The desert west and the loneliest higway

First off, those pictures from Kanab I promised in my last entry















Kanab is a nice little town, don't you think? It's easy to see why Hollywood chose it so often as a backdrop for westerns.

The last two days represent the first time I have had to make unplanned route choices more or less on the flip of a coin. I knew I wanted to see the Grand Canyon, and I knew I wanted to visit friends in Vail and Austin. But I didn't know whether to go through Las Vegas or Phoenix upon leaving California. Like Robert Frost, I'll never know what might have happened on the road not taken, but there is nothing to regret with the route I took.

You may not realize it if you look at a standard map, but Arizona has something in common with Michigan and Maryland. All three have segments of the state that are partially or totally cut off from the more populous stretch. With the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the outer shore of Maryland, it's Lake Michigan and the Chesapeake Bay respectively. With Arizona, it's the Grand Canyon. The northwest corner of the state is essentially isolated from the rest by the Grand Canyon and the national park. They call it "the strip," and to visit it, you have to approach from Utah. Because of this isolation, the north rim of the canyon only gets about 1/10th the visitors annually as the more popular and easily accessible south rim. This was actually my main reason to pick this route.

I feel suitably rewarded. I left Kanab just as the sun came up for the 74 mile drive south. Everywhere one turns around in this part of the country there's a national park of some sort. You actually travel through 2 national preserves: the Vermillion Cliffs and the Kaibab National Forest, in order to get to the Grand Canyon north rim park entrance. Here's a picture of the cliffs in the distance, with the post-dawn sun reflected off them, seen over the tops of the lower reaches of the forest. The forest itself is on a plateau. The highest elevation point on the highway leading to it is 8840 feet. The forest is made primarily of ponderosa pines. Unlike evergreen forests back home the Pac NW, there is very little ground vegetation amidst the trees. They were in the middle of a preventive controlled fire just before my visit, and you could see some charring in numerous places.

As pleasant as both of those sights were, the Grand Canyon itself is everything you've ever heard or imagined it is. It staggers the ability to comprehend. I wore my battery out taking pictures of the place. I wish I were ten times the photographer I am. Then I might hope to actually be able to convey in images what this place is like.

From the north rim you can't see the Colorado River, whose actions over the last 5-6 million years carved the canyon, at all. What you can see is Bright Angel Canyon, a rift that describes a fault line running north-south across the short axis of the great girth of the grand canyon itself. You can see it as the deep, narrow defile in the center of one of these pictures. There's a trail that runs across the canyon along its length. It's 3000 feet down, 16 miles south, then almost 3000 feet back up again on the south rim. Maybe someday. For now, I contented myself with a little 1.5 mile in-and-out well maintained trail along the canyon rim.

They say the national cathedral is a building in Washington DC. While I'm no Joe Wilson, I'm here to tell you they lie. This is the national cathedral. As impressed as I was by the panorama in front of me, I was also struck by the reactions of my fellow tourists this fine but misty morning. Here you find blue hair retirees, Southern California hipsters in board shorts and pork pie hats, and leather clad bikers (lots of those, actually). All stand side-by-side in almost perfect silence. Nobody talks, not a word. Even the extraneous sounds of movement are muffled as people just take the place in.

Theodore Roosevelt; 26th president of the United States, war hero, peacemaker, hunter, and conservationist; said, "In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it is now. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel, or anything else to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." Three years after his presidency ended, they disregarded his wish and built the Grand Canyon lodge. While Teddy may have disapproved, I think they did a pretty nice job of matching the sublimity of the facility with the surroundings. Someday I could come back here for a stay. However, today, delayed by a few hours that could have been many more, it was time to hit the road.

The next target of my journey was Vail, Colorado. But the strip of Arizona is isolated from everything. One is very far from an interstate highway here. So I had to backtrack for over an hour just to get a piece of 2 lane highway that would take me northward and eventually hook me up with interstate 70. This is scenic highway 89, cutting through the mountains, mesas, and canyons of southern Utah.

Not visited, as I was kind of canyoned out, was beautiful Bryce Canyon. I took these pictures of the area around it from route 89. The actual canyon amphitheater is almost 20 miles off the highway. As was my experience with the Pacific Coast Highway and southern California, I felt that I could spend days and days here. But I'm pretty sure I could spend days and days in lots of places on this trip; that's just not the point.

Driving through this country put me in mind of the frontier spirit again, as the California missions had done. Bryce Canyon, for instance, is named after a guy named Ebenezer Bryce, who was sent out to this stretch by Brigham Young himself to colonize it with cattle ranches, farms, and Mormons. He evidently said of the canyon, "it was a great place to lose a cow." Ebenezer wasn't quite the orator Roosevelt was. But he accomplished something that even rugged, outdoorsy Teddy didn't do: he carved a decent living out of borderline desert. I didn't expect southern Utah to be as green in stretches as it actually is. There's agriculture here, and cattle ranching. Everything depends on irrigation. It's easy to see how water rights are the defining issue of the American west. The last hundred years of development from the Rocky mountains west is dependent upon it. What kind of vision does it take to make a desert bloom? What kind of determination? On the one hand, I imagine it must take one man in a million to carry off such a transformation successfully. On the other hand, it seems to have been done again and again if the evidence of my eyes is to be believed. Is success really a matter of determination, hard work, and perseverance? Or is it just that the memory and bones of the unsuccessful are quickly swallowed up by time and the desert they failed to tame?

By the late afternoon I was on Interstate 70, which rises in Baltimore in the east, travels through the Ohio valley, crosses the Mississippi in St. Louis - the Gateway to the West, traverses the great plains and the rocky mountains, and terminates....in the middle of the freakin' desert. I'm not joking. I-70 just sort of ends when it bumps into 15. There are hardly any humans for hundreds of mile around. This is the loneliest stretch of interstate I've ever seen, and I've seen plenty. I would like to tell you I stopped to soak up some of the local culture. Only there isn't any. There is mile upon mile of desert and butte with signs that read "Gas this exit, 108 miles to next service" or words to that effect.

This doesn't mean that the scenery isn't worth taking in. One particular part, called Spotted Wolf Canyon, caught my eye with it's scenic overlook. This is a natural pass through a massive rock formation called the San Rafael reef. This wall of granite and sandstone was so prodigious that the railroads detoured hundreds of miles around as they drove west, rather than try to climb it or penetrate it. But by the time we started building the interstates in the 1950s, either technology or American hubris had expanded to the task. The commemorative plaque said that when construction work began on this stretch of highway in 1957, a worker standing at the bottom of the canyon could touch both walls simultaneously with outstretched arms. Now, four lanes dive through it and plunge to the Green River below and the Colorado border beyond.

I arrived in Colorado as the sun was setting in the west, behind the mesas and tableland I was leaving in my wake. The eastern extent of the Rocky Mountain state is much like Utah; dry and dotted with mesas rather than mountains. But shortly, the amount of flowing water and green picks up. The heights around start to be dotted with pines at lower and lower elevations, and to have rounded tops and granite coloration. But the sun was fully down by the time I entered the Rocky mountain passes that wind up to Aspen and Steamboat Springs, and I made out only the black silhouettes of massive sentinels against a sky of deepest indigo. In the morning I'll see the mountain west with fresh eyes.