We met a ranger in the canyon wash about five miles into the hike, hoping she could explain what we were seeing. This was in Horseshoe Park, Utah, a three-hour drive from where we were staying in Moab, much of it on dirt roads that tested our rental minivan’s fortitude. Tumbleweed and dust-storm country. The only living creatures we saw during the drive were cattle whose eyes seemed to ask, “What are you guys doing here?” In a state with many remote sites, this was my partner, her family and I’s furthest push off the beaten path. Still, like most such journeys, it felt worth the drive. Horseshoe Park is known for the Great Gallery. Cliff paintings estimated between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, but that’s mostly just a guess; nothing is known about the tribe or civilization that created them, and because of the pigments used, the Gallery is impossible to carbon-date. The paintings are … unique is the complimentary word, bizarre feels truer. Life-sized “portraits” in a blood-red pigment, human only in broad outline. Bodies shaped like coffins, heads resembling skulls, but to call them representations of the dead feels wrong when they emanate such living force. Animals dance in their chests. Patterns decorate in intricate detail. Powerful, frightening, and beautiful all at once. These figures aren’t hunting deer or gathered around fires—they simply stare back at the viewer. One of the scarce handful of other hikers we passed told us, in an awed voice I associate with churches, that no other paintings quite like these exist anywhere else in the world. “So what do these mean?” we asked the ranger. “Who made them?” The ranger shrugged. “We know basically nothing.” This both fascinated and irked me. I’d expected to drive back to the land of cell-phone service and find all the answers. After all, what can’t be explained in 2020? I could find out how these deep canyons got carved over the course of millions of years, what minerals made the rocks in this landscape glow so red. How, then, could we not understand everything about these paintings? The ranger (wearing a Park Service fleece despite the desert heat, which I admired) told us what she could. So little was known about the painters that anything archaeologists came up with would be little more than a guess. These paintings clearly meant something in some incredibly distant point of time; but we will likely never be able to experience or even understand that story ourselves. That night we drove to the fascinatingly named Dead Horse Point State Park to watch the sunset. The view got obscured by clouds; still, we had a great time sitting by the canyon rim, giddy with hiking exhaustion. And pulling out at dark, we were treated to something unexpected; a full moon, huge and heavy as only moons seen in unfamiliar places seem to be, rising precisely over the highest mountaintop. The canyons illuminated again, this time with moonglow. We pulled over. Photos were of course attempted—and of course they couldn’t capture what we were seeing. Someone commented on a strange sadness, despite or even because this was so beautiful; because this moment was inherently fleeting. We could try explaining it to others, but could never convey the feeling of unexpected delight and awe. And with time we might even forget ourselves what made the cold night feel so unique. Everyone talked about strategies of remembering. We even passed around a bag of beef jerky, trying to connect the particular smell and taste with this full moon in our memory, like Proust’s madeleine for hikers. We’ll try our best to remember. But I am trying to grow comfortable with forgetting as well. There is no way others will know exactly what a full moon over Dead Horse Point looked like on that particular night, or what this trip meant to us. I take comfort in that. In a world where it gets ever easier to type in a search browser and feel you’ve understood something, there is such pleasure in travel that cannot be explained or even understood. Only experienced and enjoyed.