Ralston went to Blue John Canyon two months later.
## The Country He Entered: Blue John Canyon in Context
Blue John Canyon sits in eastern Wayne County, Utah, approximately 42 miles south of the town of Green River. Its floor elevation is around 4,839 feet. It is Bureau of Land Management land — not part of a national park, though it lies just south and west of the boundary of the Horseshoe Canyon Unit of Canyonlands National Park. The distinction matters: search and rescue operations following the 2003 incident would involve park rangers and other federal personnel, but the canyon itself is on BLM territory, an often-overlooked distinction in the extensive coverage that followed.
The canyon is a slot canyon — one of the geological formations characteristic of the Colorado Plateau, created over millions of years as water carved through layers of sandstone, eventually producing gorges that are in some places barely wide enough for a person to pass through. Blue John Canyon’s main fork runs approximately eleven miles, north-northeast from the Robbers Roost Flats. Several tributary canyons branch from the main fork. The full traverse requires technical canyoneering skills and equipment: rappels, squeezes through narrow passages, route-finding in terrain that offers few landmarks and less mercy for errors in judgment.
The canyon’s name is probably derived from John Griffith, a nineteenth-century outlaw nicknamed “Blue John” who reportedly kept stolen horses in the surrounding country. The Robbers Roost region of Utah — a stretch of canyon country between Hanksville and the Colorado River — was bandit territory in the era before extensive law enforcement reached the interior of the Colorado Plateau. Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch used it as a hideout. The landscape that had once sheltered outlaws from the long arm of the law was, in 2003, offering Aron Ralston a different kind of isolation: the kind that made rescue nearly impossible.