High Desert Flora

Not quite all the places we visited in May count as high desert, but mostly that’s what we saw, including a wide variety of plants. I looked at them mostly for aesthetic enjoyment, since I’m woefully ignorant about natural history, and when I try not to be, the information mostly isn’t retained by the sieve of my mind.

Still, I know a Joshua Tree when I see one. These were outside Las Vegas. The further east you go from there, the fewer you see.Joshua Tree, Nevada Joshua Tree, Nevada

Smaller than many of the yuccas at Joshua Tree NP, but Yuriko, who hasn’t visited that park, was suitably impressed.

Moving on, flora at Zion National Park.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.Grand Staircase-Escalante NM

Owl Canyon, near Page, Arizona. Amazing the places life can cling.Owl Canyon, Arizona

Also near Page.
Near Page, Arizona

National Bridges National Monument.
Natural Bridges NM

Arches National Park.Arches National Park Arches National Park Arches National Park

Canyonlands National Park.Canyonlands National Park Canyonlands National Park

Salt Lake City.Salt Lake City flowers 2022 Salt Lake City - City Creek Park

The flowers were at Temple Square, near the Assembly Hall. The second image doesn’t look much like a city view, but it was, in City Creek Natural Area. The ground gets pretty steep pretty fast as you move away from downtown.

A 180-degree turn at that point, and you see this.Salt Lake City - City Creek Park

A nice change from desert scrub, though desert flora has its fascinations.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Back to posting on the last day of May. Memorial Day and Decoration Day coincide this year, which won’t happen again until 2033.

“Throughout the 19th century, white settlers considered the Monument Valley region — like the desert terrain of the Southwest in general — to be hostile and ugly,” notes Smithsonian magazine. “The first U.S. soldiers to explore the area called ‘as desolate and repulsive looking a country as can be imagined,’ as Capt. John G. Walker put it in 1849, the year after the area was annexed from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. ‘As far as the eye can reach… is a mass of sand stone hills without any covering or vegetation except a scanty growth of cedar.’ ”

Tastes change. I imagine Capt. Walker’s reaction was entirely reasonable for his time, considering he and his men came by horse and mule, carrying everything they needed, living meagerly and fully aware that their surroundings could kill them all too easily, or at least make for days of uncomfortable misery, whatever season it was. Monument Valley was a vivid ordeal for them, not a notion fostered by cinematic entertainment.

We have it a good deal easier here in the 21st century, and am I glad. All it took for us to reach Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park on May 18 was a roughly two-hour drive from Page, Arizona, by Toyota horseless carriage along paved two-lane roads through the Navajo Nation.

My main concern that morning — and we got up fairly early — was that I didn’t know for sure we’d get in. The park’s policy for visitors is, first come, first served, and there’s a limit to the number of people who can enter each day. Even on a weekday, I imagined joining a long line of cars waiting, only to be turned away.

Nothing of the kind happened. We got to the entrance booth with no one ahead, paid $8 a head, and got in to the place known as Tse’Bii’Ndzisgaii in Navajo. First stop, a fully modern visitor center.Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

The wind whipped the four flags in full motion: Utah, the Navajo Nation, the United States and Arizona. I wasn’t familiar with the Navajo flag, but I am now.

Something I didn’t know until we entered the park and saw a number of private roads leading off to residences in the distance: people live in Monument Valley, unlike in a national park or monument. I expect ranching and running tours are their main occupations, along with selling the products of Navajo craftsmanship to visitors.

For $8 a head — an absolute bargain, if you asked me — you get to drive around a 17-mile unpaved loop road in the park, dusty and red as Mars, but only occasionally bumpy. The road doesn’t venture that deep into the park, which measures nearly 91,700 acres. Longer treks by foot or horse or jeep are possible, available only with Navajo guides, and no doubt offer rich rewards to those undertake them.

Even so, the drive is incredible, passing formations of astounding size and shape and contour and color. It’s easy to see what enamored John Ford about the place.
Speaking of the director, the park honors him with a spot called John Ford Point.

As well it should, since he put Monument Valley on the map, as far as the more receptive imagination of the 20th century was concerned, though naturally he wasn’t the first outsider of that period to visit — the likes of Zane Grey and (of course) Theodore Roosevelt came earlier. Harsh terrain, still, but the material progress of later years allowed later visitors the leisure to appreciate the place in a way that Capt. Walker could not.

Ford must have known he had a cinematic treasure in view when he had the cameras first deployed here for Stagecoach. The world clearly agreed.

Of Ford’s many forays into the valley, Smithsonian has this to say: “The shoots were usually festive, with hundreds of Navajo gathering in tents… singing, watching stuntmen perform tricks and playing cards late into the night. Ford, often called ‘One Eye’ because of his patch, was accepted by the Navajo, and he returned the favor: after heavy snows cut off many families in the valley in 1949, he arranged for food and supplies to be parachuted to them.”

Though it wasn’t the first place we visited on the drive — in fact, it was nearly the last — the instantly recognizable view from John Ford Point is going to go first here.Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Because later movies and commercials returned to this particular view so often, the other marvels on the road aren’t as famed or recognizable. But they’re equally worth a good look. Just a sampling below; there was something remarkable just about everywhere you look.Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Aside from the rock giants, the terrain itself fascinates, its colors so unusual to those of us from greener places.Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Color that the road itself shares.Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Without color, the contours emerge vividly; Ford must have appreciated that, too.Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

We left the park that afternoon, but even as you drive north from Monument Valley on U.S. 163, it has one more gift to give, if you’re paying attention. I almost wasn’t. As we drove along, we noticed people ahead, standing in the road, taking pictures. They got out of the way before we reached them, but I wondered, what are they doing there?

Then it hit me, and we stopped at the next pullout in the road, maybe a fifth of a mile away, and looked back. A view almost as famed as that at John Ford Point, and certainly as arresting.Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

That isn’t quite the “Forrest Gump Stopped Here” place, but I wasn’t about to go back where those yahoos had been standing in the road just for that (unlike Stagecoach, it isn’t a movie I like very much). In fact, I wouldn’t have remembered the view was made famous in that movie, either, but some other people had stopped where we were, and I overheard them talking in German about Forrest Gump.

U.S. 89A

Much excitement yesterday afternoon around here, when the village alarm sirens went off around 3:30. Moments before, my phone told me of a tornado warning, both in English and Spanish. I was advised to seek shelter.

Instead, I took a look out of both the front and back doors. We had rain at that moment, but very little wind, and the clouds weren’t particularly dark. The sirens quit, but started again a few minutes later. I listened and watched a while.

Another warning came and went, but the wind stayed low. It might have been a reckless impulse, but nothing I saw made me want to seek shelter, which in my case would be the lower level near the bathroom, but with the bathroom door closed, because there’s a window in there. Still, I watched the skies more closely for a while. I understand that while a funnel cloud had been spotted over the northwestern suburbs, for whatever reason it never came to the ground and stir things up.

Our most recent trip was a driving one, despite the cost of fuel. I have the receipts in front of me for buying gas five times. They helpfully list the price per gallon, regular each time.

St. George, Utah (May 15): $4.599. Page, Arizona (May 17): $4.789. Blanding, Utah (May 18): $4.659. Moab, Utah (May 20): $4.689. Salt Lake City (May 21): $4.569. According to AAA, the national average for gas a week ago (May 19) was $4.589, so we were paying slightly more than average (which today is $4.600), but less than at home. A year ago, the average was $3.035, for an increase of about 51% since then.

All together, we paid $147.63 for gas on this trip, which would have (roughly) been about $100 had we taken the same trip a year ago. So that’s about $50 that Mr. Putin owes me. I suspect he’s going to stiff me on that charge.

I didn’t like paying a premium for fuel, but it was completely worth it. Some of the drives were extraordinary.

Such as the one from Page to the Grand Canyon and back, especially back, because getting to the park was the main focus in the morning, and we didn’t stop. On our return, which was in the late afternoon of May 17, we took a more leisurely attitude, and took a look at things along the way.

U.S. 89 out of Page is a good drive through a red desert landscape, generally following the Colorado River, which is mostly invisible, far below in Marble Canyon. The drive south from Jacob Lake, Arizona, on Arizona 67 through the wonderfully alpine Kaibab National Forest to the park entrance, is also good.

But the best road that day by far was the two-lane U.S. 89A, which connects the other two, U.S. 89 and Arizona 67. As visible in the map, it skirts Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

On our return, we headed east on 89A from Jacob Lake (where 89A meets Arizona 67), which is in the forest at that point: through a fine aspen, spruce-fir, ponderosa pine and pinyon-juniper woodland. Nice, but the road is even better is when you reach the edge of the Kaibab Plateau. There’s a place to stop and see the Vermilion Cliffs and the desert flatlands below.Vermilion Cliffs National Monument Vermilion Cliffs National Monument

The thin black line is 89A. From the viewpoint, the road heads down toward the flatlands, leaving the Kaibab Plateau. As far as I can tell from the maps, the highway is the border of the monument, or very close to it. In any case, you see the cliffs looming not far away. They follow you for miles down the road.Vermilion Cliffs National Monument Vermilion Cliffs National Monument Vermilion Cliffs National Monument

“Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is a geologic treasure,” says NPS signage along the road. “Its centerpiece is the majestic Paria Plateau, a grand terrace lying between two great geologic structures, the East Kaibab and the Echo Cliffs monoclines.

“The Vermilion Cliffs, which lie along the southern edge of the Paria Plateau, rise 1,500 feet in a spectacular array of multicolored layers of shale and sandstone… these dramatic cliffs were named by John Wesley Powell in 1869, as he embarked upon his expedition of the Grand Canyon down the Colorado River.”

Earlier explorers were here, too. In 1776, Fathers Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante came this way, though they had to turn back to Santa Fe eventually, so harsh was the terrain.

In our time, there are a handful of lodges on 89A in the shadow of the Vermilion Cliffs, but little else in the way of human artifacts, at least until you come to Navajo Bridge, which takes the road across the Colorado River at Marble Canyon.Navajo Bridge

Rather, two Navajo Bridges: in my picture, the original bridge on the left, and the modern bridge on the right, both steel spandrel arch bridges. The historic bridge was dedicated in 1929 and represented the only crossing of the Colorado for many miles, effectively joining the Arizona Strip with the rest of the state. The wider bridge opened in 1995, and the older one was repurposed as a pedestrian and equestrian bridge.

Naturally, we went across it.
Navajo Bridge

The view of the Colorado from the pedestrian bridge.Navajo Bridge Navajo Bridge

The historic plaque.
Navajo Bridge

I looked up the Kansas City Structural Steel Co. There’s a newish company of that name, founded in the 1990s, but the one referred to on the plaque seems to be this one, whose work was in the early 20th century.

There are warning signs as well.Navajo Bridge

I supposed it means a survivable sort of jump, as with a bungee cord, which no doubt lunatics do sometimes, or at least used to.

Grand Canyon National Park, North Rim

There is one way to drive on paved roads from Page, Arizona, to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, at least without going way out of your way. Go south from Page on U.S. 89, then north on U.S. 89A, then south on Arizona 67. If that sounds a little roundabout, it is, but the drive is worth every minute you spend. It takes two to two-and-a-half hours if you don’t stop much.

Eventually, you end up at the park, famed the world over.Grand Canyon National Park

As the raven flies, and we saw a fair number of them soaring on the air currents around the canyon, it is about 10 miles from the North Rim to the South Rim. Driving from the North Rim to the South involves more than 200 roundabout miles.

The South Rim has fairly close access to a large metro area — Phoenix — and the sizable town of Flagstaff as a closer jumping off point. That’s what we did in 1997. It occurs to me that we visited the canyon this time two days short of exactly 25 years after the first time.

The nearest town to the North Rim is Page, reached as I’ve described. Not exactly remote, but certainly out of the way. In 2021, about 221,000 visitors came through the North Rim entrance when it was open May through mid-October, according to NPS stats. (The road is snowed in much of the year.) So for every one visitor to the north last year, there were 10 to the south, with about 2.2 million visitors coming to the South Rim during 2021.

When we got to the North Rim last Tuesday morning, the place was popular enough, but not overrun. Even mere feet away from the Grand Canyon Lodge North Rim parking lot, which is where the road into the park ends, the view doesn’t disappoint.Grand Canyon National Park

The lodge itself, just opened for the season two days earlier, is perched on the rim, and built from native stone and timber, especially Kaibab limestone from the nearby cliff at Bright Angel Point.Grand Canyon National Park

People were perched on the lodge viewpoints.
Grand Canyon National Park

Through a subsidiary, the Union Pacific Railroad originally developed the lodge in the 1920s, though the first structure burned down after only a few years, and was rebuilt  somewhat differently in the ’30s. Design by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who specialized in lodges and railroad stations. He also designed 140 cabins surrounding the main lodge by 1928.

“Erected in 1927-28, this is the most intact rustic hotel development remaining in the National Parks from the era when railroads, in this case the Union Pacific, fostered construction of ‘destination resorts,’ ” says the National Historic Landmarks listing for the building.

“The main lodge building was rebuilt in 1936 following a devastating fire, but its most important interior spaces retained their scale, materials and flavor, and the deluxe cabins and standard cabins of log and stone construction also kept their fabric, layout and ambiance.”

From the lodge, Bright Angel Point is a 10-minute walk along a trail created by — no need to guess very hard — CCC workers. Those lads need to be honored with a bronze on the grounds somewhere, though I might have missed it.Grand Canyon National Park Grand Canyon National Park Bright Angel Point Grand Canyon National Park Bright Angel Point

Out at Bright Angel Point. Let’s just say there were impressive views. And an impressive wind whipping by.Grand Canyon National Park Bright Angel Point Grand Canyon National Park Bright Angel Point Grand Canyon National Park Bright Angel Point

We didn’t have the place to ourselves, but sometimes, almost.
Grand Canyon National Park Bright Angel Point

We had lunch in the lodge restaurant, an enormous space with high ceilings, dark woods and towering windows to bring the view of the canyon into room. The food: decent. The view: magnificent.

A separate trail leads away from the lodge and heads toward the campgrounds, a few miles away. We walked part of that trail, which generally follows the rim.Grand Canyon National Park North Rim

Offering its own views.Grand Canyon National Park North Rim

A return trail cuts through a pine forest, with no notion of the yawning canyon a short distance away.Grand Canyon National Park North Rim Grand Canyon National Park North Rim

Sometimes, we had to go around the trees lying across the trail.Grand Canyon National Park North Rim

There’s a life metaphor in that somewhere, but on the other hand, a walk in the woods is sometimes just a good ramble.

Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend

Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend, both in easy driving proximity to Page, Arizona, are both new stars in the tourist imagination, created by the rise of easily sharable digital images. Do a Google image search and the selection for either is essentially limitless. Naturally, people crab about this state of affairs.

“Whether you actually enjoy your time here, and whether what you’re doing is even morally sound is, as with most tourist attractions in the Instagram age, secondary,” sniffed Vox in 2019, referring to Antelope Canyon, though in the very same paragraph says the place has an “extraordinary beauty [that] is almost transcendent.”

It certainly does. The reason to go, in my opinion, is to see that extraordinary beauty with your own eyes. This is primary. Secondary, for me, is sharing pictures.

As for enjoying my time there, I did immensely, and as for the morality of tourism, if you believe it’s suspect, stay home. I will be out seeing the world while you aren’t. Any human activity can cause damage, yet any damage can be mitigated — as I believe it has been at Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend.

Actually, we visited Upper Antelope Canyon. There is a Lower Antelope Canyon nearby whose attractiveness is surely on par with the upper one, but we decided to pick only one for this trip. Both are among the many slot canyons in Antelope Canyon Navajo Tribal Park. The place, obviously known to the Diné people since time immemorial, has been the haunt of photographers since the 1970s at least.

According to our guide, an affable young Navajo named Nate, guided tours weren’t done much in those days. Permits weren’t necessary, and so off you went, since the canyons weren’t really that far off in the bush, and only a trickle of people visited anyway. Things changed in 1997, when the area became a tribal park, and when, in August that year, 11 visitors were washed away in a flash flood, which is a risk in a lot of seemingly dry Arizona. After that, you needed a permit to visit; later, you needed to be on a tour.

These days, Nate said, the tour operators also keep an eye on the day’s regional weather forecast. Rain a few miles away can push water unexpectedly, and violently, through the canyons, an event that has been essential in sculpting canyon shapes over the millennia, but which you don’t want to experience up close.

The tours control the flow of people. At the upper canyon, we entered after a wait of a few minutes, and likewise had to linger at various points along the way inside the canyon until the people ahead of us moved along, which they always did after a few minutes. That directed flow of people didn’t take away from the experience; rather, it added to it, since the canyon actually isn’t that long. You need to linger a bit to appreciate its many marvels.

I took more than a few pictures myself last week at Antelope Canyon, a few of which might hint at the extraordinary place I saw with my own eyes.Antelope Canyon
Antelope Canyon

One of the things photographers are known to do at Antelope is try to capture beams of light coming through the openings to the sky, since the canyon is like a cavern, but without a roof. Quite a sight, these irregular beams. But I didn’t try very hard to caputure them digitally. Leave that to the pros.

Still, I did take a few beam images I like.Antelope Canyon
Antelope Canyon

Especially this one.
Antelope Canyon

I’m amused to put two SF interpretations on that image, one benevolent, the other sinister: a figure being beamed up to (or down from) the mother ship; or a hapless human who couldn’t escape the invaders’ destructo-ray, even hiding in a slot canyon.

Antelope wasn’t the only canyon we visited. We booked a tour for it and two others in the vicinity, which we visited before Antelope, also led by Nate. The first one we passed through was the much more open Owl Canyon.Owl Canyon
Owl Canyon

There was only one other group in Owl at the time, a guide and a visitor (our party had four visitors, us and a German couple). The other guide had a Navajo double-flute with him, and he skillfully treated us all to a tune. The acoustics were excellent.
Owl Canyon

Rattlesnake Canyon, which was next, apparently isn’t called that because of a reptile population. Rather, it has a snakelike course.Rattlesnake Canyon
Rattlesnake Canyon

Unnervingly tight in places.
Rattlesnake Canyon

have bad dreams occasionally about confined spaces, as a lot of people probably do. Luckily, I haven’t had any since visiting Rattlesnake, so I guess it wasn’t that unnerving.

Besides taking pics inside the canyons, I took a few outside. You know, for context. It’s a harsh-looking land.Navaho Nation Navaho Nation Navaho Nation

Horseshoe Bend is even closer to Page, and part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The feature is a deep canyon — about 1,000 feet — carved by the Colorado River, which takes a major bend at that point. The view from cliffside is arresting. It shouldn’t be that deep, or that curvy, or that massive, but it’s all those and, in certain lights, insanely photogenic. I understand its fame.

You park at a spanking-new (2018) parking lot, run by the city of Page, pay your $10, and walk about a half mile along a well-defined path. At one point along the way, marked by a small sign, you enter the recreation area’s land and presumably leave Page’s, as if that matters a whit.

Only a few years ago, people parked beside the highway and traversed the mildly hilly desert territory to the view. As numbers increased, so did calls for help from people who hadn’t prepared themselves for the walk. Even a half mile on this terrain requires some preparation (good shoes, water, that sort of thing).Horseshoe Bend Trail Horseshoe Bend Trail

A bit of the cliff-edge has rails, but most of it does not.
Horseshoe Bend Trail

Most of the time we were there, the sun was in our eyes, since the viewpoint faces more-or-less west and it was about an hour till sunset. That didn’t diminish the in-person grandeur of the bend. It did diminish the quality of my images. Oh, well.
Horseshoe Bend

The direct sun didn’t deter others from their picture-taking either.Horseshoe Bend
Horseshoe Bend

The sinking sun didn’t actually represent sunset, since it only meant the sun dropped (appeared to drop) behind the mountainous territory to the west. Still, it was a relief, and while the canyon at that moment isn’t in optimal light either, it’s still a wonder.

NV-AZ-UT ’22 (Or, How to Overdose on Western Scenery in a Week)

Years ago, I got to talking scenic destinations with a professional photographer who contributed to the Chicago-based magazine I edited at the time. He asked me if I’d ever been to Utah. I told him I had: northern Utah, including Cache Valley and Salt Lake City, which I’d visited in the early ’80s. Pretty places, I said.

“Northern Utah is pretty,” he said. “But southern Utah is ethereal.”

Later, after I visited Zion and Bryce National Parks, I was inclined to agree. But of course I wanted to see more. This year, I did. Yes, photographer whose name I wish I could remember. Ethereal. Absolutely.

Saturday before last, Yuriko and I flew to Las Vegas, returning late this Sunday from Salt Lake City. Two days in transit, seven on the road. In that time, we visited four national parks, three national monuments and two tribal parks, all in either Arizona or Utah. We spent a little time in the aforementioned major metros, plus more time in two tourist towns — one in Arizona, the other in Utah — staying there in two non-chain motels, one of which is arguably historic. We passed through an array of other tiny towns and wide places in the road, stopping when the mood struck.

I’m glad to report we ate no fast food. Besides grocery store food in our rooms or at picnic tables, and motel-supplied breakfasts, we ate at local eateries: Vietnamese, a family restaurant, Southern fried chicken, doughnuts, Mexican, barbecue (Texas-style beef), a retro diner, Thai, pizza, Korean fried chicken and Chinese hot pot. A few of those restaurants were in the cities — Vegas and Salt Lake — but I can also report that here in the early 21st century, the American appetite for food variety has spread far and wide into a galaxy of smaller places.

We drove briefly on Interstates, but mainly followed state, park and tribal roads, most paved, but not all. We walked a variety of trails, across sandy ground and over flat rocks, through woods but more often desert scrub. We crawled through slot canyons. All that under hot and copper skies, sunny or partly cloudy. Very warm, rather; in the 80s F. most of the time, except for a cooler spell on the last two days. Often as not, on the hot days, the wind kicked up and cooled us off, besides blowing sand at our faces and threatening to whisk our hats off high cliffs.

Mosquitoes were rarely a presence, fortunately, but gnats and flies made themselves known. If you looked carefully (actually not that carefully), you’d notice lizard trails in the red sands, and holes borrowed into the same sands by larger creatures who don’t care to come out during the daytime. Lizards, on the other hand, are more than happy to sit around in the sun, or scurry across the trail ahead of you or on the queer rock formations to your side.

I’m not the first to notice that deserts can be surprisingly green, though not the greens you see in less arid places. Notice it I did. I’m not a farmer or horticulturist or botanist or  florist, but I tried to notice the desert flora. Wildflowers bloom in great profusion this time of the year, along the roads and trials and off into the distance, even in the harshest environments.

People are back in the national and other parks. Middle-class American tourists, that is, of whom I’m obviously one, plus visitors from a spectrum of European and Asian nations. Perhaps a strict majority of the tourists we encountered were older, but younger age groups, including young families and groups of young friends, were out in force. The tourists passed through an inhabited land, of course, one with as diverse a population as most any city in the nation.

No destination was exactly crowded, but a number of places were very popular, enough to erase any notion of desert solitude. Even so, there’s a mild camaraderie among the tourists, greeting each other much more frequently than they would in an urban or suburban setting, asking and offering to take pictures of strangers, pausing for each other to pass on narrow paths, sharing information about trail conditions ahead, making jokes or other observations for everyone to hear.

At one particularly windy vista, I put my hand on top of Yuriko’s head to hold her hat down, at her request, while she took pictures.

“That’s why she keeps you around, huh?” one passing fellow with about 10 years on me said.

“That and to open jars,” I answered.

The kernel of this trip was Yuriko’s longstanding wish to see Antelope Canyon (and she knows how to pick destinations). Back in bleak January, I planned the thing, expanding the list of destinations a lot. I’ve wanted visit that part of the country again for years.

We went looking for scenic vistas formed by rocks of unimaginably various shapes, and boy did we find them — views of reds and oranges and ochers and browns and whites, seeing formations deep in canyons, vaulting high into the sky, or appearing wholly at eye level or underfoot. It boggles the mind: how did these rocks get to be so incredible to human perception? I know: wind and water and time. A lot of time. But damn. I also know — or at least have an inkling of — the fact that these rocks are temporary. Geologically speaking, only a little less the blink of an eye than my own lifetime.

We drove out of Vegas last Sunday morning, bound for the tourist town of Page, Arizona, where we’d last stayed 25 years ago this month, when we visited Lake Powell. En route, we passed through Zion National Park (a destination in 2000 but not this time) and later ventured briefly into the vast and contentious Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Our first major destination, a week ago on Monday morning, was the slot canyons of Lake Powell Navajo Tribal Park, an embarrassment of sandstone riches near Page. Also near Page — actually in Page, but also part of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area — is Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River, now famous because of Instagram. Be that as it may, we weren’t about to miss that. We watched the sun drop below the mountains in the distance at Horseshoe Bend.

Another thing we weren’t about to miss was the less-visited North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, which is every bit as grand as the South Rim, though it took some circuitous driving  last Tuesday to get there from Page, by way of remote roads, One of those roads, the only paved one anywhere nearby, edges the bottom of the dramatic cliffs of Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, a sprawling uplift of wilderness. Of it, the Bureau of Land Management says, “expect rugged and unmarked roads, venomous reptiles and invertebrates, extreme heat or cold, deep sand, and flash floods.”

Returning from the Grand Canyon to Page, we stopped at Navajo Bridge, which spans the Colorado River. It’s two structures: the historic bridge from the 1920s and the modern bridge from late in the 20th century, which was designed to complement the older bridge, and it does, masterfully. The old bridge is now a foot bridge, and we walked across it.

Leaving Page on Wednesday, we made our way to another tourist town, namely Moab, Utah, at first on roads passing through the Navaho Nation, until we reached Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, home of famed sandstone buttes. We did the drive on the park’s circular road, unpaved and dusty and rocky and as red-orange as Mars, flabbergasted by the stone masses, most of which don’t actually make it into the movies. If you think you’ve seen Monument Valley because it’s been captured on celluloid so often, let me assure you that seeing it in person is an experience a level higher.

Later that same day, before arriving in Moab, we stopped at the much more obscure Natural Bridges National Monument, whose name clearly states its prime attraction. Among the wonders of southern Utah, it is a modest one. But a modest wonder in this part of the country is still a wonder.

On Thursday, we drove the short distance from Moab to Arches National Park, an astounding place populated by lofty arches, but also an endless array of stone pinnacles and balancing rocks and other rock formations. We spent most of the day there. The crowds are such that timed entry is now being tested at the park, and the crowds are right. Arches is one of the places the photographer must have been talking about.

Less crowded but no less spectacular than Arches is Canyonlands National Park, a little further out of Moab. We spent Friday morning at the evocatively named Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands, whose vistas overlook canyons, mesas and buttes. Another ethereal place. On Friday afternoon, we drove to Salt Lake City on roads through pale badlands and along more cliffs, and then through the forested mountains of Carbon and Wasatch counties.

We spent Saturday in Salt Lake, a city greatly expanded since the last time I visited, in 1980. That’s so long ago it was like I’d never been there. We focused most of our attention downtown in the morning and took in urban sights, Mormon-oriented and otherwise, including Temple Square and Utah’s magnificent State Capitol. In the afternoon, we visited the This is the Place Monument on a hill overlooking Salt Lake, and finally the Natural History Museum of Utah.

On a stretch of Utah 261, we encountered the Moki Dugway, a mountain road and one intense drive — more about which later. When we got to the top, I stopped to take pictures, including one of a road sign just ahead of the road’s first serious curve.Moki Dugway Buc-ee's

That little bastard of an amphibious rodent is everywhere.

Short Travels With Ed

Some years ago, Ed Henderson told me that we’d probably travel well together. That is, not get on each other’s nerves too much over the course of a multi-day trip. I took that as a compliment, but not anything we’d actually follow up on. And we never did.

Ed’s passing made me think about the scattering of places we did go, all day trips of one kind or another. In late ’91, for instance, two places on two separate occasions: Ishiyama-dera and Koyasan.

I wrote about Ishiyama-dera: “Warm and sunny day, flawless weather to visit the exquisite Ishiyama-dera. I went with Ed and Lynn, two former fellow teachers, and Americans as it happens, to the temple, which is in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture. It’s near the shores of unscenic Lake Biwa, the sludgepot that provides greater Osaka with its drinking water.

“No, that’s not the best way to begin to describe Ishiyama-dera, which is set in the forested hills not far from the lake. You forget about Biwa while visiting the fine old wooden structures, which manage to convey their great age through their smell, somehow, maybe redolent of centuries of incense. This time of year, the temple also has the aesthetic advantage of seasonal reds and yellow. It augments the aura of esoteric objects honoring esoteric gods on remote shores.”

As for Koyasan, I don’t ever seem to have written about it. That surprises me a little, since it was one of my favorite places in Japan, and I went there at least three times (maybe four). Whenever someone was visiting me from the States, I would take them there to marvel — as I always did, each time — at the enormous trees and the ancient shrines and the vast cemetery among the trees and the shrines. Just the way the afternoon sunbeams slipped through the towering tree canopy to touch the grass next to monuments, or dappled mossy statues, was worth the ride into the mountains to get there.

Koyasan, along with two neighboring sites, was put on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2004, and for good reason. “Set in the dense forests of the Kii Mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean, three sacred sites – Yoshino and Omine, Kumano Sanzan, Koyasan – linked by pilgrimage routes to the ancient capital cities of Nara and Kyoto, reflect the fusion of Shinto, rooted in the ancient tradition of nature worship in Japan, and Buddhism, which was introduced from China and the Korean Peninsula,” the organization says.

“The sites (495.3 ha) and their surrounding forest landscape reflect a persistent and extraordinarily well-documented tradition of sacred mountains over 1,200 years. The area, with its abundance of streams, rivers and waterfalls, is still part of the living culture of Japan and is much visited for ritual purposes and hiking, with up to 15 million visitors annually. Each of the three sites contains shrines, some of which were founded as early as the 9th century.”

My college friend Steve — whom I did travel with once upon a time, in Europe — was visiting Japan that fall, and he and I and Ed went to Koyasan one day. It was there that Ed told me about his medical condition, perhaps (but I can’t remember now) in a discussion of why he, someone not even 30, needed a cane that day.

Here’s a thought: I wonder what a world map would look like with pushpins to mark the all the places all three of us have been, since Steve is fond of travel as well. A porcupine of a map.

As I mentioned yesterday, in May 1997, Ed and Lynn and Yuriko and I went to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, about an hour east of Phoenix on 392 acres in the Sonoran Desert. It was a hot day, as you’d think, but we had an enjoyable walk on the grounds, taking a look at its large variety of desert plants. Not all of which were cacti. But many were.

Boyce Thompson Arboretum 1997Boyce Thompson Arboretum 1997Last August — only 11 months ago — while visiting Ed in Washington state, I suggested we go to Vancouver for a day. It was a city he knew well, but one that I’d bypassed in 1985 to go to Vancouver Island instead. He wanted to go, but had no energy for it. So I went by myself.

During that visit, however, we did go to Bellingham, a much shorter distance from his home, with me driving and him navigating. Among other things, we spent time at two bookstores in downtown Bellingham within walking distance of each other — the excellent and large Village Books and the excellent and small Eclipse Books. Like me, Ed owned and read a lot of books about a lot of different things, and thus spent a lot of time in bookstores.

We also ate gas station pizza. It was a favorite of Ed’s, bought at a Bellingham gas station, which actually had a fairly large shop attached to it. We got our slices to go and went to the Alaska ferry terminal, sitting on one of the benches facing the water to eat the pizza. Since no ship was due to arrive or depart that day, few other people were around. At that moment, he might have suspected he’d never return to Alaska, a place he liked so much; I wondered if I’d ever make it.

Actually, Ed did return, or will eventually. I understand that his ashes have been — or will be — scattered in the Stikine River, which empties into the Pacific just north of Wrangell, Alaska, where he lived for a time.

Lake Powell, 1997

In May 1997, we visited Arizona. First Phoenix, then up north to Flagstaff, Cameron and eventually Page, the town created to house workers who built the Glen Canyon Dam, which in turn created Lake Powell. It’s an impressive bit of work.

Glen Canyon Dam 1997A Story That Stands Like a DamI understand that Glen Canyon, now flooded by the lake, was even more impressive, but it’s something I’m not ever likely to see.

The dam is 710 feet from bedrock and holds back more than 26.2 million acre-feet of water, or 9 trillion gallons, when Lake Powell is full. (Puny, though, when compared to Lake Superior’s 3 quadrillion gallons; but no dam holds it back.) It’s the last of the major North American dams, started in 1956 and completed in ’66. I suspect that had the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation delayed even a few years in starting, it would never have happened, so completely did public opinion change.

We took the tour, which goes inside the dam to see various features, such as one of the massive turbines. In the gift shop, I bought A Story That Stands Like a Dam by Russell Martin (1989), and read it during the rest of the trip, and at home. It too is an impressive piece of work. As an Amazon reviewer put it: “This book is absolutely loaded with information on Glen Canyon, Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell, and Page, Arizona — the nearby town of dambuilders. Its author has tried incredibly hard, and succeeded, at writing a book that is unbelievably fair, and that presents the controversial story of the building of Glen Canyon Dam in as truthful and as unbiased a light as possible.”

Maybe Lake Powell should be the Glen Canyon again. Some future decade, perhaps. You can make the case. But for now, Lake Powell is there, and one thing to do is take a boat ride.

LakePowell97The boat we took had a destination: Rainbow Bridge National Monument, which is just across the border in Utah.

Rainbow Bridge NMThe NPS says: “On May 30, 1910, President William Howard Taft created Rainbow Bridge National Monument to preserve this ‘extraordinary natural bridge, having an arch which is in form and appearance much like a rainbow, and which is of great scientific interest as an example of eccentric stream erosion.’

“After the initial publicity, a few more adventurous souls journeyed to Rainbow Bridge. Teddy Roosevelt and Zane Grey were among those early travelers who made the arduous trek from Oljeto or Navajo Mountain to the foot of the Rainbow. Visiting Rainbow Bridge was made easier with the availability of surplus rubber rafts after World War II, although the trip still required several days floating the Colorado River plus a seven-mile hike up-canyon.”

Since the creation of Lake Powell, it’s an easy trip by boat. Good to see while you can. One of these days, like the Old Man in the Mountain in New Hampshire, which we saw about eight years before its collapse, erosion or some fool is going to bring the natural bridge down.