At last, we saw it. It was a flawless pool of water, clear as glass, cool, shimmering blue, with a soft sandy bottom, welling miraculously out of the dry desert rock. After five days in the hot, sun-baked canyon, heaven was wet, cold and right in front of us.

It was morning on the last day of our five-day hike through Grand Gulch Primitive Area, a BLM-managed canyon on the wild, isolated Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah. As always, we were stalking water. Quiet filtered down through the afternoon desert light, settling on the valley floor. The serrated red rock walls rose high on all sides. We were at the end of a narrow side gully called Polly's Canyon, halfway down the 52-mile stretch that snakes from the Kane Gulch trailhead all the way to the cascading San Juan River.

A week before, I had been gritting my teeth through another Montana spring. Winter doesn't give up without a tough fight in the Rocky Mountains. Each spring day is an agonizing mix of feeble warmth and frigid snow. In order to remain sane, I buried myself in work. My life narrowed to the tap-tapping of the little wand on my PDA, the glare of a computer screen and lunch appointments with people I didn't like. I had all the usual advantages of a paying job: money, nice clothes and a car that worked. However, excess had not made me grateful, only grumpy. I longed for more time, not just a few stolen hours, but days on end free of worry and deadlines.

I returned home from work one day to find Michael, my ordinarily even-keeled companion, throwing camping gear into a bag. He was ankle-deep in maps, maps with colorful names like Indian Creek, Skull Valley and Mexican Hat. Seeing me in the doorway, he grinned wildly, not unlike a coyote that has come across some idle prey.

"We're going to the desert," he said with conviction. "Pack light."

Michael viewed a visit to the Four Corners as nothing less than an annual pilgrimage, his own personal desert haj. To prepare, he would devour Edward Abbey, Navajo and Hopi writings, and Terry Tempest Williams. In some years, he brought whatever girl was currently in the picture. In others, he and his dog, Sammi, would make the drive alone, camping by the side of the road and heading south with first light, coffee in hand, the rising sun at his elbow.

Michael had been making the trip to the Southwest each year for a decade. He didn't care about seeing new places or people. It wasn't novelty he was after. It was the familiar desert calm that harbored deep revelations, for those willing to sit quietly and listen carefully.

I stammered something about my job, but it fell on deaf ears. One does not sully a religious experience with talk of 401-Ks and vacation days. He was inviting me along on a straight road to salvation. I could hardly refuse.

Two days later, we could see the lights of Moab, Utah, in the distance. At the turn of the century, Moab was a farming and ranching community. The uranium boom in the early 1950s brought in miners, workers and speculators, quickly tripling the population. Overnight, uranium had become a hot commodity, primarily as a material for nuclear weapons to fuel the Cold War arms race. Farmers, mechanics and even schoolteachers quit their jobs to plunder the Colorado Plateau. Seeking riches underground, they transformed the quiet farming town into a mining camp.

By the 1980s, it was mountain bikers who were descending on Moab. Hot on their heels were the Jeep enthusiasts, the spa junkies, and the spring breakers. A busy strip formed along Main Street, with rowdy bars, trendy stores and hip coffee shops sprouting like desert wildflowers. Today, Moab is the recreational Rome of the Southwest. All roads lead to it.

As we headed into town, an endless line of Jeeps streamed out into the night, engines roaring and music blaring. Beer cans lay strewn across the desert, tin relics of a week of debauchery. In the harsh environment of the desert, Moab is a cheerful, plastic oasis. It provides the placid comforts of home, the security of the familiar. Tourists from wetter places happily scrub desert dust off their Jeeps at the local car wash, oblivious to the decade-long drought. Bars blare loud music, creating a noisy suburban city in the middle of emptiness.

We enjoyed these comforts for a day, walking to the always-likeable Jailhouse Cafe for a cup of coffee and browsing in bookstores on the main drag. The next day, it was a relief to leave town, letting the desert quiet settle on us once more. We passed arches and rock bridges worn thin by the wind, and rock spires rising precariously into the sky. Just outside of Moab, the red canyons and desert sagebrush seem to barely register the faint drone of the city, with its humans and their synthetic inventions. The Colorado River unfurled across the desert, and the snow-crested LaSal Mountains sat sentry on the eastern horizon. We drove south until we reached Cedar Mesa.

Close to 200,000 acres on the southeast Colorado Plateau, Cedar Mesa is abundant with arroyos and seeps, washes and wildlife. Black bears, coyotes, elk, and countless smaller creatures make their home on the mesa. And in the hidden canyons that criss-cross through the mesa is evidence of 15,000 years of human habitation.

The Kane Gulch ranger station was a mobile home, with an old dog asleep in the sun out front. The ranger, sweating even in the air conditioning, pointed out where the springs were on the map, the ones that possibly could be flowing, but warned, shrugging nonchalantly, that he could be wrong. It had been a very dry year, one of a long string of dry years..

We carried four water bottles each, prepared for opportunity. That morning, we descended into Bullet Canyon, leaving both mesa and the modern world behind. Before us, a new world was opening up. We could see the streaks where water was normally flowing, now bone-dry. Geckos darted into the hot sun and quickly retreated back into the shade. It was both beautiful and forbidding.

By midday, we reached Jailhouse Ruins, the first of the Anasazi sites in Grand Gulch. The earliest known inhabitants of Grand Gulch were the Archaics, nomadic hunters and gatherers who passed through the canyon from 6500 to 1500 B.C. Their artwork marks the Gulch in various places. Better known were the Basketmakers, who took up residence from B.C.1500-A.D. 400, farming in arable bottoms and leaving behind stunning rock art. They were so named because of their apparent refusal to shift to pottery, using elaborate baskets instead for carrying food and other supplies. Later, it was the Pueblos who would create the kivas, or underground ceremonial rooms.

In all, over 50,000 Anasazi sites are spread across the Four Corners region in the Southwestern United States. Ironically, even as they grow in popularity, the word itself comes from an historical misunderstanding. "Anasazi" is actually derived from a Navajo word; it is the Hopi who are the descendants of the Old Ones. The Hopi refer to their ancestors as the Hisatsinom, or "The Ones Who Came Before," and to this day resent the use of a Navajo word for their kin.

Jailhouse Ruins was named for the barred window cut into the dwelling high up on the cliffs. Tiny petrified corncobs testified to the daily life of its ancient residents. Visitors had carefully arranged these artifacts, along with shards of pottery and wispy remains of baskets. We crawled around the site, peering out of the window at the neighboring cliffs, marveling at the privilege of seeing these objects in their desert home, not lined up neatly in a glass box in some distant museum.

Later in the day, we came upon Perfect Kiva, a well-named religious site high on the cliff walls. In Anasazi culture, the ladder rising up from the kiva represents a departure from the old world and an entrance into a new one. Scaling the cliffs, descending down the rickety wooden ladder into the open room below the earth, we entered a new world. Hollow voices from the past echoed in our ears, and with a shiver we scrambled back up the ladder. It seemed a place best left to its ghosts.

That night, we camped on the cliff at a junction of Bullet Canyon and Kane Gulch. The wind was howling, and I felt exposed to the elements. We had camped at the spot because of the nearby spring, but it was slightly fetid. It was the best we could find, and we carefully planned our coming days around the tiny dots on the map that represented springs.

In an age of abundance, the search for water forced a shift in perception for me. Suddenly, I was engaged with my natural surroundings, not just carelessly taking what I needed, but laboring for it. And I realized that first night why Michael had brought me to the desert. It is the only place where Americans can go to understand the stark beauty in nature's scarcity.

On day two, we entered Grand Gulch, seven miles from the Bullet Canyon trailhead. The day was spent strolling through scrubby pinion junipers and desert shrubs, and under graceful cottonwoods, shimmering in the breeze. The Old Ones did not lack for fuel: they used juniper wood for everything from firing pottery to padding cradleboards. We set up camp near Green Canyon, one of dozens of side canyons off Grand Gulch. That night, we explored the cliffs and watched the sunset from a small kiva, carved high on the rocks, where I imagined thousands of other sunsets had been watched before.

The next morning, we decided not to travel anywhere. It was a mind-altering concept, a radical departure from the norm. We would simply stay put. We didn't have to go anywhere, accomplish anything. I spent an entire afternoon drawing, trying to capture the red of the canyon walls. I never captured that red, but as I sat motionless, I spied a coyote, gazing at me steadily from the pockmarked canyon wall.

At midday on our fourth day, we approached Big Man Panel. Petroglyphs are pictures carved into the rock; pictographs are paintings on the rock surface. Big Man Panel is a pictographic Sistine Chapel. We scrambled up to the rock itself, and stared at the pictures for a long time. The pictures strutted on the rock wall; the Anasazi, apparently, were not without a sense of humor. It was easy to imagine the youthful hands that drew those images of exaggerated prowess and masculinity.

That night, we camped at Polly's Canyon, five more miles up the gulch. In the middle of the night, a rock fell in a far-off canyon. The sound was like the world dying. We both shot awake, shivering uncontrollably with an ancient fear. We felt like we had been forgotten by the whole world, grandly insignificant. At the same time, we felt strangely privileged, wondering how many rocks fell in those canyons unheard by human ears.

We had walked the entire length of Polly's Canyon before we finally found it, tucked against the back wall of the gorge. It was a crystal blue, deep pool, a shimmering mirage in a world of warmth. When I saw that water, after days of fetid water and fierce heat, I felt a surge of joy unlike anything I had experienced. In the desert, happiness comes in very small packages: a cool drink of water, soft light on red rock, a tiny, bright flower on a prickly cactus. Life becomes raw and elemental; great pleasures coming from the simplest of rituals. The Anasazi used to peel and eat the prickly pear cactus, surviving on it when food was scarce. The desert provides, albeit in unlikely places. It is a return to the balanced, indifferent give-and-take of nature. Our ancestors understood: real, deep gratitude for life comes from the discovery of a hidden spring, not a cheap present bought at a mall.

I stepped into the water, and the feel of it was like a cool dream. I was naked, stripped of clothes, phone, computer, voicemail and time itself.

I had never felt so wealthy.