I kinda like ’em; they’re a great in-joke!”
“As you wish,” I replied. Looking up at her from our new mascots, I asked, “Ready to go get the kayaks?”
She shook her head. “There’s another place nearby we have to visit first. Gimme the keys.”
I handed them over, and she drove us a few miles further down the paved road that went past the campground, away from the highway, then turned onto a dirt road marked Wild Horse Road. We drove some forty minutes down it into the desert. Several times Kaitlyn looked knowingly over at me, but I didn’t ask where we were going.
We pulled off the road at some point into a rough parking lot, scarcely more than a flat place where the occasional parked car kept the desert grass and sagebrush stomped flat. We were the only ones here.
Kaitlyn got out, climbed into the bed of the truck, and began opening bags, selecting a few things from each, closing them, and handing them down to me to lock in the cab. She’d set aside an empty day pack, a few water bottles, and a small selection of snacky hiking food. Then, still standing in the small truck bed, she stripped naked and stuffed her things into the day pack and handed it down to me. “Your turn to carry the gear,” she told me.
I took from that that she meant for me to put my clothes in there as well, so I did, slung the pack on, and motioned for her to lead on. The scenery was better than if I’d led the way: I had a desert landscape out of a Georgia O’Keefe painting around me and Kaitlyn striding before me, bare-assed.
About half a mile up that wash, the scenery began to change subtly, the walls of the canyon closing in until they suddenly rose almost vertically, having closed down to just a few feet wide at the bottom and perhaps ten to twenty feet wide at the top.
“Welcome to Little Wild Horse Slot Canyon,” Kaitlyn announced, a broad grin on her face, her arms wide before her.
I had my smartphone out, having taken several pictures of the scenery, but this virtually begged for a shot, so I set it up carefully and proudly showed the result to Kaitlyn.
“Very nice,” she complimented me, “but it gets better further in.”
“I always find it’s better deeper in,” I replied with a cheeky grin.
“There might be some of that, too,” she agreed just as cheekily. We were at a three-way fork, and she said, “This bit to the right is Little Wild Horse. The bit to the left is Bell Canyon; we’ll be coming back down that way about lunchtime.”
As we walked and gawked, she told me about the place, one of several slot canyons in the area but that this one was nowhere near as famous as Lower Antelope Slot Canyon down near Page, Arizona. I found it amazing nevertheless. There were several places where it nearly closed in over us, the walls soaring dozens of feet upward, leaving only a narrow band of sky above us. I almost ran my phone’s battery down taking photos of the sights, mostly of Kaitlyn nude in nature.
There was one point where the rain had created a small cliff, some six to eight feet high. This was the only point where clothing might have been useful, but being mages, we quickly banished the minor scrapes we got pulling ourselves up the rough sandstone clifflet. We sat and refreshed ourselves at the top, then continued our hike.
Shortly after that point, the canyon widened first out to dozens of feet across, then opened onto the desert behind what Kaitlyn called a “reef.” The trail eventually came upon a Jeep road where she sat silently for some time, clearly in a trance, then said, “I don’t feel anyone around, but be prepared to toss the bag and go invisible. Off-roaders could come upon us without much warning.” She rose and continued hiking, nude in nature.
A couple of miles down the road, a marked hiking trail teed off back into the sandstone reef. “This is the top of Bell Canyon. It’ll take us back to the fork we left a few hours ago.”
About half an hour down that fork, Kaitlyn left the wash, climbing up a steep defile between two sandstone hillocks over ground far too rough for her to get up before she’d learned to toughen her feet magically. Perhaps a hundred yards up the defile, she said, “Leave our stuff here.” I put my smartphone in the day pack and set it down by a juniper tree, and then we walked on, doubling almost straight backward along the backside of one of the hillocks then up its shallower rear side, ending up atop it, looking down over Bell Canyon.
“This is the place, Davie.”
I didn’t need any more hints. I found a fairly flat space where she’d have a good view, oriented my head towards it, lay down, and began directing my body to erect. I could smell Kaitlyn’s womanly odor wafting toward me; she was apparently magically lubing herself up, impatient to begin. My guess was confirmed when she sat down almost directly onto my cock and began slowly bouncing on it, arms outstretched to the sky.
I entered rapport with Gaia and found Kaitlyn there. We entwined our senses magically, and I saw what she saw. It was a glorious sight, the pale crumpled sandstone vista before us, the feeling of our love between us.
«Aw, Davie, this is awesome!» she sent through the bond, the shishing wind passing over the desert and the coupling of our bodies the only sounds.
We spread out further into Gaia and found no higher intelligences anywhere around us, so we felt free to be as loud as we wanted to be, unlike back at the campground. Let loose we did.
“Ahhh, yeah, Kaitlyn my love, it is spectacular!”
The midday sun baked our bodies, the rising sun lighting Kaitlyn’s breasts up above me as they bounced and wobbled with our movements.
“Ah, ah, ah, yeah!”
We increased speed without explicit direction from the other, our pace escalating through the bond in perfect harmony, flying toward a crescendo we’d reach together in due course, no more uncertainty to it than to the progress of a masterfully written symphony. We were the instruments and the players, Gaia our stage.
“Ooooooohhhaaaaayeeeeeeeahhhhh!” we cried together, our culminations simultaneous, one of us collapsing upon the other; it wasn’t clear which between the orgasmic explosion and the unifying Gaia bond.
Minutes later, we discovered that Kaitlyn had somehow ended up on bottom, even though we had no clear idea how. We healed our scrapes and bruises as well as our developing sunburns, then held each other for a while, letting the desert breeze cool our sweaty bodies.
By mutual agreement, we stood some time later, retrieved the backpack, and drank most of the water within down, then resumed our hike. In our postcoital calm, still partially entwined by the Gaia bond, we did not speak. Words were unnecessary. We simply enjoyed nature and each other, leading, following, and walking side by side in a sort of walking ballet down the Bell Canyon wash.
We began to come back to our individual selves near the end of the canyon, where the walls narrowed again and developed hundreds of pockmarks, like Gaia’s own mailroom.
When we reached the fork in the canyon again, I dropped the day pack gently back to the ground, and we walked off a few dozen feet from it, then sat and probed down the canyon for other presences. We observed no one coming up, so we remained nude, hiking the rest of the way back down to our truck. We unlocked it, moved our stuff back into the truck bed, tossed the day pack onto the middle of the bench seat, then got on down the road.
I let Kaitlyn drive again. She seemed to know the area, and she seemed to like the visceral feel of mi burro, the sort of vehicle that talks to you through vibrations and growls. If you have to learn to drive a stick, this is the sort of vehicle to learn it on. I’ll never understand why people put up with quiet standard transmission cars, particularly when first learning to drive. You don’t need a tachometer to know when to shift in mi burro, only a single working ear.
She pulled off to the side of the road, dropped it into neutral, and put the parking brake on when we got to the tee with Utah Highway 24. “I’d love to keep driving like this, but I don’t want to scramble when we pull into town,” she explained. “You’re welcome to stay nude.” Then she amended it: “No, thou art commanded! Be thou nude!”
“Yes, ma’am!” I replied with a broad grin.
She pulled back onto the road, resuming our journey to Hanksville, Utah, a town so tiny it makes Moab look like a major city. Nevertheless, there are several restaurants and stores there, largely to cater to the tourist trade. We pulled into one of these, parked, put on our Tevas, and went inside to get lunch and cold drinks for the road.
The store was surprisingly capacious being part gas station convenience store, part tourist knick-knack store, and part restaurant. We went to the latter, got some great home-cooked burgers and English chips, sat down, and enjoyed them along with the other tourist-looking people in the place.
When we finished, we got our cold drinks, topped up the gas tank, and got on down the road.