Forced to go on a hiking trip with his Uncle Jack, fourteen-year-old Zach Walker heads to the desert near Bluff, Utah to search for an ancient staircase-the same one Zach's father was looking for when he disappeared three years before. Once in the backcountry, Zach discovers prehistoric ruins, mysterious rock art, and a one-way portal to the past. When he steps through the portal, he finds himself trapped in the land of the Ancestral Puebloans-a place hit hard by severe drought and conflict. Zach soon runs out of food and water, but a native girl named Aqua rescues him and takes him to her village where her family adopts him. But the canyons are full of warfare and Zach wants to go home, despite his growing attachment to Aqua and her family. The problem is, nobody in Aqua's village seems to know the way back to the twenty-first century. Will Zach spend the rest of his life in a land eight hundred years before his time? How will he ever find his way back to family and friends in Portland, Oregon? Includes Readers Guide.